Welcome to Thursday’s edition of the RaceFans round-up.
Comment of the day
Seeing Lewis Hamilton in a Ferrari is going to take some getting used to for some of our readers:
It really hasn’t sunk in yet that this has finally happened, Hamilton in a Ferrari, wow. This is what Formula 1 is about.
However they shape up against each other, I’ll be ecstatic if either he or Leclerc get to win a championship this season or soon (and I guess likewise Ferrari too).
@David-BR
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday to Brent Foster!
On this day in motorsport
- 65 years ago today the Monte Carlo rally ended. Graham Hill retired with brake trouble in his Ford Anglia which he shared with John Patton. Walter Schock and Rolf Moll won in a Mercedes 220SE.
- Eight years ago today Bernie Ecclestone was ousted from his role in charge of Formula 1 following Liberty Media’s takeover of the sport
- On this day last year Formula 1 announced a new street track in Madrid would join the calendar in 2026
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
Tifoso1989 (@tifoso1989)
23rd January 2025, 9:53
I’m surprised there was no reference to the Visa cash app Isack Hadjar tweet. It seems that Hamilton still lives rent free in the heads of the RB management. As usual they don’t waste any opportunity to show how classless they have always been.
BasCB (@bascb)
23rd January 2025, 11:57
Yeah, I don’t really get why they bother with that kind of stuff. It only makes them look small minded (best case), or are they suddenly feeling that Hamilton might help boost the Ferrari team to be their prime rival?
Jere (@jerejj)
23rd January 2025, 11:42
I hadn’t read or heard about Oliver Turvey since at least the mid-2010s, so I thought he’d left McLaren a long time ago, but apparently, he hadn’t, so simply a team switch for the exact same role, which has been redundant ever since him not becoming a full-time driver became evident.
Oh well, he’s always been essentially in the same position as Marc Gene at Ferrari & Pedro De La Rosa at Aston Martin.
Zak O’Sullivan’s SF drive became official a month ago already, but I’m still somewhat surprised that he managed to get a drive in the series that late in the year & over some relatively experienced series races such as Ukyo Sasahara.
However, as he’s a Williams-affiliated driver, I bet he’ll leave the series after a single campaign as non-Japanese drivers affiliated with F1 teams/organizations have tended to do.
The other two non-Japanese drivers who are supposed to compete in SF this year, a series-returnee Sacha Fenestraz & former WEC driver Oliver Rasmussen, & are another matter, especially the former who’s additionally scheduled to do a full Super GT campaign.
Jere (@jerejj)
23rd January 2025, 11:45
Edit: Igor Omura Fraga as well. He seemed to have been overlooked by teams once again, but Ponos Nakajima Racing ultimately had handed him a full-time driver, after all.
montreal95 (@montreal95)
23rd January 2025, 19:03
He’s not Williams affiliated anymore. Their association ended on 31/12/2024. There’s a story about it on Autosport or The-Race can’t remember which.
In it he describes how his Williams association was useless for him anyway. In fact it didn’t even pay enough for him to finish the F2 season. People assume that team association is always a great thing for a young driver so this article was an eye opener to the fact that this is not always the case.
Finally, as someone who follows SF I wasn’t in surprised in the slightest that he was chosen for the drive. All the talk after the post-season test was how impressive Zak has been. So it was more of a question of which team will win the fight over his services.