Lewis Hamilton warned about 'dangerous game' he must avoid playing at Ferrari
Lewis Hamilton will be a Ferrari driver in 2025, and that change comes with a steep adaptation curve.
Former Ferrari engineer Rob Smedley has advised Lewis Hamilton against bringing several members of his Mercedes entourage with him to Maranello next season. The seven-time world champion will be without a host of key allies when he makes the switch this winter.
Despite interest from Hamilton’s side, long-serving race engineer Peter ‘Bono’ Bonnington will not make the transition from Mercedes to Ferrari. While the likes of Loic Serra and Jerome d’Ambrosio will be present, the Silver Arrows have not suffered a mass exodus in the way many predicted.
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.
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“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.
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“So I think that the team will embrace him. 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.”
While Hamilton won’t have many familiar faces in the garage at Maranello, he can at least fall back on a strong relationship with team principal Fred Vasseur. The pair worked together during the Brit’s stellar junior career at ART Grand Prix, and will now be reunited on the biggest stage.
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Hamilton is up for the challenge too. "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,” he said back in February.
"You go to the Italian Grand Prix, we see the sea of red of Ferrari fans and you can only stand in awe of that. It is a team that has not had huge success since Michael's days and since 2007, and I saw it as a huge challenge. As a kid, I used to play [video games] as Michael in that car, so it is definitely a dream, and I am really, really excited about it."
