Lewis Hamilton's four big Ferrari F1 tests as Brit enjoys first day with new team
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As of today, Wednesday, January 1, Lewis Hamilton is officially a Ferrari employee. He has now achieved his childhood dream of being able to call himself a Ferrari Formula 1 driver. And in March he will race in red for the first time, in the hope of having a better chance of more title glory than he would have had if he had stuck with Mercedes.
It is not the first time Hamilton has taken a huge risk by leaving one team for another. Plenty of questions were asked when he quit McLaren to join Mercedes in 2013, but all the success he and the Silver Arrows enjoyed together shows that it was certainly the right call.
He will take confidence from that and believe that, once again, he has made the decision that he is best for him in the twilight of his F1 career. But there remain some very real barriers that Hamilton will have to knock down in order to achieve what he wants in Italy. Here are the big tests facing Hamilton in the coming months and years.
Hamilton has just spent 12 years with the same team and surrounded by, with the odd change here and there, the same people. That level of familiarity is certainly helpful when it comes to the environment you need to produce your best work and, initially at least, he simply won't have that in Italy.
Other than team principal Frederic Vasseur, with whom he has worked before, and a couple of others, Hamilton needs to get to know everyone at the team. And there is also a language and cultural barrier to be crossed which complicates things further still.
