Lewis Hamilton under pressure in ‘nightmare’ first Ferrari season, Oliver Bearman’s rookie campaign, maiden season, driver market, silly season, Ralf Schumacher

There’s no-one who doesn’t have an opinion on Lewis Hamilton.

Having spent most of the last decade winning races and titles, it’s impossible not to.

While nothing can take away from Hamilton’s phenomenal legacy of success or his status as the greatest of his generation — perhaps of all time — his potency in his 19th campaign has become the subject of intense debate.

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The seven-time champion’s star has waned since the 2022 regulation changes. At first his decline seemed pinned to Mercedes’s inability to grasp the new rules, but now that his switch to Ferrari hasn’t gone to plan, a harsh spotlight has its gaze trained on the 40-year-old F1 icon.

It coincides with the rise of Oliver Bearman.

Bearman, 20 years old, has been a member of Ferrari’s junior driver roster since 2022. He made his F1 debut for the Italian team last year, when Carlos Sainz was felled by appendicitis in Saudi Arabia, and impressed with seventh place after just one free practice session at one of the sport’s most difficult tracks.

A pair of erratic but fast outings with Haas later in the season sealed him into the seat with the American-owned team for this season.

After a dire crash-riddled start in Melbourne and an error-prone middle of the campaign, Bearman has come good late, scoring points in four of the last five grands prix, including a career-best fourth in Mexico City.

As a Ferrari-backed driver, his trajectory has him bound for Maranello eventually, assuming his form proves sustainable.

But the contrast between him and Hamilton is manna from heaven for Formula 1’s burgeoning hot-take industry.

Enter Ralf Schumacher.

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‘LOTS OF MISTAKES, SPEED OKAY’

Ralf Schumacher is a six-time Formula 1 race winner and brother of the seven-time title-winning legend Michael, most of whose stratospheric records for success were broken by Hamilton in the last 10 years.

Were it not for the questionable use of the safety car in Abu Dhabi in 2021, Hamilton likely would have pinched the championship record from the German icon too.

Ralf Schumacher is now a pundit for Germany’s Sky Sport, and on the broadcaster’s Backstage Boxengasse podcast, he declared the Hamilton era over, opining that Ferrari ought to axe its big-bucks star and replace him with the English novice.

“With Lewis Hamilton, I simply believe — you have to see it this way — that in addition to the fact that me makes many mistakes, his speed is okay but not better.

“And now I see this young Bearman doing amazing things with the Haas, and he costs a fraction of what Lewis Hamilton costs.

“We’re talking about more than €60 million ($106.6 million) a year.

“I don’t think that [Ferrari chairman John] Elkann can get that through anymore. That was his decision.

“I wouldn’t know if he isn’t like that and says, ‘Okay, it’s been a year now, Lewis Hamilton has kind of stagnated. He’s come a little closer, but the money … we’d rather bring in a Bearman. We have a young driver who is pushing the brand; we can build something with this rule change for the future.’

“With such a high-ranking appointment, I expect more.”

Schumacher said it was important for Ferrari to look towards the future, with Bearman representing its next generation.

“One thing must not be forgotten: Lewis not only has the number four at the start of his [race] number [44] but also his age [40].

“If I were a manager now, I would also say, ‘Well, that’s not working, so I’d rather move on and develop a young, talented man like Bearman.’”

It was a searing assessment of a driver who arrived at Ferrari with considerable fanfare but who has so far failed to live up to the hype.

HOW’S HAMILTON REALLY DOING?

Hamilton’s own assessment of the season so far is grim.

“It’s a nightmare,” he told Sky Sports UK. “I’ve been living it for a while.

“The flip between the dream of driving for this amazing team and then the nightmare of the results that we’ve had, the ups and downs — it’s challenging.

“At this point I’ve just got to believe that there’s something to come out from all this hardship we’ve been going through.

“I’m sure that we’re destined for something positive in future. Maybe we’re getting all our bad luck out of the way this year. We won’t give up, we’ll be pushing.”

Hamilton and Ferrari had endured a particularly painful weekend in Brazil, where the team suffered its third scoreless grand prix of the year.

He was knocked out of sprint qualifying and grand prix qualifying outside the top 10, and though a sizzling first lap in the short race got him into the points, his Sunday feature race was a disaster.

He picked up damage in a collision with Carlos Sainz and then rear-ended Franco Colapinto in a punishable incident. His car was so damaged after these melees that he retired from the race.

It was one of those weekends Hamilton started a step behind teammate Charles Leclerc and never caught up. Leclerc was ahead of him in every consequential session and was battling for a spot on the podium — albeit in the first handful of laps — when he was eliminated from the race as an innocent bystander in the incident between Oscar Piastri and Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

But Hamilton’s underwhelming performance — notwithstanding this was a particularly poor track for Ferrari — is the exception rather than the norm of an improved second half of the season.

Comparing their fastest grand prix qualifying times shows a small improvement for Hamilton since the mid-season break, down from an average of 0.169 seconds adrift to just 0.107 seconds slower than Leclerc.

