Lewis Hamilton: New Ferrari driver celebrates 40th birthday ahead of fresh F1 adventure in 2025

Lewis Hamilton celebrates his landmark 40th birthday on Tuesday, seven days into a year that is set to prove one of the most significant and fascinating of his whole career.

That’s Lewis Hamilton the Ferrari driver now, of course, with January 1 having formally marked the career transition from Mercedes silver to Ferrari red for Formula 1’s most famous and successful driver.

Whether coincidentally or not, Hamilton has chosen to embark on a late new chapter in his already unparalleled career at the point in life considered a time of reflection on what has gone already and anticipation of the challenges that lie ahead.

And by joining the sport’s biggest team with the aim of helping them return to championship-winning glory, and taking himself to a record-breaking eighth world title, the challenge ahead is certainly clear right at the start of arguably F1’s most blockbuster match-up in history.

‘Reinvention is powerful’ – the Hamilton-Ferrari adventure finally begins

Given the union of F1’s most successful driver and most successful team was first revealed last February, anticipation levels have had almost a year to build – and the results of that are certainly already showing early on, mere days into 2025.

On New Year’s Day, Ferrari marked the formal start of the partnership with a short text post on X – “Perfect time for a follow @LewisHamilton” – which while little more than a matter-of-fact statement, gained huge social media traction, with the post being viewed almost four million times on that platform alone.

Hamilton also began the year by following Ferrari’s official social accounts, even reposting their official announcement of his 2025 arrival from 11 months ago, while sharing a picture of him karting as a youngster wearing a red crash helmet and yellow overalls – the colours of his new team now decades later.

But his first words as a Ferrari driver actually came on LinkedIn, where he updated his new job to: F1 Driver – Ferrari.

“I could not be more excited for the year ahead,” wrote Hamilton ahead of his 19th consecutive season on the grid.

“Moving to Scuderia Ferrari, there’s a lot to reflect on.

“To anyone considering their next move in 2025: embrace the change. Whether you’re switching industries, learning a new skill, or even just taking on new challenges, remember that reinvention is powerful.

“Your next opportunity is always within reach. Here’s to 2025 – a year of embracing new opportunities, staying hungry, and driving forward with purpose. Let’s make it one to remember. Andiamo #newjob.”

Since then, Hamilton has been spending time in his usual winter retreat on the slopes – posting a picture in a red snow suit, inevitably, in a continuation of the early 2025 theme – and it is not until the second half of January that we are expecting to see him in actual Ferrari racing red for the first time when he heads to his new ‘office’ in Italy.

Hamilton to make Ferrari track bow in old car

Ferrari are yet to officially confirm Hamilton’s exact early movements at their Maranello base later this month, but team boss Frederic Vasseur told the media just before Christmas that his debut on the track for them was set to be in one of the team’s old cars.

That’s because F1’s sporting regulations allow for the Testing of Previous Cars (TPC), under certain restrictions, with teams this year able to run their cars from 2023, 2022 or 2021 outside of race weekends and official 2025 testing.

What we do know is that Hamilton’s bow will come at the Scuderia’s own Fiorano test track, which is adjacent to their factory in northern Italy, with the exact date later in January to be determined closer to the time by the weather forecast.

Vasseur has also floated the possibility of the Briton driving in one of Pirelli’s 2026 development tyre tests, the first of which takes place in Magny-Cours at the end of January.

While no bespoke unveiling event for Hamilton’s signing is planned, the Briton will be presented along with the rest of the much-changed 2025 grid at F1’s big season launch event at London’s O2 on February 18.

Hamilton and new team-mate Charles Leclerc will then help launch Ferrari’s new 2025 car back in Italy a day later on February 19.

With pre-season testing in Bahrain beginning on February 26, when he will share driving duties with Leclerc across three days with the new challenger, Hamilton will have little over a month to truly acclimatise to life and working practices at his new team – but his new boss is not concerned.

“For sure, we know that we’ll have a lot of procedures to assimilate during these couple of days, but I think he’s experienced enough to do it,” said Vasseur.

“We will have the advantage to have the simulator, so he’ll be able to do a race simulation, a qualifying simulation in the simulator and to be fully prepared with the steering wheel and all the particularities of the car.

“But, honestly, I’m not worried about this, and it’s not the biggest challenge.”

Hamilton at 40: Can he still get back to his best after 2024 struggles?

While advancements in sports science mean that seeing top-level sportspeople continuing to compete into their late 30s and early 40s has become more commonplace in sports where it certainly was not the case in past eras, such as football and tennis, age alone has never been a particularly reliable bellwether for determining when a driver should hang up their helmet in F1.

Drivers generally leave the sport once they either lose the motivation to race on, or once they are viewed by teams to no longer be fast enough.

Still, Hamilton will be only the fifth driver so far this century after Michael Schumacher, Pedro de la Rosa, Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso to race on beyond their 40th birthday when he takes to the grid for the season-opener in Australia on March 16.

Indeed Alonso, who himself has just started a new two-year Aston Martin contract and will turn 44 in July, has in recent years redefined what is considered possible for a 40-something driver to achieve in this sport.

But one thing even the evergreen Spaniard has yet to do as a quadragenarian is claim another race victory. Nigel Mansell remains the last driver to win a grand prix in their fifth decade, the Briton doing so aged 41 at the 1994 Australian GP.

Emulating that Mansell feat will certainly be one of Hamilton’s early targets in red and that is something which should be eminently achievable given the Scuderia finished 2024 strongly – winning three races and finishing on all-but two podiums across the season’s final nine races, as they just missed out to McLaren on a first Constructors’ Championship title in 16 years.

As the most successful driver of all time, Hamilton does not exactly have anything left to prove to anyone in F1, yet it is also true to say that his difficult 2024 swansong season at Mercedes did lead some observers and fans to question whether he was still quite as good as he once was in his title-winning pomp.

Those questions largely came about because of the uncharacteristic and sustained qualifying struggles which saw record 104-time polesitter Hamilton thrashed 5-19 in the Mercedes head-to-head by George Russell, 13 years his junior.

Speaking on a recent edition of the Sky Sports F1 Podcast, Nico Rosberg – the only one of Hamilton’s F1 team-mates before Russell to outqualify the Briton over the course of a season, in 2014 – suggested that while the seven-time champion still showed plenty of evidence that his race performances remained supreme last year, his qualifying issues would be playing on his mind heading to Ferrari.

Rosberg said: “Even though he still seems to be at his very, very best in race pace… when you qualify poorly all the time almost – and he says it himself, he’s just not quick enough in qualifying – then that’s something that was weighing on his shoulders so much during the end of the year.

“When you get beaten race in race out from your team-mate who’s younger and not a world champion… and in the case of Lewis, who’s statistically the GOAT, then that’s really tough.

“Now he has two years at Ferrari, and he will 100 per cent be very, very worried [thinking] ‘what if this form of mine continues? Was it just the car at Mercedes, or was it something else, and what if this form of mine continues at Ferrari?’

“If it does it would really be quite a painful adventure I would say because that’s not what Ferrari hired him for.

“Ferrari hired him to be on a level with Leclerc and fight for world championships.

“So I think he will be very worried about that and we can only hope that he finds back to his good old self with a reset at Ferrari and is once again the brilliant driver we know.”

If Hamilton’s stirring LinkedIn message for 2025 is anything to go by, then the seven-time champion, armed with new car and operating in a fresh, new environment, is certainly primed to come back firing on all cylinders once more as he targets what would be a crowning glory to his career with the storied Prancing Horse.

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