Lewis Hamilton is now learning why Fernando Alonso didn’t think Ferrari could win a world championship

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Fernando Alonso left Ferrari just over 10 years ago because he didn’t feel the team was in a position to win. At first, it seemed Alonso had made a mistake.

While he toiled at the back of the grid with the doomed McLaren-Honda project in 2015, Sebastian Vettel won on just his second start for Ferrari and would collect two further victories. A couple of years later, he challenged the mighty combination of Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes for the title.

But Vettel’s title bids, which fell away from the decisive period of the season, are the closest Ferrari have come to proving Alonso wrong. While Helmut Marko thinks Charles Leclerc could have won in 2022, operational errors and unreliability helped Max Verstappen pull away.

Now Hamilton, the sport’s most successful driver has arrived and is trying to lay out a championship blueprint. But Ted Kravitz says Ferrari may not be listening.

Ted Kravitz says Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari problems aren’t new

In a seismic interview this week, Ferrari chairman John Elkann told his drivers to ‘talk less’ outside the car.

It was then reported that Hamilton’s feedback documents had sparked ‘resentment’ in some quarters of the team. The 40-year-old publicly revealed that he’d been reviewing Ferrari’s failings.

Kravitz fears that a series of great drivers have identified the same fundamental problems, but met firm resistance. That’s why, as Alonso feared, they’re not functioning as well as their rivals.

“If Lewis is writing all these documents, a kind of winning blueprint, as to what it takes to be a top-line team, then how many times do Ferrari need to hear this, and why are they not listening to it?” he asked on the F1 Show.

“When you go back to Fernando Alonso, who left Ferrari because he said that he didn’t see a team that could win consistently. That was 2014. Fernando left because he said, ‘I’ve seen what it takes to be a Red Bull or a Mercedes, and that’s not what I see at Ferrari at the moment’.

“Sebastian came in, wasn’t able to turn it around, enjoyed his time as a Ferrari driver, won some races. Charles Leclerc won some races. It’s not a new problem – it goes back to Fernando Alonso.”

Fred Vasseur not expected to survive if Lewis Hamilton loses Ferrari seat

Hamilton stood by Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur earlier this season when his future was called into question by the media. Vasseur, who had worked with the Briton in the junior categories, was instrumental in signing him from Mercedes.

According to The Daily Mail, the fates of Hamilton and Vasseur are ‘inextricably entwined’. It’s ‘hard’ to imagine that the Frenchman could survive if his star signing was dropped.

While they may not leave at the same time, Vasseur could follow Hamilton out ‘within weeks or months’, even though he’s only recently signed a new contract.

Hamilton’s Ferrari deal runs until the end of 2027, and while there’s clearly a sense of disappointment from both parties at the moment, he’s currently expected to see that term out before moving on.