Hamilton insists he’s nonetheless motivated to proceed into subsequent season, when the introduction of recent guidelines bolsters his hope that his and Ferrari’s type can flip round.
“It is the love for what you do,” he says. “It is the love for racing. I’ve obtained wonderful assist from individuals round me, my followers. It is that fixed maintaining a tally of the dream. I nonetheless have a dream that I maintain hope in my coronary heart and that is what I work in the direction of.”
That dream stays to win his eighth world title with Ferrari. Any solutions he ought to retire can clearly by ignored.
How lifelike that dream may be stays to be seen. And the precise causes of Hamilton’s struggles in 2025 stay a degree of conjecture.
Subsequent 12 months, F1 goes by way of a serious upheaval with new guidelines for vehicles and engines. Ferrari will not be alone in hoping that the inevitable reset of the aggressive order that may create will profit them.
That partly explains why Ferrari haven’t proven any vital progress this season. When the automotive was clearly uncompetitive early on in 2025, the group made a collective choice to focus much more closely on the 2026 automotive, even earlier.
“I used to be part of (that), I used to be one pushing for it,” Hamilton says. “You may’t fall behind the others by way of that growth for the brand new automotive as a result of it is a steep studying curve for all of us.
“So I supported it 100%. I nonetheless do. I feel it was the proper choice. Notably the place we have been already with the automotive, we weren’t combating for a championship.
“But it surely’s simply meant that it has been more durable to take care of the efficiency, not less than a number of the efficiency we had firstly of the 12 months.”
This season has offered Hamilton with loads of examples of areas the place he thinks the group can enhance operationally, and it is clear that Ferrari might be spending a while over the winter taking a look at the place to plug the gaps that Vasseur, too, has repeatedly identified.
“We simply have to analyse the place we have been, what’s been good, areas that we are able to enhance on,” Hamilton says. “I do know the place all of them are. It is sitting down with the group on the finish of the 12 months.”
However even when Ferrari find yourself aggressive subsequent season, there inevitably stay query marks about Hamilton.
Whereas he has repeatedly pointed to the necessity to adapt to Ferrari in numerous other ways, it’s an uncomfortable reality that this was the second consecutive season by which he has been out-performed by a youthful team-mate. George Russell’s file in opposition to Hamilton in his twelfth and closing season at Mercedes in 2024 was remarkably much like Leclerc’s in 2025.
