Lewis Hamilton will certainly face a quick test in front of the Tifosi when he lines up in Ferrari colours for the 2025 Formula 1 season.

Hamilton joins the team from Mercedes for the upcoming F1 campaign following 12 largely successful years at Mercedes, where he picked up six of his seven drivers’ world championships.

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When is Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari debut?
Hamilton’s shock move to Ferrari, where he will officially make his race debut at the Australian Grand Prix on March 16, was announced nearly a year ago and he will go into the new year with a realistic hope that he can finally challenge for a record eighth world championship.

That would eclipse the record he jointly holds with F1 and Ferrari legend Michael Schumacher having had to sit back and watch Red Bull star Max Verstappen dominate the F1 landscape for the previous four years.

Hamilton, though, will turn 40 years old by the time the season starts, with his birthday in early January, and it is clear time is not on his side to reach such lofty ambitions.

His F1 form in general has been questioned, having been beaten by George Russell at Mercedes in two of their three seasons together including the most recent campaign. It will be one of the biggest unknowns of 2025, especially given that on his day the British star can still show world-class form, as evidenced at the last race of 2024 when he came from near the back of the grid to pass Russell on the final lap of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to claim fourth place and remind everyone that he does still indeed ‘have it’.

But this was in a familiar comfortable Mercedes environment, an almost family like set-up that had grown an element of sustained trust over 12 seasons. Ferrari of course are not going to give him a cold shoulder when he marches into Maranello, but there will be differences to how the team work, function and even gel as a culture that may be unfamiliar to Hamilton, and hamper the elimination of early teething issues.

Hamilton faces similar Michael Schumacher Ferrari test
Unlike many of his predecessors, he also has to face the Italian crowd very early on in his Ferrari career. With respect to Carlos Sainz in 2021, and the likes of Felipe Massa, Rubens Barrichello and Eddie Irvine, he will be the first star driver to drive in an Italian-based grand prix just a matter of weeks after his Ferrari race debut since Schumacher in 1996.

While the circumstances are not quite the same, the venue is and there is a similar level of expectation in the air.

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When will Hamilton race in Italy?
The Emilia Romagna Grand Prix is due to be held at Imola on May 18, a mere two months after the start of the season for the sixth round… just as Imola hosted the San Marino Grand Prix on May 5 for the fifth round of the 1996 campaign when Schumacher made his mark.

Back then Schumacher had just joined the team following double world championship success with Benetton and, while the team were only slowly recovering from an early 1990s slump and championships were not yet an expectation, race wins were certainly a target.

It didn’t quite happen for Schumacher that weekend, but he did take his first Ferrari pole and still finished second behind Damon Hill’s dominant Williams FW18 with a damaged car to further strengthen what would become an immortal relationship with the Ferrari fans in Italy.

For Hamilton, the expectation could be a similar one. Championships, at least drivers’ ones, have not been realistic aims over the last few years, but there are good signs of progress at the team and there is no reason why he can’t arrive at Imola with hopes of a pole or even a race win following their second-place standing in the 2024 constructors’ championship.

What are Hamilton’s biggest Ferrari tests?
Unlike Schumacher, he does have a very strong team-mate to compete with and Charles Leclerc already has good standing at Ferrari – especially after taking stunning home wins in 2019 and 2024.

But when a weekend can be considered a long time in F1 – who knows what shape Ferrari will be in once Hamilton is given his major test in red on Italian soil. Hamilton might already be a multi-race winner with the team by then, in which case poles and wins expectations will be sky high, or the team could be in a 2020-esque slump where a podium finish could be treated as a cause for celebration.

Either way, Hamilton faces huge challenges from multiple angles early in his Ferrari career not seen in nearly three decades and perhaps more. With a competitive team-mate, uncertain machinery for a battle at the front and a Tifsoi test just weeks after his F1 race debut with the team at the ripe age of 40 – Hamilton has little time to lose in terms of settling into what he hopes could be a glittering final chapter to his F1 career.

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