Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur explained that he plans to build a different environment for Lewis Hamilton than Mercedes did.

Lewis Hamilton has already said his final goodbye to Mercedes’s sponsors and colleagues in all factories. It is now time to move on, and in 2025, the seven-time world champion will officially become a Ferrari driver.

The team principal of the team from Maranello, Fred Vasseur, didn’t like to talk about the Lewis Hamilton situation throughout the season as he focused on the Constructors’ Championship and finishing on a high with Carlos Sainz, who now heads to Williams.

However, as the 2024 season has come to an end, Vasseur held a conference with the media in Maranello where he talked in depth about his plans with Lewis Hamilton:

“I’m not sure that we have to do a copy-paste of what he did with Mercedes. The environment worked very well at the beginning, a bit less at the end.”
“We have to find the best way to manage Lewis. I know him pretty well, but I don’t want to do at all a copy-paste of what he did in the past.”
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Vasseur’s statement that he wants to avoid copying Hamilton’s partnership with Mercedes makes sense. Still, it is important to mention that Mercedes-Hamilton is the most successful team-driver pairing in F1 history.

On the other hand, Hamilton, for whatever reason, couldn’t perform as well and as consistently towards the end of his last season with the German team. Vasseur would like to avoid such a scenario. As quoted by BBC, he said:

“I am really convinced, and I don’t want to blame Lewis or Mercedes, that this situation is not easy to manage and I can understand if it is not going well you can suffer in this relationship.”
“He [Hamilton] was not very well in his mind, and he was clear about this in Brazil, but he also did very well on the last couple of events, and I am not worried at all.”
Vasseur emphasized that he’s not worried about the seven-time world champion’s form as this was one of the most frequent questions that he received towards the end of the season.