As the 2025 Formula 1 season rolls into Italy for the seventh race in this year's world championship, held a short drive away from Ferrari's legendary headquarters in Maranello, so close that the circuit, Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari, feels as if it sits in the shadow of the Prancing Horse, it is time to ask a very difficult and almost unimaginable question: Will Lewis Hamilton ever win again?
The most successful driver in F1's 75-year history owns 105 grand prix victories, the only racer to hit triple digits. Next month will mark the 18th anniversary of his first win, but the month after that will be the anniversary of his latest victory. To mere mortals, that doesn't seem like so long, but for the superheroes who hold steering wheels for a living, it feels like a drive into an abyss.
Unless, of course, Hamilton figures out how to successfully hairpin his SF-25 away from that edge and finishes atop the podium between now and then. The problem is that neither the greatest of all time nor his still-new team of Ferrari, the greatest F1 organization of all time, have given us any indication that they are capable of doing that.
Just ask the man himself. And we do every race weekend.
A few quotes around the past three race weekends from the seven-time world champion, who turned 40 in January:
"I've been nowhere all weekend."
"There wasn't one second [where I felt comfortable]."
"Clearly, the car is capable of being P3. Charles [Leclerc] did a great job today. So, I can't blame the car."
Lewis, are you hopeful? "Praying is more like it."
"We'll keep trying, we're only six races in, but we're struggling big-time. We're trying our hardest not to make big setup changes, but no matter what we do, it's so inconsistent every time we go out."
And the most telling bombshell?
"It's just about my performance. Poor performance. There's no reasons. I'm just not doing the job. I'm just not doing a good enough job on my side. So, I've just got to keep improving ... it's definitely not a good feeling."
It is also an unfamiliar feeling. Or at least it used to be.
As Hamilton rolls into Imola, it has been 291 days since his most recent victory, at Spa in July 2024. He inherited that win after then-Mercedes-teammate George Russell took the checkered flag first but was disqualified for being underweight. Hamilton did cross the line first at Silverstone three weeks earlier, though.
Before those results, he had suffered a 56-race winless streak, easily the longest of his career. Add that to his current 0-for-16 stretch and that's only two wins in his past 75 tries, and those came with his former team, which sits two places and 47 points above Ferrari in this year's constructors' championship.
This from a racer who, from 2007 through 2021, averaged nearly seven wins per year, posted double-digit wins six times and posted multiple victories in all but one of those 15 seasons.
That's how an athlete spirals, from one who used to effortlessly exude confidence and make winning look almost too easy, to a man visibly rattled by self-doubt. Being unmoored. Taking swings in the dark. Looking into the crystal ball and seeing nothing but cracks. They, too, are not good feelings.
But they, too, are familiar feelings for so many others. Those who have also faced auto racing's harshest truth: that one day, the winning just stops.
It stopped for Richard Petty, who won his 200th NASCAR Cup Series victory on July 4, 1984, and then ended his career in an interminable 0-for-241 drought. It stopped for A.J. Foyt, who won his 67th IndyCar race in 1981 and then failed to win again in a dozen more years of trying. It even stopped for Michael Schumacher, the pre-Hamilton F1 GOAT, who won seven times in what was supposed to be his final season of 2006, only to unretire four years later and end his legendary career on a skid of 0-for-58 with only one podium to show for three seasons of effort rebuilding then-very-lost Mercedes.
"I won at least a couple of races every year for 16 years, and then my last three seasons I won zero times," recalls Jimmie Johnson, seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion and someone who has gotten to know Hamilton at different events over the years. "Man, once that momentum shifts and starts working against you, it's hard to turn it around.
"It's tough in the moment to see what the issue is, or how to correct it, how to fix it. With the perspective of time, I can see it now. I had the same crew for most of my career, then had big changes at the end, and that's hard because now you have to start that learning clock again. That tests your patience. It tests your fire. That's where Lewis is right now."
That testing of the fire is very real. Like a bucket of cold water. Johnson recalls distinct phases of that test. He remembers being "so pissed off" at those who questioned his fire, but then ultimately realizing that they weren't wrong. Admission, followed by acceptance, that perhaps what is missing isn't just about the car or the learning curve of a new team.
"The moment I knew that I was done, I remember it like it was yesterday," confesses Rick Mears, who shocked the American open-wheel racing community when he retired at the end of the 1992 season, only one year removed from his record-tying fourth Indy 500 victory. "My entire career, when I woke up in the morning my first thought was, 'This is what we are going to try in practice today.' Then one day I got to the garage and asked the team, 'What are we doing today?' I knew right then that the fire had gone out."
Mears is one of the lucky ones, having recognized that flickering flame and walking away on his terms and while he was still seemingly in a winning frame of mind and driving for a team in race-winning shape. For most, that path is a long road into the desert that they fail to recognize until they have already gone too far.