It’s of course not what Hamilton expected, but up against arguably the best qualifier on the grid and in the context of his difficulties adjusting to the car, it’s respectable.

His scoring rate has improved too.

Though he’s down 63-39 since the mid-season break, the bulk of his deficit came from his luckless Mexico City Grand Prix performance, where he’d qualified third but was one of few drivers to actually use the circuit on the first lap, which perversely cost him places, including to his teammate.

Ironically he was then penalised for attempting to recover ground when others weren’t, leaving him a frustrated eighth while Leclerc finished second, costing the Briton 14 points relative to the sister car.

Again, the picture isn’t where Hamilton — or anyone — expected it to be by this stage of the season, but given the team’s sporadic competitiveness and his Ferrari experience deficit to Leclerc, it’s not quite the disaster it’s been made out to be.

Ferrari’s struggles this year must also be considered. The team has been far more disappointing than Hamilton has been, and the Briton shouldn’t shoulder the blame for that.

WHAT ABOUT BEARMAN?

Good but not great shouldn’t be Ferrari territory, however — even though you could label the team with the same description for most of the last 20 years.

With Formula 1 having pivoted towards youth this year and with Ferrari’s homegrown Bearman among the strongest performers in the crop, there’s a forceful argument to be made to pick the young gun.

Certainly Bearman has improved considerably this year, and his recent results have been especially impressive.

His meritorious fourth in Mexico was hard-fought, him having had to defend against Max Verstappen in the first stint, both Mercedes drivers in the second stint and Oscar Piastri in the third.

Verstappen got past on strategy, but Bearman successful held all the others at bay in a breakthrough performance.

He was strong again in Brazil, finishing at the head of the midfield in sixth.

His fourth successive scoring finish, he’s seized the ascendancy at Haas from Esteban Ocon since the mid-season break, leaping ahead of the more experienced Frenchman on the title table in Mexico.

He’s now ahead of Ocon on every important performance metric, which is notable considering how shaky he was early in the year — he hasn’t just levelled the scores, he’s pulled forward enough to tip the averages in his favour.

Oliver Bearman’s vital statistics

Qualifying result: 14 average

Qualifying head to head: Bearman leads 12-8

Qualifying differential: Bearman ahead 1.5 places

Time differential: Bearman faster by 0.13 seconds

Race result: 10.7 average

Race head to head: Bearman leads 11-7

Race differential: Bearman ahead 1.9 places

Points: Bearman leads 40-30 (57-43 per cent)

It’s exactly what you’d expect to see from a driver Ferrari has pegged as a future star.

SO IS BEARMAN A DONE DEAL?

Not quite.

Proponents will argue that Leclerc, around whom Ferrari has built its team for seven years now, was promoted to the Scuderia after just one season at Sauber, where he also comfortably outperformed his more experienced teammate, Marcus Ericsson, in his rookie year.

The precedent is there for Bearman.

But there are some major differences between their respective rookie seasons.

While Leclerc also took some time to build into the year, he arrived much more quickly and much more cleanly than Bearman, whose maiden season has been pockmarked by incidents and inconsistency.

The crashes are one thing — Melbourne, for example, can be put down to the immense pressure he was putting himself under on his first weekend — but some of the other driving mistakes are another.

He has two red flag infringements this year, which have rightly piled penalty points onto his licence.

One of them was for a crash in pit lane in Silverstone — absolutely unnecessary, and the attached 10-place grid penalty totally undid what ended up being only the second top-10 qualifying appearance of his year.

Red flag infringements of this nature cannot be written off as rookie errors.

And even after that tremendous weekend in Mexico, he was pinged for erratic driving while battling Liam Lawson down the straight in the Sao Paulo sprint, earning him a post-race time penalty and another penalty point.

He’s now only three penalty points away from a race ban. All his penalty points were accumulated this season; he won’t get any back until next May.

None of this should write him off as a future star, and he’s clearly already ironing out some of his deficiencies, but Ferrari has the luxury of allowing him to do that away from the spotlight at a smaller team. There’s no need to rush his progress.

It’s also not the right time to dispense with Hamilton.

Him joining the team was always aimed at success from 2026 onwards under the new rules. The Briton clearly doesn’t gel with this generation of car, but with his input on board, Ferrari’s 2026 challenger can be closer to what he needs to get the best from himself.

He also brings value off the track, where he decade of experience with Mercedes at the peak of its powers can bring Ferrari the final percentage points of performance it needs to finally close the gap at the top of the championship standings — assuming it takes any of his advice on board.

His contract reflects all of this, with paddock speculation suggesting it’s a three-year deal, taking him to the end of 2027.

Hamilton himself described it as “a pretty long contract” in Brazil.

There’s still more to the Hamilton story at Ferrari, and Bearman has more to prove before he earns elevation to the senior team.

But there’s no doubt their trajectories are destined to cross. It’s just a matter of the circumstances in which they do so.