Lewis Hamilton. When a champion knows how to win again

"If you can think it, you can do it" was the phrase Enzo Ferrari used to confront the most difficult challenges. It seemed hardly possible, then, that the driver with the greatest number of World Championships and victories to his name — having set his mind on ending his Formula 1 career at Maranello — would fail to make of that chapter a new success. Having witnessed the determination and quality of driving displayed at the Gran Premio de Catalunya, in Barcelona, we can say with certainty that Enzo Ferrari was right. Anyone who finds this reading of the red number 44 too romantic need only cast their mind back to the photograph Lewis had taken on his first day at Maranello, on 22 January 2025: he chose to be photographed in front of the building at the Fiorano circuit where Enzo Ferrari spent the final years of his life, dressed formally, as Ferrari himself would have been.
Lewis Hamilton, on 22 January 2025, his first day at Maranello, posed in front of the Casa di Enzo Ferrari at Fiorano alongside the Ferrari F40, in a shot that symbolically marked the beginning of his adventure in red.
This victory — his 106th in a World Championship Grand Prix — carries far more weight than the first, in Canada, in 2007. When you are young and feel destined to win, that first victory matters because it tells you there will be more to come. Beautiful, but a point of departure. When, at 41, after a year and a half with a new team and nothing to show for it — the Sprint Race in China in 2025 could hardly be counted — you return to dominate and defeat the strongest and most respected drivers on one of the most demanding circuits on the calendar, you live through something that cannot be repaid. Certainly Lewis, from this moment on, after so much suffering in red, will feel something of a new beginning: I've won one, I'll win more. For motorsport, and for those who love it, that can only be a good thing.
Sunday 14 June 2025 brought Lewis Hamilton his 106th victory, and his first with Ferrari.