Here’s Your First Look At Lewis Hamilton Ripping Fast Laps In His New Ferrari

Formula 1 pre-season testing is live in Bahrain on Wednesday for the first of three days of hard charging as teams and drivers try to figure out their cars ahead of the 2025 season. The world has known about seven-time F1 champ Lewis Hamilton moving to the Ferrari squad from Mercedes-Benz for over a year now, but it still hasn’t really set in that he’ll be wearing Rosso Corsa overalls this season. Seeing Lewis driving a red car is still somewhat of a shock to the system. I’m sure getting into the Ferrari after so many years in silver has also been something of a shock for Hamilton. The Ferrari SF-25 is a significantly different driving experience to what Mercedes built, as the team developed a new car with a longer wheelbase and the driver sat much further back in the chassis than the Mercedes. Lewis complained in the past about sitting too close to the front wheels in the Mercedes before, so hopefully he’ll be more comfortable and even quicker in his new spot amongst the Tifosi. 

Formula 1, despite all of the series’ efforts to reach new audiences, still doesn’t allow its YouTube videos to be embedded, so you’ll have to click through to YouTube to catch the video of Hamilton’s time on track. It’s worth the click. 

During the morning testing session Lewis was able to set some quick laps in his new car. This is admittedly just the first session of the first day of pre-season testing, so there’s not much data here for fans to glean any information from, but it’s nice to be able to climb onboard with Hamilton for his first hard run in the new Fezza. There’s no telling what each team was testing, and whether drivers were on long-burn race-length tests, or qualifying-style low-fuel soft-tire runs to set quick times. In any case, Hamilton’s fastest lap in Bahrain this morning was about 4 tenths of a second off the fastest lap of the session, a 1:31.428 coincidentally set by Hamilton’s replacement at Mercedes, Kimi Antonelli. I wouldn’t bank on anything in this session actually meaning anything, because Liam Lawson set the second-fastest lap for Red Bull followed closely by Alex Albon in the Williams and Yuki Tsunoda in the Racing Bulls.