Stephen Lord, Mercedes’ race team coordinator, has shared that he once anticipated Lewis Hamilton might return to McLaren after his tenure with Mercedes.
However, he revealed that a switch to Ferrari had been in Hamilton’s thoughts “all along,” with the topic having come up in a conversation with the seven-time world champion some years ago.
Hamilton recently confirmed he would join Ferrari on a multi-year contract starting in the 2025 F1 season, marking the end of his successful partnership with Mercedes. Over the years, he won six of his seven World Championships with Mercedes, along with becoming the first driver to surpass 100 Grand Prix victories and pole positions.
The only previous team change in Hamilton’s career occurred in 2013 when he made a surprising move from McLaren to Mercedes. He won his first F1 title with McLaren in 2008, but after several years of underachievement with the team, he opted to switch to Mercedes, which had seen little success since it took over the Brawn GP team in 2009.
On F1’s Beyond The Grid podcast, Lord was asked about his reaction to Hamilton’s Ferrari move, to which he responded, “Not at all. Because I think that’s been his plan all along. A few years ago, it came up in conversation. I actually always thought he might be tempted back to McLaren, but I was completely wrong. We had a conversation years ago and he always said that he felt most drivers had a desire to, at least at some point in their career, drive the Ferrari. So I wasn’t surprised at all. They’re the oldest, most recognisable team in the pit lane, the history and the esteem that that marque is held in, I think it’s inevitable that people would want to go there.”
Earlier this year, Hamilton shared on the Performance People podcast that when he left McLaren for Mercedes, he was told his “career’s over.” Reflecting on that decision, Hamilton said, “It will probably have been when I decided to join Mercedes. I was in Thailand at the time, in between races after Singapore, and that’s when I made the decision. And I was like: ‘I want to take the leap of faith and I’m going to go with it, regardless of what people say.’ Pretty much everyone told me to stay, but I went with my gut and my intuition and it was the best thing for me.”
He explained the situation at the time, saying, “I was with a championship-winning team. I was with McLaren, which had such a great history. Obviously, Mercedes used to own half of McLaren, and so it was partly their team, but then they broke away and bought their own team and as they were trying to ramp up, they weren’t having a lot of success. I think they were the fifth or sixth-best team at the time, so they were often finishing out of the top 10, struggling to get into the top 10. As a World Champion, people were like: ‘This is the worst decision you can make, this not a great team and your career is over.’ All the pundits, all the media outlets, all the fans, everyone was like: ‘Career’s over.’ And then it went well and everyone’s like: ‘Oh, it’s the best decision ever made.’”
