The Old Man and the SF-26: Hamilton through Hemingway
Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton has won the drivers’ championship seven times throughout his career in the sport so far. He shares the record with only one man in the known universe, the legendary Michael Schumacher.
Except for his maiden championship with McLaren in 2008, Hamilton won all six of his remaining titles with Mercedes between 2014 and 2020. He missed out only in 2016, when his teammate Nico Rosberg won the championship instead. Mercedes continued its run of constructors’ championship titles from 2015 to 2021.
However, something changed dramatically in the 2020-21 season, which is still one of the finest F1 seasons I’ve experienced.
Hamilton was challenged by Max Verstappen in an epic battle that lasted throughout the season. Ultimately, that championship was decided in the final race of the season on the final lap, making Verstappen the new champion. It remains a very controversial event to many, but one thing was clear: the Hamilton era was over, and it was Verstappen and Red Bull Racing’s time under the sun.
Over the next three years, Verstappen would add three more championships to his name, his winning streak finally broken last year when Lando Norris became the world champion.
How we should judge F1 drivers
If you have never seen an F1 race before, you might not be able to tell that not all cars on the grid are created equal.
At its core, the series is a constructor series where we’re trying to find out which team built the best car primarily and not who is the best driver in equal machinery (unless they happen to be teammates, but even then it can vary depending on how the driver gels with the car).
Of course, that doesn’t discount what it takes to drive an F1 car and win the driver championship over the course of an entire season consisting of several races.
The larger point I’m trying to make here is that despite the mainstream interpretation of “who’s the best driver” based purely on track position, we should look at them through a lens that values qualities like consistency, reliability, and “racecraft”. In other words, the positions are usually based on how fast your car is, and there is a limit to how much you can influence the results by raw skills alone. Luck and track conditions can sometimes tilt the odds towards you a bit.
When Hamilton was going through his series of wins season after season, it was a rare moment in history because the team and the driver had an amazing fit and Mercedes consistently provided a car that could compete at the front.
Once the Mercedes domination was over, he spent three more seasons with the team and would go on to win 2 races and 20 podiums over those three years. It is still a lot compared to the average driver, but for contrast, if we look at the stats of the previous three years, he had 30 wins and 48 podiums.
For the 2024-25 season, Hamilton would move to Ferrari, where he continues to drive in the current season of 2025-26. It was one of the biggest stories in the sport due to the gravity of the two names involved.
Yet the first season did not bear any significant fruits. In fact, it was one of the worst seasons of his career, ending with no wins or podiums (still sixth in the driver championship standings). This was largely due to Ferrari not being able to put a competitive car on track.
However, this season has been remarkably different for him, and the new car Ferrari built for this season, the SF-26, has served him well. He is currently 2nd on the driver championship standings behind Kimi Antonelli (the teenager who replaced him at Mercedes, and who is currently the frontrunner for the win). He has had 5 podiums in the first ten races of the season so far and has won 2 of them.
The chances of him winning the entire championship are largely out of his hands and will depend on how Ferrari and Mercedes upgrade and maintain their cars through the season. If both teams continue at their current pace, the reasonable status quo would see Mercedes win with Antonelli.
Yet, as someone who admires Hamilton and sees the story in the sport, I think the slight chance that he could win his eighth title in his career is absolutely thrilling and would be a miracle if he and Ferrari can pull it off.
However, I don’t think he needs to win the championship; rather, he has already won a harder battle, and that shows why he’s who he is. To explain myself, I’ll use a literary metaphor because the story of F1 sometimes deserves a better lens than soap opera.
The Old Man and the SF-26
The core idea behind this article came to me while reading some very high-brow comments on /r/formuladank, and one commenter mentioned that they were enjoying the Hamilton arc this season and that it was fun to watch him in a “last dance for unc” type situation.
Obviously, some facts make the connection between Hamilton’s situation and the legendary sports documentary weak; the “unc” part was objectively true. As of 2026, Hamilton is forty-one years old. He’s definitely not old in any conventional sense, but compared to the average age of the drivers, he’s more of an uncle figure than a peer and can serve the same role for consumers of the sport.
(Sidenote: Some would also argue that moniker fits Fernando Alonso, but to me he has more of the “stepfather who never cared about you but refuses to leave your life” archetype.)
Regardless, the comment actually made me think of a very obvious literary metaphor we can use to describe Hamilton’s current season to the character of Santiago from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.”
The novella is about an old fisherman. He’s considered washed up and no longer fit to catch fish. However, he does not give up and still believes he can fish as well as he did in his youth.
One day, he goes out to the sea and goes further than he has ever done before. He manages to hook a massive fish and spends several days pursuing it, finally killing it. He ties the fish to the boat and makes his way back to the city.
On the way, he gets attacked by sharks who eat away most of his catch. By the time he gets back to the shore, only the skeleton of the fish remains. Despite his struggles and hard work, he got no material payoff because he could not sell any of the fish he caught. But he still proved to himself and the community that he still had the skills in him, and that was bigger than any material reward to him.
While the above was a brief summary that cannot do justice to the original work, which has a lot more to say than the point of this article, one of the themes of the story is that our effort and our will to try is more noble than the results; that even if we fail, the heroic attempt itself is worthy of celebration and should be considered noble. And a true strong character defines itself based on how it handles failure rather than how it handles victory.
Bringing this back to F1, the parallels almost write themselves.
With his last season going the way it did, many were wondering if Lewis Hamilton still had it or if he was washed up and that was the end of his career. Yet, he persevered. He continues to fish every race, trying to go further.
Yes, the sharks will likely eat up the catch, leaving only a skeleton to drag back home, but we must appreciate Hamilton not for the fish but for the effort and for showing a champion attitude, especially in defeat.
Hemingway wrote “a man can be defeated but not destroyed,” and that stands true for Hamilton.