On Valentine’s Day, Lewis Hamilton enters a sprawling studio space in northwest London and intently stares at the magnificent creature standing off in the distance.
“Sh-t,” says Hamilton to no one in particular. “I’m nervous.”
Soon enough, however, the seven-time Formula One world champion overcomes his anxiety and is standing face-to-face with a shiny black stallion named Aroma. He pets his nose, massages his neck, generally spreads his hands all over Aroma’s thick coat. He is doing his allergies, the source of his initial fear, no favors. But Hamilton, a literal knight, is enamored, peppering the horse master with questions. Where’s Aroma from? (Portugal.) Can he sleep lying down? (Yes.) How much does he weigh? (About 1,300 lb. Only a few hundred less than Hamilton’s race car.)
He’s throwing health caution to the wind in order to commemorate his much ballyhooed move from Mercedes, where he won six of his seven F1 driver titles, to the venerated Scuderia Ferrari HP race team: a photo of himself positioned in front of an actual black horse standing on his hind legs, mimicking the Italian automaker’s famous logo. Like Hamilton, Aroma—who is retired but still does the occasional photo shoot—has an impressive resume, including appearances in Robin Hood and Maleficent, ads for Hermès and Burberry, and a Dua Lipa video; he is joined by Theo, a stunt horse you might recognize from Bridgerton, among other things. “This is going to be such an iconic picture,” says Hamilton while trying on outfits for the shoot. “Super timeless.”
That depends, of course, on what comes after. At 40, Hamilton is aiming to not only win a record eighth F1 driver title—cementing his status as the greatest F1 driver to ever live and ending the longest-ever championship drought for the most storied race team on the planet—but also fulfill a lifelong dream. His move to Ferrari, announced before the 2024 season, was shocking worldwide front-page news: he had suited up for Mercedes for more than a decade, helped build a more diverse workforce there, and hoped to someday acquire an ownership stake in the team. It seemed he would ride into the sunset with the Silver Arrows.
Hamilton had other ideas. “You can’t stand still for too long,” Hamilton tells TIME, in his first in-depth interview about his decision to leave Mercedes for Ferrari. “I needed to throw myself into something uncomfortable again. Honestly, I thought all my firsts were done. Your first car, your first crash, your first date, first day of school. The excitement I got by the idea of, ‘This is my first time in the red suit, the first time in the Ferrari.’ Wow. Honestly, I’ve never been so excited.”
During the 2024 F1 season, Hamilton, out of respect for Mercedes—with whom he was still under contract and racing—didn’t talk much about the switch. The situation was awkward and unprecedented. (Picture LeBron James suiting up for the Los Angeles Lakers knowing he’d be playing the following year for a rival, like the Boston Celtics. Exactly. It would never happen.) All sides appear to have handled it as professionally as possible: Hamilton ended a 945-day losing streak by winning his hometown race, at Silverstone in Britain, in July before winning again in Belgium three weeks later. Meanwhile Carlos Sainz, the Ferrari driver whom Hamilton is replacing this year, helped Scuderia finish second in the constructor, or team, standings, just a few points behind 2024 champion McLaren.
Hamilton’s road to the title record won’t be easy. Some critics have questioned Ferrari’s strategy of signing an aging driver, whose best days could very well be in the rearview. They’ve wondered whether Ferrari’s more interested in marketing than winning—Hamilton is still F1’s most popular driver, by a mile, as well as an internationally known cultural figure with a hand in fashion, film, and business. (He’s co-chairing the Met Gala in May alongside Colman Domingo, Pharrell Williams, A$AP Rocky, and Anna Wintour; LeBron James is honorary chair.) Plus, a slew of younger drivers like reigning four-time champion Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, 27; McLaren’s Lando Norris, 25; and Hamilton’s new Ferrari teammate, Charles LeClerc, 27, could keep him off the top of the podium.
“The old man is a state of mind,” says Hamilton. “Of course your body ages. But I’m never going to be an old man.”
The 2025 F1 campaign, which kicks off in Australia on March 16, comes laced with intrigue. Hamilton sits at the epicenter. Ferrari is religion in Italy; when the team wins an F1 race, the bells of the Church of St. Blaise in Maranello, the small city near Bologna that houses Ferrari headquarters, ring in celebration. So Hamilton’s quest to end Ferrari’s agony, while breaking the individual title record set by Michael Schumacher—who won five straight titles with Ferrari from 2000 to 2004—will be appointment theater. Meanwhile, Hamilton is co-producing, along with Jerry Bruckheimer and others, an F1 movie, aptly called F1, that is almost literally a Brad Pitt vehicle. The film, which comes out in June, plus a competitive race for the championship, could deliver a jolt to the sport’s popularity, especially in the U.S., where F1 has boomed but flattened out a bit, given Verstappen’s predictable dominance.
