The members of the 2025 Formula 1 team are cooking up a storm of scandal and drama left and right without Drive to Survive having to go looking for it. Ranging from drivers to veteran team principals, F1 is currently serving as a minefield of controversies that are set to become fodder for the Netflix series’s Season 8 arc.
However, of the numerous matters of concern, Lewis Hamilton’s new season at Ferrari takes the cake. Famous for his legacy-making run at Mercedes, the legendary 7-time world champion made headlines after announcing his sudden shift to Ferrari in 2024. Hamilton’s 2025 season with the Maranello team is set to be a high-priority topic throughout Drive to Survive Season 8, along with the aftermath of his departure from Mercedes.
Toto Wolff and Lewis Hamilton’s legendary friendship
The legendary Sir Lewis Hamilton rose to his current status of recognition shortly after joining Mercedes in 2013, along with Toto Wolff. The pair rose to unparalleled and unchallenged heights of fame in their respective roles as driver and team principal, just as their partnership flourished over the years.
While Hamilton won one Grand Prix after another, Toto Wolff bought a 30% ownership stake in the Silver Arrows team, becoming one of its three owners. Together, they won eight consecutive constructors’ championships from 2014 to 2021 and seven World Drivers’ Championship titles.
As such, one can only imagine the horror of being the very last one on the entire Formula 1 paddock to find out that Hamilton was leaving his long-time base at Mercedes and joining Ferrari. Speaking to The Guardian, Wolff recalled the days leading up to the revelation:
I got a phone call from Carlos Sainz and his father. He said: ‘Something is cooking.’ I said: ‘Why would that happen before the start of the season?’ But that same afternoon I received calls from a few other drivers that were close to Charles Leclerc… I think it started from Leclerc knowing over the winter and then his closest allies hearing there was a seat free [at Mercedes]. I said to Susie: ‘This is happening without us officially knowing.’
Later, he texted Fred Vasseur, Ferrari team principal and his close friend, to check whether the rumors were true. When Vasseur evaded his question, Wolff had his answer. In January, Hamilton finally found the courage to walk up to his boss to tell him about the move, and Wolff had a strangely calm reaction.
I did not want to put him in a situation where he had to lie to me because at that stage the contract wasn’t signed. I saw the pain in him to tell me. My feeling was ‘Why now? When are we announcing this?’ He said: ‘Well, it’s leaking.’
With Hamilton extracting himself from the situation first, Toto Wolff claims it spared them both the misery of having a very difficult conversation – about retirement. Lewis Hamilton, who is currently 40 years old, has aged out of his seat at Mercedes and is too old for his contract to be renewed. Although Wolff maintains that he would have been straight with his old friend about the issue, the conversation “would have been a real horror for me and for him.”
Drive to Survive S8 needs to focus on Wolff & Hamilton
Although Toto Wolff harbors no ill will towards Lewis Hamilton, there is bound to be a change in the pair’s dynamic. As Hamilton built a new rapport at Ferrari, Wolff recruited the 18-year-old Italian Andrea Kimi Antonelli to the team. Antonelli is now the youngest debutant to score points in his first F1 race and the second-youngest driver to debut in F1 after Max Verstappen.
The 2025 season of Formula 1 will be an entertaining enough ride for Netflix’s Drive to Survive, and while Season 8 can stretch out an entire storyline on Antonelli’s electric and memorable debut in Mercedes, the majority of the spotlight should fall on the aftermath of Lewis Hamilton’s departure from the Silver Arrows.
As Toto Wolff himself remarked in The Guardian interview:
The friendship will change, but not the depth of emotion. On the contrary. This will be a new friendship with Lewis. On the professional side, I always see benefits in change. We have new regulations, we have reshaped our organisation and we’re embarking on a new era with our senior driver [George Russell] turning 27 and the junior driver [Kimi Antonelli] being 18. We have two drivers barely older together than Lewis. That’s very exciting.
With such a cold, hard approach to facts and numbers, Drive to Survive is bound to spin Wolff’s comments into a jilted-lover storyline in the upcoming Season 8 arc. While the Netflix docu-series keeps the meter running on the drama, the 2025 Grand Prix season will be more invested in Lewis Hamilton’s growth in Ferrari and the rise of the McLarens against Red Bull’s Verstappen.
Drive to Survive Season 7 is currently streaming on Netflix.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
