Lewis Hamilton greeted a crowd of waiting fans on Wednesday as he drove a Ferrari Formula 1 car for the first time since joining the Italian team for the 2025 season.
Hamilton was behind the wheel of a 2023-specification Ferrari SF-23 bearing his racing number, 44, at the team’s Fiorano test track, and wore a new helmet design in yellow with a prominent Prancing Horse logo.
The 40-year-old British driver set out for his first lap at 9:16 a.m. local time in light fog and twice waved to a crowd of around 1,000 spectators, who had gathered on a nearby bridge despite the cold and wet weather.
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Part-way through the day, Hamilton headed over to fans who had waited for hours in the wet conditions since early morning for a glimpse of him behind the wheel. Wearing a jacket in Ferrari red, he waved, gave a thumbs-up gesture and put a hand to his heart.
There was excitement Wednesday from one of Italy’s biggest sports stars, too.
After reaching the semifinals at the Australian Open, top-ranked tennis player Jannik Sinner was asked by an Italian reporter if he had seen anything on social media about Hamilton’s Ferrari debut.
“It’s still pretty strange to see him in red,” Sinner said, “but it’ll be a great season.”
Hamilton has shaken up F1 with his move to Ferrari after 12 years with Mercedes, where he won six of his seven world titles. He has said he’s fulfilling a childhood dream.
“I’ve been lucky enough to have achieved things in my career I never thought possible, but part of me has always held on to that dream of racing in red. I couldn’t be happier to realize that dream today,” he said Monday after arriving at Ferrari’s Maranello headquarters for his first day at work with the new team.
F1 tightly restricts teams from testing current-specification cars but the rules are more loose for older cars like the SF-23 that Hamilton drove Wednesday. The F1 regulations for 2025 allow Hamilton to drive up to 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) over four days in older F1 cars under the “testing of previous cars” rule. The SF-23 is the most recent Ferrari that’s eligible.
Pre-season testing for the new season’s cars is from Feb. 26 through 28 in Bahrain.
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