Former Ferrari engineer Nikolas Tombazis knows that the Scuderia will be a completely different world for Lewis Hamilton – victories in the Schumi era were sometimes too easy
A completely new life begins for Lewis Hamilton in the new year. The Briton is moving from Mercedes to Ferrari and thus into a completely new environment. Up to now, he has always driven for British-based teams at McLaren and Mercedes, but a completely different culture awaits him at Ferrari from 2025.
Former Ferrari engineer Nikolas Tombazis, now head of formula racing for the FIA, remembers his own time at the Scuderia well and says that at Ferrari it was a different world to other teams, at least back in the days of Michael Schumacher. “And I guess it’s still like that today,” he says in the Beyond the Grid podcast.
Because Ferrari is simply something like a national team in Italy. “They have the Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper, which is probably the most widely read newspaper in the age of the internet,” he says.
“And this newspaper is in every bar in Italy. When you go for a coffee, everyone wants to read it. There’s only one edition, and someone always reads it. And you wait for them to finish and then you have to grab it before someone else does,” says Tombazis.
“And every day there’s a whole page about Formula 1, and usually half of it is about Ferrari. That’s the pressure,” he says. This means that everything that happens in Maranello is under enormous scrutiny.
“If things go well, you get almost god-like feedback, but if things don’t go well, you get slaughtered,” says the Greek.
However, Tombazis believes that Hamilton will be able to cope with the pressure because he has often been exposed to great pressure in his career. “He has to prove that he can still win races, and win them with them. But I think he can do well. “
Winning with Ferrari back then “too easy “
Tombazis himself mostly experienced the good times at Ferrari, because as Head of Aerodynamics he was involved in Michael Schumacher’s world championship titles in the early 2000s. The German won the Formula 1 title five times in a row and seemed unbeatable at times – which was unsatisfactory for Tombazis himself at times.
“Even if it’s stupid, I had the feeling that it was too easy at times,” he says. “At some point I thought to myself, this is far too easy and not a challenge. No matter what we do: We win. And that made me look elsewhere at times. “
Tombazis thought that victories were almost guaranteed for Ferrari – and indeed they seemed to be: in 2002 Ferrari only failed to win two races, in 2004 they only conceded three.
As a result, the Greek joined McLaren in 2004 before returning to the Scuderia in 2006, where he did not have quite the same success. Since Kimi Räikkönen’s title in 2007, Ferrari has been waiting for a drivers’ world champion.
“In the later stages of my career, I thought how stupid I was to think that wins were easy and guaranteed because I had other periods in my career where there were no wins – and that was really, really hard,” he says. “I felt like I didn’t appreciate the wins when they came so easily. “