Culture
Lewis Hamilton’s first week at Ferrari: Louboutin boots, a dream fulfilled and a proud mom
“This is the one!”
Lewis Hamilton could not hide his excitement as he walked among the road cars in the ‘heritage section’ of Ferrari’s headquarters in Maranello, Italy.
As he spotted a bright red Ferrari F40, one of the rarest of the manufacturer’s road cars, in the middle of the floor, he paused. Spreading his hands across the rear spoiler, a smile engulfed his face. He’d found his favorite.
It was this kind of wonder that Hamilton, a seven-time world champion who has seen and won it all in Formula One, sought when he decided to move to Ferrari. For all the success he enjoyed with Mercedes, nothing could match the history and the magic of F1’s most iconic team.
The moment he had dreamed about since childhood, becoming a Ferrari driver, had finally arrived.
Day one at Maranello had been almost a year in the making for Hamilton. Since announcing his shock decision to quit Mercedes after 12 seasons, he endured a difficult and, by his own admission, occasionally awkward final year. Closing that chapter in Abu Dhabi may have been emotional, yet Hamilton knew it was giving way to something new and exciting.
To mark the start of this era, uniting F1’s most successful driver and most successful team, every detail had to be meticulously planned. Ferrari F1 team principal Fred Vasseur was reluctant to have a big presentation or media event, not wishing to add any extra work or distraction to the team’s plate amid its preparations for the new season.
But it had to make Hamilton’s first week at Maranello memorable.
The F40 housed in the ‘old’ side of Ferrari’s factory — the headquarters is split between the historic part of the facility, noted by its yellow buildings and walls, and the ‘new’ side that is red — was wheeled through the Italian drizzle to the Piazza Michael Schumacher, named after the great who won five of his seven F1 titles for Ferrari. On it stands the house of Enzo Ferrari, the founder of the legendary manufacturer who had watched many legends sample his red cars from the window. History resides wherever you turn at Maranello.
Hamilton met with Vasseur and Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna before posing for photos outside the house next to the F40. Even Hamilton’s outfit for the day had been carefully planned by his stylist, Eric McNeal, right down to his red-soled Louboutin boots. The first official pictures of Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari F1 driver, quickly went viral and became the most-liked photo on F1’s Instagram page in less than 24 hours, as well as gracing all the front pages of the Italian sports newspapers the next morning.
Hamilton’s arrival photo went viral and made headlines around the world — especially in Italy. (Clive Rose / Getty Images)
Hamilton also made time to visit the fans, Ferrari’s loyal tifosi, who had congregated outside the factory gates at Maranello since the early morning hours, desperate to glimpse their new hero on his first day.
While at McLaren and Mercedes, Hamilton struck a strong bond with his fans (known as ‘Team LH’) and wants to rekindle that kind of relationship at Ferrari.
“I don’t know really what to expect, but I’m really looking forward to connecting with that community,” Hamilton said in a press conference last August. Taking a few minutes with fans to pose for pictures and offer signatures as they chanted his name was a good first gesture. It created a bystander out of Ferrari president John Elkann, one of the key brokers in signing Hamilton and perhaps the most powerful figure at Ferrari.
A lot rests on 2025 for both Ferrari and Hamilton. Ferrari missed out on its first constructors’ championship since 2008 by just 14 points, while Hamilton is still searching for a record-breaking eighth world title. His struggles with the Mercedes car through 2024 made for a season of lagging behind teammate George Russell. Shaking off that funk and proving he still has the edge that once made him near-impossible to beat at the peak of his powers in F1 is a critical part of this move.
It made Hamilton’s time getting to know his new colleagues through a factory tour and subsequent meetings on Monday and Tuesday vitally important. Hamilton always took strength from the closeness of his relationships with his teammates at Mercedes, particularly with his race engineer, Peter Bonnington, who he likened to a brother. Taking over that role will be Riccardo Adami, who was the engineer for Carlos Sainz (the Spaniard affectionately nicknamed Adami ‘Ricky’) as well as four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel, and will now be the voice on the end of the radio to Hamilton through races.
Hamilton suiting up for his first test at Fiorano. (Ferrari)
Ferrari planned Hamilton’s first on-track outing behind the wheel of its 2023 car for Wednesday at its private test track, Fiorano, which is adjacent to the factory. But it was always weather-dependent, making it hard to predict in the depths of January in northern Italy.
Preparations through Monday and Tuesday included a seat fitting and sampling Ferrari’s simulator, giving Hamilton a chance to feel, at least virtually, how his new car would perform. One of his great struggles through 2024 was feeling confident and balanced with the car, particularly under braking with his late, aggressive style. Over a single lap, Hamilton often failed to get the most out of the car. The simulator will have at least given a first read of what he can expect from the Ferrari this year, even if nothing compares to the real thing.
