Hamilton insists he is still motivated to continue into next season, when the introduction of new rules bolsters his hope that his and Ferrari’s form can turn around.
“It’s the love for what you do,” he says. “It’s the love for racing. I’ve got amazing support from people around me, my fans. It’s that constant keeping an eye on the dream. I still have a dream that I hold hope in my heart and that’s what I work towards.”
That dream remains to win his eighth world title with Ferrari. Any suggestions he should retire can clearly be ignored.
How realistic that dream might be remains to be seen. And the exact causes of Hamilton’s struggles in 2025 remain a point of conjecture.
Next year, F1 is going through a major upheaval with new rules for cars and engines. Ferrari are not alone in hoping that the inevitable reset of the competitive order that will create will benefit them.
That partly explains why Ferrari have not shown any significant progress this season. When the car was clearly uncompetitive early on in 2025, the team made a collective decision to focus even more heavily on the 2026 car, even earlier.
“I was a part of (that), I was one pushing for it,” Hamilton says. “You can’t fall behind the others in terms of that development for the new car because it’s a steep learning curve for all of us.
“So I supported it 100%. I still do. I think it was the right decision. Particularly where we were already with the car, we weren’t fighting for a championship.
“But it’s just meant that it’s been harder to maintain the performance, at least some of the performance we had at the beginning of the year.”
This season has provided Hamilton with plenty of examples of areas where he thinks the team can improve operationally, and it’s clear that Ferrari will be spending some time over the winter looking at where to plug the gaps that Vasseur, too, has repeatedly pointed out.
“We just need to analyse where we’ve been, what’s been good, areas that we can improve on,” Hamilton says. “I know where they all are. It’s sitting down with the team at the end of the year.”
But even if Ferrari end up competitive next season, there inevitably remain question marks about Hamilton.
While he has repeatedly pointed to the need to adapt to Ferrari in a number of different ways, it is an uncomfortable truth that this was the second consecutive season in which he has been out-performed by a younger team-mate. George Russell’s record against Hamilton in his 12th and final season at Mercedes in 2024 was remarkably similar to Leclerc’s in 2025.
