Lewis Hamilton becomes the 12th driver for Ferrari in its Formula 1 history, following an illustrious history of men from Britain to race for the team.
Enzo Ferrari infamously coined the 1950s influx of British privateer Formula 1 entrants as “garagistas”, the term perhaps made with scorn, as the likes of Vanwall, Cooper and Lotus put paid to the great man’s grand plan of world domination in the highest echelons of motor racing.
However, there has also seemingly been a more fondly felt link to the British that emanated from Enzo’s converted farmhouse in Maranello, in front of which Lewis Hamilton posed last week, now officially a Ferrari driver.
Eight British drivers drove for Ferrari during Enzo’s lifetime, with a further four coming since then, including Hamilton, who arrived in Italy to fanfare and typical Tifosi-style pandemonium.
Anglo-Italian relations got off to a successful but contentious start, with swashbuckling bow-tie-clad Mike Hawthorn, who drove for the Scuderia over two periods and won the World Championship in 1958. An inter-team rivalry developed between Hawthorn, its second British driver in Peter Collins, and the Italian Luigi Musso, who would perish in that year’s French Grand Prix, which Hawthorn won.
Musso’s girlfriend later alleged that Hawthorn and Collins agreed to share their prize money equally, freezing Musso out, and instilling a daredevil attitude within all three to take more risks, and with the biggest financial windfall coming in the French race, Musso took one risk too many.
Six months later, both men were also dead. Collins was a victim of the Nurburgring, at the German Grand Prix within a month after Musso’s crash.
Hawthorn took glory at the final round in Morocco, holding off the Vanwalls to become the first-ever British World Champion, but the following January, in a cruel twist of irony having retired from F1, he would die in a road accident, having reinvented himself as a children’s author.
From missing Moss to signing Surtees
1959 saw two new British drivers take the wheel, in the form of Cliff Allison and Tony Brooks. The former was signed permanently for 1960, but a crash in Monaco curtailed his tenure with the team, whilst Brooks came close to the title in ‘59, but ultimately fell four points adrift of Jack Brabham.
Within this period of time, Ferrari himself offered a test drive in a Formula 2 car to a young Stirling Moss, but according to Moss, upon arrival in Italy, Ferrari had changed his mind, and he vowed to never drive for them. He would, with private entrants, win a multitude of sportscar races in a Ferrari, but continued to show his worth in F1 with the likes of Mercedes and Vanwall, narrowly missing-out on the championship four times.
Knowing a good driver – and perhaps even a special driver – when he saw one, Ferrari witnessed his two “shark nose” 156 cars roundly defeated by the inferior Lotus-Climax driven by Moss at the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix.
After the conclusion of that year’s championship, Moss would come face-to-face with Enzo again, and made the offer to, in effect, give him whatever he wanted in order to race for the team. Moss. Amazingly, Ferrari agreed to Moss’s conditions that he would race a 156, entered by the longstanding British Rob Walker Racing Team, ditching the scarlet red for a white-and-blue colour scheme.
What would have been a unique union was to sadly never materialise, as Moss crashed his Lotus at the non-championship Glover Trophy at Goodwood, causing injuries that persuaded him to retire from Grand Prix racing.
Therefore, there would be a gap of three years until Ferrari signed its next driver, former motorcycle champion John Surtees. The union was a successful one with Surtees taking the title in 1964, becoming the first man to win world titles on two and four wheels, and he looked set to repeat the feat two years later, but acrimony ensued between Surtees and the wider Ferrari team after a tactical disagreement as to how the Le Mans 24 Hours would be approached.
After winning the Belgian Grand Prix, Surtees left and joined Cooper-Maserati, finishing second in the championship, Brabham again the benefactor.
Mansell: the lion victimised by unreliability
The spate of British signings were short-term ones, all coming from the world of sportscars. Mike Parkes – a Ferrari stalwart – drove six Grands Prix across 1966 and ‘67, with Jonathan Williams earning a solitary outing in the latter, with 1968 seeing two appearances for Derek Bell, whose entrance in the American Grand Prix that year was the last for a British driver for Ferrari for 21 years.
