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Ferrari driver Lewis Hamilton celebrates his 41st birthday on Wednesday. No driver 41 or older has won the world championship since Juan Manuel Fangio way back in 1957.
One also has to go back to 1994, when Nigel Mansell won his final Grand Prix in Australia, for the last time a quadragenarian even won a Grand Prix.
But Hamilton clearly still believes that he can win another world title, otherwise he would surely have called time on his historic career already.
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Indeed, Hamilton furiously hit back at Toto Wolff when the Mercedes team principal suggested that every athlete has a ‘shelf life’. He said there had never been another driver like him.
However, Hamilton’s first season at Ferrari, in which he failed to score a single podium, has raised serious doubts about whether he is still at the level to compete for the championship.
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Matt Bishop worked with Hamilton when he was chief communications officer at McLaren and is now a columnist for Motor Sport Magazine.
Bishop is ‘troubled’ by the possibility that Hamilton’s career might ‘peter out unimpressively’ in a repeat of Michael Schumacher’s F1 comeback with Mercedes.
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Hamilton’s fellow seven-time world champion returned to the sport in 2010, having initially retired in 2006. He added another podium to his record and set the fastest lap in 2012 Monaco qualifying (before a gearbox penalty was applied), but was largely outperformed by younger compatriot Nico Rosberg.
Now there are ‘many in F1’ who ‘quietly’ fear that Hamilton is ‘facing a similar fate’, particularly because Ferrari are still a ‘few seasons away’ from reaching a contending level.
Hamilton’s Ferrari contract reportedly runs until the end of 2027, though there may be exit routes at the end of this year.
How does Lewis Hamilton’s first Ferrari season compare to Michael Schumacher’s 2010 Mercedes campaign?
Like Ferrari in 2025, Mercedes were F1’s fourth-fastest team in 2010, though the gap to the top three was larger in their case.
Schumacher and Hamilton both scored multiple fourth-place finishes without cracking the top three. The Briton did score more than double the points, though (156 vs 72).
Hamilton competed in five more races, as well as six Sprint weekends, which partly explains the deficit. He also bettered Schumacher’s average finishing position (7.4 vs 8.9), but the margin is uncomfortably small.
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