Lewis Hamilton, aged 41, still dreams of winning the F1 title with Ferrari.

Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari looked a long way off title contention in 2025 (Image: Getty)

Now aged 41 and under no illusions about the extreme difficulty of his task at Ferrari, Lewis Hamilton finds history against him. Only two men have ever been crowned Formula 1 world champion beyond their 41st birthday, and both Juan Manuel Fangio and Giuseppe Farina did it in the 1950s.

Today’s F1 is a whole different animal. Hamilton endured a rotten debut season at Ferrari despite all the fanfare around his arrival, and is a matter of weeks away from learning how the rest of his time in red is likely to go.

Pre-season testing starts early this year to give teams time to put their new cars and engines through their paces. A behind-closed-doors test gets under way in Barcelona in the last week of January, before two more formal, televised blocks of testing in Bahrain in February.

Ferrari’s 2025 car was rubbish and didn’t win a Grand Prix in 2025, as F1’s most successful marque continued to look lost. Their last title came in 2008, while Kimi Raikkonen is their most recent drivers’ champion having pipped Hamilton, back then a rookie, and Fernando Alonso to the post a year earlier.

F1 and football don’t easily compare, but the parallels to Manchester United are eerily similar in many ways. Both are global powerhouses, the most recognisable brands in the world in their respective sports. But both are living on past glories, starved of any real success for more than a decade.

And both are suffering the mal effects of many years of mismanagement at the top, who have appointed a string of sub-par leaders who have failed to replicate the success of the icon that came before them.

Ruben Amorim was the 10th manager who failed to win the Premier League with Man Utd since Fergie (Image: Getty)

Ten managers have come and gone since Sir Alex Ferguson retired, yet the Scot remains the most recent manager to win the Premier League with United, back in 2013. Six drivers’ titles were won by Ferrari drivers under Jean Todt’s leadership – five for Michael Schumacher and Raikkonen’s success. Zero under five team principals since.

The biggest problem in both Manchester and Maranello has been a string of terrible decisions at boardroom level. Meddling executives have been undermining Ferrari for many years and it remains possibly the most chaotic organisation in F1.

United have wasted a horrifying amount of money on ridiculous transfers, on many occasions signing big names on huge wages to try to fix their problems. Ferrari have done the same with Hamilton, but will it end the same way? It’s still too early to tell, but the coming season will provide the answer.

Because if Ferrari fail to come out of the blocks quickly in F1’s new era, then it matters not who is behind the wheel. This new rules cycle will run for at least five years and Hamilton does not have that kind of time. He’s believed to have unilateral control over whether he remains at Ferrari in 2027, though there’s every chance the Brit won’t want to if they still can’t get their act together.