Lewis Hamilton will be a Ferrari driver in 2025, and that change comes with a steep adaptation curve.
Ex Ferrari chief mechanic Rob Smedley has warned Lewis Hamilton against taking some of the members of the Mercedes team close with him to Maranello next season. He will lose a string of close supporters when he moves this coming winter, though he is a seven time world champion.
Although there is notable interest on Hamilton’s part, race engineer Peter ‘Bono’ Bonnington, who served with Mercedes for so long, will not be joining Ferrari next year. All is not doom and gloom for the Silver Arrows though, as Monte Carlo is one of the rare occasions that the team has not seen a procession of outgoing drivers in the way that many forecasted for several seasons.
Speaking to the Formula For Success podcast, Smedley explained: “When a seven-time world champion chooses your team to come and work at your team. I don’t think he needs to bring an entourage with him.
And I always spoke about this, this publicly, both for Lewis himself and for people like Bono [Peter Bonnington]. I think that it’s quite a dangerous game to play to follow the driver around because if the driver falls out of favour or the driver decides that after one year this is not for him, he can’t take the entourage with him.
“So I think that Lewis has done the right thing. He’d obviously have Team LH around him, his management and trainers and people like that. But I think trying to take engineers would have been a bit of a misstep.
And so I believe that the team will accept him as he is, or with whatever he wants for a bag. But if you go there with a bit of a reputation like what Lewis has got for being able to deliver the team will get around him.
Hamilton will not have many faces he knows in the garage at Maranello But he can always rely on the established friendship with team principal Fred Vasseur. The duo has joined forces again during the Brit’s outstanding junior career at ART Grand Prix and will now rejoin on the top level.
Hamilton wants it though as well. In February this year, he said, I think for every driver growing up, watching history, watching Michael Schumacher in his prime, probably all of us sit in our garage and see the screen pop up and you see the driver in the red cockpit and you wonder what it’d be like to be surrounded by it.”
You attend the Italian Grand Prix, you see the sea of red of Ferrari’s supporter fan base and can only marvel at it. Since Michael’s time and since 2007 it has not been a team with a great deal of achievement and I considered it a great opportunity. Well, as a child, I played and Michael in that car so i think it’s all a dream come true for me and I am really, really looking forward to it.”