Culture
Why Lewis Hamilton feels revitalized at Ferrari: ‘I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be’
When Lewis Hamilton put on his Ferrari race suit for the first time ahead of his maiden test for the team last month, he needed a moment to adjust to his new look.
While putting on a set of overalls is automatic for racing drivers, completed thousands of times through their careers, donning the iconic red of Ferrari is an honor bestowed on so few. And after 12 years in the silver and black of Mercedes, this was a big change for Hamilton.
At last, he was in Ferrari red. The excitement and anticipation he felt had been long in the making. Now, after F1’s season launch in London and his first test in the 2025 car, it is a reality.
Such wonder is something only Ferrari can stir. No matter how many world championships or races you win, the feeling of being part of F1’s most famed, successful team is unmatched. It’s what made Hamilton want to make the move and why he has radiated excitement since starting at Maranello in the middle of January.
Nearing the new season and the official start of his next chapter, Hamilton’s enthusiasm has shown zero sign of subsiding. After a sobering final year with Mercedes that appeared to sap some of the fizz from his love for F1, often hamstrung by an underperforming car, Hamilton has a fresh spring in his step.
He’s revitalized. Renewed. And, importantly, he is hopeful the record-breaking eighth world championship he came within one lap of winning in 2021 is within his sights once again at Ferrari.
“They’ve got absolutely every ingredient they need to win a world championship,” Hamilton said. “It’s just about putting all the pieces together.”
Adjusting to a new environment is not something Hamilton has done a lot during his F1 career.
Unlike more journeymen F1 drivers — on Tuesday, Carlos Sainz noted he’s driven for half the grid in 10 years — Hamilton is moving to just his third team. It will be the first time he has driven without Mercedes engines and the first time he’s not racing for an English team.
“This step is huge,” Hamilton said on Wednesday after his first test in Ferrari’s new car. “It couldn’t be any bigger.” There’s been plenty of adjustment, ranging from the vibration of the Ferrari engine behind him to the different steering wheel functions and processes. Hamilton feels a newfound appreciation for drivers who have made those switches and been successful immediately, but he is embracing the change.
“Every day, I’m experiencing something new, which actually is really exciting,” Hamilton said.
That includes learning Italian. While Ferrari conducts all of its meetings in English, Hamilton started taking Italian lessons last year to interact better with his mechanics and engineers, like chit-chatting about day-to-day life. Learning a new language has always been one of Hamilton’s dreams. He even gave a speech in Italian at Ferrari’s factory last week and is eager to immerse himself in Italian culture — including the food. “Last week, I had three pizzas,” Hamilton revealed, noting that while he has indeed lost weight, he knew he could not keep that up.
Vasseur and Hamilton debuted the SF-25 at F1 75 Live on Tuesday. (Sam Bloxham/Getty Images)
The effort Hamilton has made with his new colleagues has not gone unnoticed. On his first day visiting the factory, he tried to meet and shake hands with all 1,500 team members. “He’s quite amazing with people,” said Jerome d’Ambrosio, Ferrari’s new deputy team principal who worked with Hamilton at Mercedes. “The team already loves him after the first day.”
Hamilton has also enjoyed many aspects that make Ferrari unique, such as having the entire team under one roof — Mercedes’ engine facility was a 40-minute drive from the F1 team headquarters — and even a test track on its doorstep.
Hamilton is also already working well with his new teammate, Charles Leclerc. While the pair had chatted in the past, it was only upon Hamilton’s official start at Ferrari that they could start working together. They’re already playing games of chess against each other, even during Tuesday’s F1 75 Live event at The O2 — Hamilton is 3-2 up, according to Leclerc. They’re showing signs of a good partnership.
“The first weeks of collaboration between the two is mega-good,” said Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur. “I’m not surprised at all. We are starting in very good shape now. The most important thing is to keep this relationship, to continue to work as a team, and to push as a team.”
Vasseur said Hamilton was the “perfect fit” for Ferrari right now, while Leclerc thought the Briton was joining at the ideal point as the team’s mentality is now stronger than ever, in part thanks to Vasseur’s leadership. No longer in a rebuild, the championship is a realistic goal for Ferrari.
“The fact Lewis has joined the team has been a big boost and has been amazing in so many ways,” Leclerc said. “But I feel like the team is very, very calm and very calm and very clear in what is the direction to work in and not getting too affected by everything that is going on around the team. That is extremely important and great to see.”
What matters most is how Hamilton performs when the new F1 season begins and how Ferrari compares to the competition.
Hamilton was adamant Ferrari had all the ingredients to win the world championship for the first time since 2008. The team only fell 14 points shy of the constructors’ crown last year, losing to McLaren. An incredibly fine margin — but a decisive one. Entering a season where Vasseur expects four teams to be in contention for race wins, every last thousandth of a second will matter.
“It’s not a matter of changing the car completely or whatever,” said Vasseur. “If we are able to bring a small bit of performance on one or two topics, it’s already a huge step forward. And Lewis is coming with his own experience, with his own background. He will help the team to develop in every single area.”
Ferrari opted for one major design change with its 2025 car: switching from a push-rod suspension to a pull-rod design, believing it would clean up the airflow around the car and allow for greater aerodynamic development after it had exhausted all areas with last year’s model. Although the SF-25 is an evolution of last year’s model and the overall car concept remains the same, reducing the learning curve the team will go through, every single part is new.
Even if Hamilton has confidence in Ferrari’s title-winning ability, he noted just how fierce the competition is set to be this year. “It’s far too early to know what the year is going to be like,” Hamilton said. “What we do know is that it’s going to be very close between the top teams. We’ve not seen the other cars; we’ve not been on the track with the other cars.”
Lewis Hamilton greets fans at the end of the day’s running at Fiorano Circuit on February 19, 2025. (Emmanuele Ciancaglini/Getty Images)
An eighth drivers’ title is the goal, but Hamilton’s appreciation for Ferrari runs deep and he knows how significant ending the team’s title drought will be — if anything, more significant given how invested everyone at Maranello (and across Italy) is to make it happen. “That’s what I’m working towards,” he said. “I don’t think about the number eight. I’m thinking about the first championship that the team has won for some time.”
Hamilton knows how much hard work still lies ahead to get ready for the new season, but the spark he has rediscovered with this move to Ferrari is obvious from every single interaction. It has given him a fresh lease of life in many ways. At 40, there is no sign he is thinking about how his F1 career may end. He feels young and remains in peak physical condition. And this new project is only spurring him on.
“The energy that I’m receiving from the team, there’s magic here,” Hamilton said. “It’s going to still take a lot of hard work and grafting from absolutely everyone and everyone is putting that in already to achieve it.
“But it’s also about belief. Everyone here dreams of winning with Ferrari, every single person in this team.”
After a difficult few years, that belief is coming back to Lewis Hamilton. The coming weeks will reveal just how genuine his title chances are in his first year in red. But for now, things feel good.
“I know I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be,” Hamilton said. “It feels natural, it feels right.”
(Top photo of Lewis Hamilton: Sam Bloxham/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.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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