F1 News: Lewis Hamilton's Hopes Tempered - 'Not Going to Make Ferrari Champions Overnight'

The addition of Lewis Hamilton to Ferrari in 2025 is a crucial component of a larger team rebuilding effort, which aims to lead Ferrari to future F1 championship successes, although not instantly.

May 2, 2024; Miami Gardens, Florida, USA; Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton (44) during a press / John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports

Despite the signing of seven-time F1 champion Lewis Hamilton for the 2025 season, former F1 driver and Sky Sports F1 analyst Karun Chandhok doesn't think the transformation of the team will happen overnight.

Karun Chandhok, a well-respected figure in the motorsport industry, pointed out the complexities of turning Ferrari back into a championship-winning team. During an appearance of the Sky Sports F1 podcast, he explained:

"Hamilton alone is not going to make Ferrari world champions over night. They have to build the team in the way that, you rewind to the nineties and they did that around. Michael [Schumacher] going on his own in '96 for example didn't suddenly make them world champions. All of these other people move in to come and restructure the whole thing, and you'd have to say Fred Vasseur is doing an amazing job."

Under the leadership of Fred Vasseur since the beginning of the 2023 season, the Maranello-based squad has embarked on an ambitious plan to reconstruct its team dynamics. It was announced earlier this week that the Italian team had signed two former Mercedes personnel - Jerome d'Ambrosio as Deputy Team Principal and Loic Serra as Head of Chassis Performance Engineering. On top of this, Adrian Newey's Red Bull exit in 2025 has spurred rumors of the Aerodynamicist moving to Ferrari next year or 2026. Speaking about the rumors and the new additions to the team, Chandhok continued:

"Whether they get Adrian Newey is still the big question mark that everyone's waiting to see how that unfolds. I genuinely believe what Adrian was saying to Martin [Brundle] in , which is I think he is going to just have some time off and consider his options.

"Whether he finally goes there would be another story.

"[Serra is] very highly rated in the engineering and aero team up at Mercedes and [d'Ambrosio] brings driving experience, but also, he brings management experience. He worked as a team principal in Formula E. He worked closely with Toto Wolff at Mercedes on various bits of pieces.

"There is just so much to do at Ferrari as part of his project rehabilitation to make them world champions again. For Fred to get a breadth of people with experience within the team is a great move. I think what Fred Vasseur is done and doing is making Ferrari."