A Hamilton championship in red, in the twilight of his racing life, would be nothing less than one of the greatest mic-drop moments in sports history. “I don’t know if I can find an adjective to describe that,” says American racing legend Mario Andretti, the 1978 F1 champion who raced for Ferrari in the early ’70s. “Nothing is missing in his career. But oh man, how better can you describe your career after that? Oh my God, he’d be the king of all kings.”
Two weeks before the stallion photo shoot, Hamilton is striking golf balls into a simulator at an indoor club on the banks of the Thames. (He has a pronounced slice.) He doesn’t golf much these days, but Hamilton being Hamilton—a man who has taken full advantage of this sport’s jet-setting ways to become one of the world’s most prominent collectors of influential people—he last played a round with actor Tom Holland, a.k.a. Spider-Man. His other golf partners have included Samuel L. Jackson and Kelly Slater, the surfing GOAT. He was once supposed to play with another GOAT, Michael Jordan, but when Hamilton got to the course, he says, Jordan “didn’t end up being there.”
As we’re taking swings, I ask Hamilton if he’s checked out TGL, the indoor golf competition founded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy that just launched its first season in the U.S. He hasn’t. I explain some of the particulars—it’s a team league, ESPN is showing it on weeknights—before it sounds familiar. But Hamilton is involved with so many projects—movies, art, fashion lines, the Denver Broncos, a pet-food company, a plant-based burger chain with Leonardo DiCaprio—that he can’t quite remember whether he poured some money into this new outfit. “I might have,” he says, with a laugh. (He did.)
Hamilton takes a break from golf, reclines on a couch, and orders a latte before sharing the story of how he arrived at this moment. It began a long time ago, when he was a kid growing up in public housing north of London. His first Ferrari memories have stuck with him. He would drive Schumacher’s car in racing video games. The Ferrari replica featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—the 1961 250 GT California Spyder—is still, to this day, Hamilton’s favorite. “That’s the ultimate retirement car,” he says. “I can just see myself with Roscoe, him with a scarf and goggles in the seat next to me, driving down the PCH.” (Roscoe, Hamilton’s pet bulldog—who, like his owner, is vegan—has an Instagram account with 1.1 million followers.)
As we’re taking swings, I ask Hamilton if he’s checked out TGL, the indoor golf competition founded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy that just launched its first season in the U.S. He hasn’t. I explain some of the particulars—it’s a team league, ESPN is showing it on weeknights—before it sounds familiar. But Hamilton is involved with so many projects—movies, art, fashion lines, the Denver Broncos, a pet-food company, a plant-based burger chain with Leonardo DiCaprio—that he can’t quite remember whether he poured some money into this new outfit. “I might have,” he says, with a laugh. (He did.)
Hamilton takes a break from golf, reclines on a couch, and orders a latte before sharing the story of how he arrived at this moment. It began a long time ago, when he was a kid growing up in public housing north of London. His first Ferrari memories have stuck with him. He would drive Schumacher’s car in racing video games. The Ferrari replica featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—the 1961 250 GT California Spyder—is still, to this day, Hamilton’s favorite. “That’s the ultimate retirement car,” he says. “I can just see myself with Roscoe, him with a scarf and goggles in the seat next to me, driving down the PCH.” (Roscoe, Hamilton’s pet bulldog—who, like his owner, is vegan—has an Instagram account with 1.1 million followers.)
McLaren signed Hamilton to a driver’s deal in 1998, when he was 13. In 2006, Hamilton won the championship in what is now known as Formula Two. “I did have the bit of red on my helmet,” he says. During that F2 season, and the one prior in F3, Hamilton raced for team principal Frédéric Vasseur, whose management style and ability to recruit top engineering talent to his lower-level operation impressed the young driver. Hamilton figured Vasseur would be a F1 leader one day.
Hamilton won his first F1 championship in 2008, his second season with McLaren. He competed there for four more seasons before jumping, in 2013, to Mercedes, a middling team that Hamilton lifted to championship heights. Through it all, Hamilton maintained cordial relations with Ferrari leadership. He’d walk past the Ferrari garage at races, say “ciao” to the mechanics, and hear them say “vieni Ferrari” (come to Ferrari). Around 2018, Hamilton met with Ferrari chairman John Elkann. Both sides expressed a desire to see Hamilton in red. But by the end of the 2020 season, Hamilton had four straight championships with Mercedes. He had no reason to jump ship. “If I’m really honest, I had accepted the fact that I’m probably not going to drive for Ferrari,” says Hamilton. “I was OK with that.”
After the 2021 season, Hamilton nearly walked away from racing. He—and millions of his fans—felt his record eighth driver title was stolen from him, when during the final race of the year, in Abu Dhabi, an official’s controversial decision allowed Verstappen to overtake Hamilton in the last lap and clinch his first title. Hamilton ultimately refused to quit without a fight, but he failed to win a single race as Verstappen cruised to another pair of championships. Hamilton signed a two-year extension with Mercedes in the summer of 2023, but the deal allowed him an option to leave after one year.
