Lewis Hamilton could make $75m a year if he joined Ferrari but if he does leave Mercedes for the Italian giants it will have little to do with financial gain.
The chance to do so was cruelly whisked away from him in Abu Dhabi at the 2021 season finale. Had he won that infamous race he would have been champion for a record eighth time – one more than Michael Schumacher. Of course, there are many other metrics in motor racing that can be used to establish the worth of a driver, and comparisons across different eras of the sport are notoriously fraught, but topping the title count has to be one of the more persuasive measures of ability.
Hamilton, 38, has often said that he would be happy to see out his career at Mercedes, the team that helped him to win six of those seven titles. And as his loyal attachment to the Silver Arrows brings him a wedge in the region of pounds 35 million per year, his contentment is understandable. If Ferrari really are willing to dig even deeper and put pounds 40 million on the table when his Mercedes contract expires at the end of this year, then the pounds 5 million hike is unlikely to be the factor that decides his future. The prospect of an eighth title will surely figure much larger in his mind.
Lewis Hamilton has won six of his seven world titles with Mercedes. Picture: Peter Fox/Getty Images
In that regard, the Maranello team will have to raise their game. Ferrari may be the oldest, most successful, most prestigious and most storied team on the grid, but they haven’t exactly been setting the world alight these past few years. They have not won a constructors’ title since 2008; their most recent drivers’ title (delivered by Kimi Raikkonen) came in 2007. Since then they have flattered to deceive. In recent times they have produced very fast cars, but have shot themselves in the foot with poor race strategies, unreliability and a driver line-up – Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz at present – that somehow does not quite seem to knit together.
And yet, they are still Ferrari. When their uber-cool, Ray-Ban-sporting mechanics roll the cars out to their grid positions before a race, you sense the history and the pride behind it all. You know the Red Bulls are faster, that the Mercedes have a better chance of finishing the race, but still the pulse quickens that little bit more when the red cars appear. You think of Alberto Ascari, Juan Manuel Fangio, Mike Hawthorn, Phil Hill, John Surtees, Niki Lauda, Jody Scheckter, Schumacher and Raikkonen, Ferrari’s nine world champion drivers. Who would not want to join that list?
When Schumacher moved from Benetton to Ferrari in 1996, he joined a team that had been struggling for more than a decade and a half. There was a shambolic element to the team as a whole. Over the next few years, Schumacher would earn admiration not only for his ability as a driver, but also for changing the Ferrari culture. Over the past two years the team have been guilty of errors that sometimes veered towards slapstick. Might Hamilton look at that and think he could do what Schumacher did and bring about positive change? It has to be a possibility.
Michael Schumacher made Ferrari a trophy winning machine in the ‘90s and 2000s. Picture: Clive Mason/Getty Images
All the mood music from the Mercedes team principal, Toto Wolff, and from Hamilton himself, has suggested that, ten years on from the start of their relationship, a renewal of vows is in the pipeline.
Which is all very lovely, but it does require a certain level of faith on Hamilton’s part. For all of last year and for the first few races of this season, Mercedes have furnished him with a car that has had precious little chance of winning a race, let alone a championship. This year’s W14 is a better and more stable platform than its violently porpoising predecessor, but it is still far off the pace of the Red Bulls and fiendishly unpredictable.
In light of which, the next few weeks are likely to be critical for Hamilton and Mercedes. The team had scheduled a significant chassis upgrade for last weekend’s cancelled race at Imola, so those changes will now be in place for this week’s visit to Monaco. While the principality’s tight street circuit is not the best place to harvest driving data, Hamilton should at least get an idea of whether genuine improvements have been made to the car. And whether he wants to sit in it for another year.