Jean Todt believes Ferrari will have a “top-level” line-up in Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, but questions whether it’s any “better” than the Leclerc and Carlos Sainz partnership.

Sainz bid farewell to Ferrari last season after four years and four wins with the Maranello team, the Spaniard dropped to make room for Hamilton.

Charles Leclerc has a new team-mate in Lewis Hamilton

Although the Briton put pen to paper on a new one-plus-one Mercedes contract in August 2023, five months later he announced he’d activated an escape clause to join Ferrari in a multi-year deal.

And so began the long goodbye for both Hamilton and Sainz, although for the latter it wasn’t by choice.

Despite spending the first half of the season auditioning on the track and negotiating off of it, and having to sit out the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix as he underwent an appendectomy, the Spaniard was only 15 points behind Leclerc when he announced in the wake of the Belgian Grand Prix that he would join Williams for the F1 2025 season.

Leclerc would go on to pull clear of his team-mate by the end of the season, 356 points to 290, but between them the Ferrari team-mates took the fight to McLaren in the Constructors’ Championship where they fell 14 points short of a first time since 2008.

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Ferrari’s SF-24 was a notable step forward, the car winning five Grands Prix but the season still belonged to Max Verstappen who clinched all nine of Red Bull’s wins with his F1 car once again the pick of the field.

Red Bull have dominated Formula 1’s ground-effect era, winning three Drivers’ titles and two Constructors’.

It has Todt claiming that Ferrari haven’t been lacking in the driver department, rather it’s the car that needs to improve.

“What is Ferrari missing to win? Little, very little. Even in the past, they came very close,” he told Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica.

“Even the line-up with Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz was a good pairing; they certainly didn’t lose because of the drivers.”

As such he wonders whether Hamilton will be any better for Ferrari than Sainz.

“Obviously, even with Hamilton the line-up remains top-level,” he continued. “Will it be better than the previous one? I have no idea, we’ll have to see the level of the car.”

Hamilton’s arrival at Ferrari has dominated headlines over the past two weeks as the world’s media systemically recorded the seven-time World Champion’s Ferrari firsts.

From photos outside of Enzo Ferrari’s house to his meeting his new work colleagues, his first laps in a Ferrari F1 car and his first crash in one too, it’s all made headlines.

It begs the question, how will this affect Leclerc, who was previously Ferrari’s favoured son.

“I don’t think it will be affected by Lewis Hamilton,” Todt said. “For Charles, it could be an opportunity to be even more motivated, much like what happened with George Russell at Mercedes.”

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