Lewis Hamilton is off to Ferrari for one reason – to win that record-breaking eighth F1 world championship.
Having grown tired of Mercedes’ inability to master the ground effects rules, Hamilton has left Brackley for Maranello, and will partner Charles Leclerc.
Overall, he becomes the 13th British driver to race for Ferrari in the world championship, the first being Peter Whitehead at the 1950 French GP and the latest being Ollie Bearman at the 2024 Saudi Arabian GP.
Should Hamilton succeed in winning the title during his stay, he will also end Ferrari’s long drought, which stretches back to 2007 for the drivers’ title when Kimi Raikkonen pipped Hamilton himself and Fernando Alonso to the title by one point.
He would become the third Briton to claim a world championship for Ferrari, and follow in the footsteps of F1’s most unique world champion in the process.
F1’s most unique champion
Three British world champions have driven for Ferrari in the world championship, although Nigel Mansell would not claim his crown until after leaving Italy.
The very first British world champion was Mike Hawthorn in 1958, who defeated Stirling Moss despite only winning one race to Moss’s four. It would take an extraordinary act of sportsmanship from Moss to stop Hawthorn being disqualified from the Portuguese GP to clinch the title for Hawthorn.
He would die a few months later, having retired as world champion, in a road car accident, with F1’s most unique champion claiming his crown in 1964.
To this day, the only person in history to win a world championship in F1 and in motorcycle racing is John Surtees.
Surtees was a four-time 500cc and three-time 350cc world champion on bikes by the time he transitioned to cars in the early 1960s, initially with Lotus.
By 1963, he was at Ferrari, and in ’64, launched a bid for the title which went down to an extraordinary three-way title decider in Mexico.
Surtees was up against Graham Hill and Jim Clark, with Hill in prime position, Surtees second and Clark needing a miracle to win the crown.
After the race settled down, Hill was set to win the title, until Lorenzo Bandini spun the BRM out, thus giving Clark the title as he was leading.
But in the closing laps, Clark’s Lotus broke an oil line, causing him to drop down the field, thus handing the crown back to Hill, until Ferrari realised that if if waved Surtees through into second place, it could win the title.
So, on the final lap, Ferrari ordered its number two driver, Bandini, to slow and let Surtees through for P2. The title belonged to Surtees.
