Lewis Hamilton will join Ferrari in 2025 with one goal in mind- to win the World Championship. Charles Leclerc, who has been with Ferrari since 2019 and will be Hamilton’s teammate, has had the same goal. Hence, it could lead to a potential conflict of interest within the outfit that Team Principal Fred Vasseur will have to deal with. The Frenchman, however, calmly asserts that treating both drivers equally won’t be a hassle.
Vasseur insists that with both drivers given similar priority will work to Ferrari’s advantage. “We are getting probably more points with two drivers than with one and a half,” he says as reported by Motorsport.
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Drawing inspiration from Leclerc’s current intra-team battle with Carlos Sainz, Vasseur also states that it will push his drivers more. “I am really convinced that I prefer having two strong ones than not.”
Hamilton is a seven-time World Champion with a proven winning pedigree. So, keeping his Title ambitions sidelined won’t be possible for Vasseur. At the same time, Ferrari has invested a lot of time and money into molding Leclerc into a Championship-caliber driver, something he is expected to achieve with a quicker car.
Vasseur seems to have a plan set in motion to deal with this dilemma. However, Ferrari as a whole will look to avoid mistakes of the past on this front.
Ferrari will be hoping to avoid a repeat of Charles Leclerc vs Carlos Sainz
Leclerc and Sainz never developed any animosity on or off the track. But former Team Principal Mattia Binotto’s idea of prioritizing both didn’t sit well with Ferrari’s strategy. Leclerc lost out on several points and even winning opportunities because of the same, as Ferrari’s strategists would make blunders to optimize both his and Sainz’s races.
For example, Leclerc lost out on a Monaco GP win in 2022 due to the same reason as Ferrari’s mistakes helped Sainz up to P3, but demoted Leclerc from P1 to P4. However, the Italian stable’s season as a whole was riddled with mistakes as Binotto failed to cope.
Since Binotto’s departure, Vasseur has done fairly well in steadying the ship as the team hasn’t shown any slip-ups on the strategy front. But if they want to have Hamilton and Leclerc on the same level from 2025 onwards, the team has to be on its toes and learn from past mistakes.