Reputedly the last driver personally selected by Enzo before his death, the team signed Nigel Mansell for the 1989 season. Having earned his status as one of F1’s best drivers after his title near-misses in ‘86 and ‘87, Mansell opted to leave Williams ahead of the first year of the post-turbo era, and the campaign could not have got off to a better start.
The 640 had a myriad of reliability issues in pre-season testing and consistently fell short of completing a race distance by a long way, leaving Mansell with the impression that an early flight home from the first round in Jacarepagua would be a certainty.
Showing his usual guts and guile, Mansell stormed into the lead, and despite benefitting from major runners dropping out of the running, still believed the car would, at some stage, break down. It did not, and he took victory in his first race for the team.
Fortunes quickly tailed off as the reality of the car’s problems set in, but Mansell would take another win that year, and it would be one of his best. At the notoriously tight and twisty Hungaroring, Mansell breezed his way through the field from 12th on the grid and snatched the lead from Ayrton Senna to take the chequered flag ahead of the rest.
Mansell’s relationship with Ferrari soured in 1990, as the team signed reigning World Champion Alain Prost. Feeling number one status in the team was now removed, Mansell suffered a series of further DNFs, the final straw being a mechanical failure at the British Grand Prix, telling fans after the race that he would retire from F1 at the end of the year.
He would ultimately renege on his promise, rejoining Williams in 1991, eventually becoming World Champion a year later, as Ferrari fell to perhaps the lowest ebb of its F1 history, going four years without a Grand Prix victory. But Mansell’s daredevil driving style forever endeared him to the Tifosi, who dubbed him Il Leone: The Lion.
How ‘Fast Eddie’ almost ended 20 years of hurt
The final full-time British driver before Hamilton to sign for Ferrari was Ulsterman Eddie Irvine, who joined in 1996, completing an all-new line-up alongside Michael Schumacher. His first year would start with a podium in Australia, but the rest of the campaign would see Irvine struggle with a woefully unreliable and undrivable car, only tamed by the brilliance of Schumacher.
As the team improved around Schumacher, Irvine began to play a supporting role in 1997. At the penultimate round in Suzuka, Irvine brilliantly stormed off into the lead in order to aid Schumacher’s quest for victory as he fought to stay in the championship battle against Williams’ Jacques Villeneuve. Schumacher won, with Irvine third.
With Schumacher narrowly missing out on the title in ‘97 and ‘98, ‘99 would be Irvine’s year
Well, almost.
Benefitting from Schumacher and the front-running McLarens retiring, Irvine took his maiden F1 win at round one in Australia, and when Schumacher broke his leg at Silverstone, he would now be the Italian marque’s leading hopeful in the title fight with the Woking-based squad.
Holding off David Coulthard’s charge in Austria, Irvine took a second win, followed by a third in the next round in Germany, inheriting the lead from his obedient new team-mate in Mika Salo.
A strategic blunder at the Nurburgring cost Irvine dearly, but Schumacher returned at the penultimate race in Malaysia to support his bid. Schumacher let Irvine through in Sepang to take his fourth win and force the title into a final-round decider in Japan, but ultimately, he fell short of Ferrari’s first title in two decades, and Mika Hakkinen stole the crown.
With Hamilton now firmly part of the F1 establishment at 40 years of age, it is perhaps fitting that the last British driver to tame the prancing horse was a star of the future, Oliver Bearman.
A member of its Driver Academy, Bearman will this year partake in his first full season with the Ferrari-powered Haas team this year, but made his F1 debut in Jeddah last year, taking the place of the unwell Carlos Sainz. Narrowly missing out on Q3, Bearman drove a faultless race, finishing seventh ahead of Hamilton and Lando Norris to be named Driver of the Day.
Hamilton now has the task of taking Ferrari to its first Drivers’ title in 18 years, and if his arrival in Italy and the reception he has already received is anything to go by, then he will have the support of the whole country behind him, metaphorically linking in arms with his masses of partisan supporters from Britain who will now flock to Silverstone and beyond in a sea of red.
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