"You feel the same way. You act the same way. You drive the same way. You ask the same question and have the same answers and lean on the same knowledge and experience that you always have, but you don't get the same results," explains three-time NASCAR champion Darrell Waltrip. He won 84 races, fifth most all time, but finished his Hall of Fame career going 0-for-243 and watched his self-owned team go bankrupt. "They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again with the same result, but what do they say when that's the same thing you did over and over again for 20-plus years and got the best possible result? Why wouldn't you keep doing it? Because one day, it has to come back around again, right? Well, maybe not."
In the defense of those who have tried, sometimes it does come back. See: the man considered by many to be the NASCAR GOAT.
It is often forgotten now, but Dale Earnhardt's legendary 1998 Daytona 500 victory was his lone win over a 100-race stretch from early 1996 through spring 1999. Then, with him having overcome health issues that he had largely left untreated and his team, Richard Childress Racing, having solved some growing pains, he won five times over the next two seasons and, after finishing second in the 2000 championship, was a title favorite heading into 2001 before his tragic death in that year's Daytona 500.
Lewis Hamilton thanks his supporters and shares his hopes of wanting to improve this season.
"That's the hope when you are stuck in a slump, that one day it will click again and maybe you have one more great moment left in you," says Helio Castroneves, who somehow resurrected an IndyCar career that had been tossed onto the scrap pile of Gasoline Alley to win his record-tying fourth Indy 500 in 2021, two decades after his first and a dozen years after his third. "We are talking about Hamilton and Formula 1, right? Well, this is the conversation that I had with Fernando Alonso when he was here (the 2017, 2019 and 2020 Indy 500s): 'Hey, old guys, why are you still doing this?'"
This fall marks the 20th anniversary of the first of Alonso's two world titles. His last F1 win came 12 years ago this week. Yet, there he still is, at the age of 43, still chasing it behind the wheel of his Aston Martin, a team that, in its current guise, has never won a grand prix. And why?
"Because we still believe we can," continues Castroneves, who this weekend will attempt to qualify for his 25th consecutive 500. He is again with Meyer Shank Racing, the underdog team with which he earned his stunning win in 2021. "And honestly, I can tell you firsthand, when you do it with a team that is smaller or is rebuilding, it's an even better feeling. Because you have proven that, 'Hey, I'm still pretty good at this.' And being the guy who put that team on the podium, the one that's fought so hard to get there, that makes the struggle worth it."
"I won many races, some famous and some infamous," said Damon Hill, the 1996 world champion and winner of 22 F1 events, at the Miami GP earlier this month. "When I won with Williams, all but one of them, it was amazing. Truly. But when I won that one race for Jordan, a team that had to scrap, there is a payoff there that is hard to describe. No one is ever going to call Ferrari a Jordan, but if you can turn a struggling team around, no matter who it is, as a racing driver there is certainly validation there. You helped show them the way."
Whether it will be worth it for Hamilton, we have yet to see, and might not see for a while. To many, "the way" is already about 2026. As summer arrives and Ferrari fades further into the rearview mirror, all focus will turn to F1's next-gen car, a lighter, more aerodynamically active would-be reset button slated to make its debut next season. Hamilton has already hinted at his excitement for its arrival.
But in the meantime, the grind. Those bad feelings. That self-doubt. As with all things in racing, just one win will be a balm to that pain, with an eye pointed toward much more in 2026 and beyond. That dream of becoming the Ferrari savior that has failed to become a reality for so many before Hamilton, a lengthy list of champions that includes Alonso, all having come to Maranello seeking to do what Schumacher did. Hoist a world championship trophy while dressed in red.
The last time anyone did that was Kimi Räikkönen in 2007, the same year a kid named Hamilton made his F1 debut and promptly won four races.
"Whenever Lewis decides to hang it up and he can look back, it'll be more telling. His gut or his heart will steer him to a conclusion that he probably can't see right now," says Johnson, who went on to add a little advice for his friend. "But for now, it takes time to meld with the team. Leclerc, he's been in these cars for a few years and knows that system. Then there's this next moment in time that, you know, if his heart stays in it, and he can spend that time there, with that new gen coming up for these guys around the corner, this whole thing's going to shake up. Hopefully, Ferrari is going to be ready for that."
If it isn't, then the answer to our original question is an easy one. No, he will not win again. That fire will be extinguished.
But if Ferrari is indeed ready for 2026, then it might just be one of the most remarkable stories ever seen in the history of motorsports. A unicorn of an occasion, when the winning had stopped but somehow, against one of the strongest natural laws of auto racing, started again.
In other words, Lewis Hamilton does what he has always done, one last time.