Ferrari signed Lewis Hamilton and missed out on the real prize - F1 insider

When Ferrari made the landmark decision to sign Lewis Hamilton in 2024, they missed out on a much bigger F1 prize.

That is the view of respected journalist Peter Windsor, who believes the Scuderia effectively picked the wrong horse by swooping for the seven-time world champion.

He claims that opting for a technical overhaul at Maranello - headed by the sport's foremost design genius Adrian Newey - could have returned the team to the front of the grid.

Newey was pondering his future post Red Bull at the time, but instead of moving to Italy he eventually stayed in England to join Aston Martin.

Now, after two years at Maranello, Hamilton and Ferrari are still seeking the secret sauce that will make them serial winners again, but they are doing so with a car which clearly cannot match the likes of Mercedes and Red Bull for raw speed.

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Choosing Hamilton over Newey a Ferrari mistake - Windsor

Speaking on a YouTube live stream, Windsor explained: "To me, as I've said many times, at the end of 2024, Ferrari had the option of doing all they could to get to the front and winning world championships - and that was either going to be completely revamping their engineering and have a proper car to go forward with. An Adrian Newey car let's say, because Adrian was definitely interesting in going there with his team of people.

"Or, getting Lewis Hamilton to solve the problems and keeping the same car and engineering and get Lewis in the car and let him win the world championship again. And they took the Lewis option, which i think was a mistake.

"Mistake not in the sense that Lewis isn't good - he's very good, but it's not what Ferrari needed. They needed a better car and they still need a better car. And Lewis isn't gonna be able to give them a better car, he can just drive a very good car extremely well and a pretty bad car pretty well."

As Ferrari begin to look ahead to 2027 they are still some way short of being the force expected when Hamilton landed in Italy. They are still plagued by the same old strategy flaws, and the internal tension between Hamilton and Leclerc refuses to go away.

Instead of having a brilliantly fast car and likely one brilliant driver in Leclerc spearheading a title challenge, they have two number one drivers battling for internal supremacy in a car which is still not best in class.

Windsor continued: "But why would he [Hamilton] need to drive it on the limit at this stage of his career? Everybody knows, you sign Lewis Hamilton and you give him a terrible car, he's not gonna stick his neck out that much. He's gonna do the lap, but he's not gonna do what some young gun's gonna do. Bit like George when they had the terrible Mercedes in 22 and 23."

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