Hamilton’s new race helmet design for this year returns to the yellow he first used as a child in go-karts to allow his father, Anthony, to easily spot him on the track. Shots of the helmet, as well as Hamilton posing in the classic red Ferrari race suit for the first time, were shared with the world, building up excitement before his first on-track running. All that was required was for the weather to play ball.
Driving a two-year-old F1 car on a misty, cold day around a short test circuit may not have the hallmarks of a special moment, but for Hamilton, this was a day he had dreamt of since playing as Michael Schumacher on video games as a teenager, wondering what it might be like to be in the cockpit of the red car someday.
Just as it was for Schumacher at Fiorano at the end of 1995 ahead of his move to Ferrari for the following season, Hamilton’s maiden outing was both understated and poignant. After changing into his new red race suit in Enzo Ferrari’s house, Hamilton walked over to the simple garage setup next to the track, no bigger than a gas station forecourt (and branded like one, thanks to team partner Shell) and was greeted by his team. As the engineers ran through the processes, Hamilton scribbled down things to remember into a small notebook.
Hamilton and Ferrari’s crew hit the ground running this week (Ferrari)
There were a number of new faces in Ferrari gear for Hamilton to get to know, but a few watched on with added fondness, including dad Anthony. Vasseur had worked with Hamilton in junior categories and they always remained friendly, paving the way for their reunion almost 20 years later. Jerome d’Ambrosio, the deputy team principal, and Loic Serra, the chassis technical director, both worked at Mercedes when Hamilton was there.
But maybe the most essential and surprising returnee was Angela Cullen, Hamilton’s former trainer and performance coach.
Hamilton and Cullen worked together for seven years before suddenly splitting just two races into the 2023 season. Cullen had been a core part of Hamilton’s inner circle, overseeing his physical preparations and helping him ahead of races. She spent last year working in IndyCar but is now back with Hamilton’s team after signing with Project 44, his management company that looks after his business interests. Her return is important for Hamilton, who will take comfort in having some familiarity during the big adjustment that comes with joining a new team.
At 9:16 a.m., Hamilton peeled out of the garage and onto the track. At last, he was a Ferrari F1 driver. Fans and TV cameras had gathered at a couple of vantage points overlooking Fiorano to catch a glimpse of the famous #44 emblazoned on the Ferrari, including one on a bridge next to a busy road. No length is too great for the tifosi.
Testing an old car would not have given Hamilton much in terms of accurate readings of how the new season may go, yet it at least offered the chance to adjust to Ferrari’s way of working. The SF-23 car, the only non-Red Bull winner of 2023, offered a first understanding of the power delivery of the Ferrari engine and the functions of the steering wheel, both of which will differ from what he was used to at Mercedes.
Hamilton only managed 30 laps through a handful of runs in the morning, completing an installation run on wet tires before switching to slicks, and there were images of him locking up at points, yet it was never about outright pace or performance. The race drivers are limited to 1,000km of private test running in old cars through the year, meaning Hamilton’s 89km run, followed by teammate Charles Leclerc’s 42km run in the afternoon, leaves plenty of room for more ahead of the new season. A further outing is planned for Hamilton in Barcelona in the coming weeks before his first run in the 2025 car on February 19 at Fiorano, one day after the F1 season launch event at The O2 in London.
Neither the limited running nor the weather would stop his Ferrari debut from being, to quote Hamilton, “one of the best feelings of my life.”
Once his run was complete, he was taken in a black Alfa Romeo road car to get out and wave at the dozens of fans who stood behind one of the fences. His mother, Carmen, stood taking photos on her phone. Watching her son in Ferrari red for the first time, she drank in the moment. Hamilton could not help but break into a smile at the chants of, “Olé!, olé, olé, olé! Lewis, Lewis!” that greeted him. The tifosi have already warmed to Hamilton, instantly becoming their new hero.
“I already knew from the outside how passionate the Ferrari family is, from everyone in the team to the tifosi,” Hamilton said. “To now witness it firsthand as a Ferrari driver has been awe-inspiring. That passion runs through their veins and you can’t help but be energized by it.”
Ferrari perfectly balanced making Hamilton’s arrival a ‘moment’ without detracting from the focus, which must be on its performance. It knows how important this year will be coming off the back of a 2024 season that will go down as a near-miss but also a big swell in momentum that has ignited hopes just at the right time. As much as this week featured public nods to the new beginning, the behind-the-scenes work and adjustment was what really mattered to Hamilton.
It is a week that will have rekindled a lot of Hamilton’s love and passion for F1. As committed as he was to the Mercedes project, even through the toughest of times, the on-track difficulties caused that flame to flicker.
This change to a new, ambitious project, one which carries the weight of an expectant fanbase, a nation’s sporting pride and the history of those who’ve come and succeeded before in Ferrari red is precisely what Hamilton needed.
Now, it’s about working hard to make the adjustment as smooth as possible, before his full debut in Australia on March 16 truly begins his Ferrari era.
Top photo: Clive Rose, Alessandro Bremec via Getty Images; Design: Will Tullos/The Athletic
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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