The painful decision that Hamilton’s Ferrari F1 move has helped Mercedes avoid

OPINION: A week on from Lewis Hamilton’s shock announcement that he will switch to Ferrari from 2025, Mercedes will be assessing its next step in the Formula 1 driver market. How this scenario has played out has created an opportunity for the team but more importantly, prevented a potential meltdown

Published Feb 8, 2024, 9:41 AM

As Formula 1 bombshells go, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff definitely has some first-hand experience of being front and centre of them.

Back at the end of 2016, he had just landed at Frankfurt airport after a promotional trip to Kuala Lumpur to celebrate Nico Rosberg’s maiden world title when he received an unexpected phone call from the German. In that conversation, Rosberg, who had flown with Wolff all the way to Germany, informed him that he would be retiring with immediate effect.

Author Jonathan Noble

Jonathan Noble is Motorsport.com’s Formula 1 editor. Having graduated from University of Sussex Jonathan worked for sports news agency Collings Sports reporting on F1, F3, touring cars and other sports, with articles appearing in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Reuters, Autosport and other publications. In 1999 he moved to Haymarket Publishing to become a senior editor at Autosport Special Projects, and one year later he became Autosport’s grand prix editor. In 2015 he moved to Motorsport Network, becoming the F1 editor for Motorsport.com. He is also a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers, and sits on the FIA Media Council.

Jonathan has won multiple awards for journalism - in 1991 he was the winner of the Guild of Motoring Writers’ Sir William Lyons’ Award for young journalists, in 2010 he was awarded the Outstanding Individual accolade for consumer journalism in the Haymarket wards, in 2011 he won Haymarket’s Scoop of the Year, and in 2018 he was awarded a prestigious Medaglia d’Oro at the Lorenzo Bandini Awards for his contribution to F1 journalism.