Formula 1: Hamilton and the load of the Ferrari love

Lewis Hamilton got the love of the Tifosi for her Scuderia Ferrari before he left Melbourne for the first major test with full force. Tens of thousands smashed the Italian anthem fervently and full of longing in the team presentation in the streets of Milan. If passion can also become a burden.

Hamilton is also astonished every day, and he has also become the red temptation. It is a special feeling to work with this Formula 1 team, he emphasizes. The eyes sparkle, the corners of the mouth twitch. “You don’t feel like you are at work, you don’t want to go.”

The only question is: does the record world champion do it better than the failed former champions Sebastian Vettel or Fernando Alonso? From this weekend in distant Australia it applies!

Vettel came with four Red Bull World Cup titles-and it didn’t work with another. Before that, Alonso, who once ended Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari era, was unable to add any further to his two titles. Hamilton wants to do better.

“I’m not thinking of number eight. I remember to win the first World Cup with Ferrari,” he says. The now 40-year-old seven-time champion and 105-time Grand Prix winner relies on a tried and tested environment: with Ferrari’s team boss Frédéric Vasseur, he already celebrated in the youth series. In addition, the Brit recovered his former long -time fitness trainer and physiotherapist Angela Cullen.

“No time to sunbathe”

Hamilton does not go on where he stopped with Mercedes, because that was no longer a success story after the six titles from 2014 to 2020 (teammate Nico Rosberg won the World Cup in 2016). He starts again – so the impression. Intoxicated and inspired, like practically everyone who once went to Ferrari, from the myth and the special feature of this racing team.

But be careful! “This aura also means that you like to sit down in the deck chair and sunbathe. But it is not time to sunbathe, but the toughest bone work,” says former Ferrari driver Gerhard Berger in a conversation from the German Press Agency.

The 65-year-old drove for a total of six years for Scuderia in the 1980s and 1990s, it is not enough to the title. Successes with Ferrari are twice as difficult as with any other team, he emphasizes.

When Hamilton arrives in the middle of Melbourne in Albert Park this Thursday, it gets particularly loud again. When he enters the paddock for the first time on a Grand Prix weekend as a driver of the famous Scuderia Ferrari, all cameras will be aimed at the superstar of the motorsport king class.

But Hamilton will also have to deliver. And Norbert Haug, the former Mercedes Motor sports director, trusts him. “If Ferrari gives him the capable car, I think Lewis is able to win the World Cup title in his first year,” said Haug of the German Press Agency. After all, in his first year in Formula 1, Hamilton just narrowly missed the triumph – for one point.

At that time, Hamilton was the newcomer in Formula 1, 18 years later he was the new team in the oldest team in the racing series – Ferrari has been with him for 75 years, starting in 1950. Hamilton’s new colleague Charles Leclerc is already starting his seventh Ferrari year. Hamilton already tries it here and there in Italian, Leclerc masters the language fluently.

And the Monegasse, a native of 13 years younger than Hamilton, actually wants to end the Titellose time of Scuderia. Since Kimi Raikkonen’s lucky triumph in 2007, no Ferrari driver has won the World Cup title.

But Hamilton is Hamilton. The first black in the Formula 1 cockpit, the great superstar beyond sport. “You can’t compare me with another 40-year-old Formula 1 driver in history, neither in the past nor in the present. They are not like me,” he recently says about himself and others in the “Time” magazine.

No career end at the eighth title

With another title, he would also overtake Michael Schumacher and become the sole world champion with eight world championships. But it would not be over yet: “If I were lucky enough to win another title, which of course we would strive for, I wouldn’t stop.”

But it does not work, a Hamilton could also gain new experience. “Ferrari fans know no mercy. Ferrari is the most important thing for them and not the person sitting in the car,” says Ralf Schumacher. The 49 -year -old brother of Michael Schumacher and himself a former Formula 1 driver explains: “If the one – for whatever reason – does not bring performance, criticism comes very quickly and it gets very loud.”

There it is again, the force of the Ferrari love, can also become a burden.