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)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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