When Lewis Hamilton dropped his Ferrari bombshell at the start of 2024, it wasn’t just his fans who needed time to process the decision.
In fact, the seven-time champion had to take a moment for himself before telling his colleagues in the most bizarre of surroundings – a paintball venue.
The Mercedes driver sent shockwaves across the sporting world on February 1 when he announced that he would be leaving the Silver Arrows family he’d been with since childhood.
Before that, though, he had to fill his team in first, with Matt Whyman, author of Inside Mercedes F1, revealing how he broke the news.
Hamilton famously told team principal and CEO Toto Wolff over their usual pre-season coffee, but there was nothing usual about how the rest of the team were informed.
Whyman told talkSPORT Driving: “It’s a very human story, really. He felt that the right thing to do was to go and see Toto face to face.
“When he left McLaren he said that he didn’t do that. He was in Thailand, I think, and did it by phone or by email or whatever, and felt that that was, in retrospect, wasn’t the right thing to do. So he knew that it had to be face-to-face.
“When he was telling me this story, I could just see, I think anyone could, could empathise with just how difficult that’s going to be. And just in retelling the story in the book, it’s clear that he really had to dig deep to go around and break the news.
“That was really just the start of the process, because he had already arranged to take his team on a kind of preseason paintballing session, just a chance to kind of blow off steam and have a laugh before the business of racing began, and that happened to have been scheduled for immediately after he’d broken the news to Toto.
“He had to get in the car and go off to the paintballing session. And when he arrived, his race team were already there, and they were just, you know, gathered outside the entrance, larking around.
“He said that he pulled up in his car knowing what he was going to have to do. He said he couldn’t. He couldn’t get out of the car for 20 minutes. He just sat there so sort of frozen with, how am I going to tell these people?
“So I think that it was genuinely difficult for him to put an end to that relationship, which in his own words, is perfectly fine. I think there’s a line that you know, they’re still in love.
“It’s just that he’s got to go off and do this thing. So he told everyone, and he broke the news.”
Whyman explained that despite the shock, there was plenty of understanding considering the prestige of where Hamilton was heading.
He said: “Having talked to those engineers who were on that paintballing trip, everyone understands it, everyone gets it, and that in his shoes, he probably wouldn’t be the only one who would have made that decision.
“He knew that, he told me that it was something that he thought about over the winter, it was a decision that he reached on his own, rather than kind of consulting widely on it.
“It all boiled down to the simple thing, that he didn’t want to retire and look back on his career having done all these incredible things, and say to himself, ‘but I never raced for Ferrari‘, the childhood dream, and that, quite simply, was what it boiled down to, that that was it.
“So I understood his decision, but then you’ve got the consequences of that decision, which is to tell people that that clearly mean a great deal to him.”
Despite breaking the internet with his announcement earlier this year, Hamilton won’t be joining Ferrari until the close of the current campaign in December.
His switch has shuffled the F1 grid dramatically, forcing Carlos Sainz to find a new home much further down the pecking order at Williams.
Meanwhile, Mercedes themselves were left in a bind, and solved it by naming junior driver Kimi Andrea Antonelli as Hamilton’s replacement to partner George Russell.
Hamilton used a break clause in his Mercedes contract to opt out of his final year and sign a multi-season contract with the Italian squad.
However, it’s been widely reported that he sacrificed his salary for contract length as he’s actually taken a pay cut to swap teams.
That financial hit could well be repaid in sporting success, with Ferrari looking like a far better bet for Hamilton to win his record-breaking eighth world title.
Hamilton went winless for two seasons in 2022 and 2023, and despite victory in a pair of races this campaign, his W15 car has been wildly inconsistent and he’s even called it ‘the worst car I’ve ever driven’.
Ferrari, meanwhile, are well ahead in the Constructors’ Championship and seeking their first title since 2008, a promising sign considering Red Bull seem to only be going backwards.
