Matt Bishop: 'Hamilton chose to fight after 2021 F1 injustice. I sometimes wish he'd retired'

F1
Matt Bishop profile pic
January 6, 2026

Can Ferrari give Lewis Hamilton an F1 car worthy of his greatness or will his career peter out in the midfield? It's our gain that the soon-to-be 41-year-old is still racing, says Matt Bishop, but retiring in 2021 would have been a fitting way to go

Lewis Hamilton in 2025 F1 paddock

Time is running out for Lewis Hamilton to find another competitive car

Ferrari

Matt Bishop profile pic
January 6, 2026

Early January often appears to be a quiet time for Formula 1 people — drivers, bosses, engineers, mechanics, journalists, and fans — but behind the scenes a lot is going on. In that sense it is a bit like the hush in a theatre just before the curtain rises. Moreover, for one of F1’s 22 race drivers, tomorrow will resonate with meaning, for January 7 is Lewis Hamilton’s birthday. He will be 41, astonishingly, and he is readying himself to embark on his 20th F1 season. Yes, here we are, contemplating a driver who made his F1 debut in 2007 and is in 2026 girding his loins to do battle with men who were babies when he first started a grand prix. Indeed, one of them, Arvid Lindblad, was not yet born. That alone tells you something profound about Hamilton: about his strength, his mettle, his perseverance, and his refusal to be defined by expectation, convention, or precedent.

I have known Lewis for a long time. We overlapped at McLaren between 2008 and 2012, years of glory and tumult, of passion and brooding, of relentless pressure and extraordinary performance. I saw close-up how he worked, how he thought, how he absorbed the slings and arrows that F1 fires so casually and so often at its leading men. I saw the public figure and the private individual, the superstar and the young man trying to make sense of a sport that gives lavishly with one hand and takes mercilessly with the other. So when I say that Hamilton is an all-time great of F1, I do not say it lightly, nor as an exercise in hyperbole, nor as a nod to either received wisdom or fashionable consensus. I say it because I have watched his greatness being forged, lap by lap, race by race, season by season, triumph by triumph.

Ferrari promises everything but guarantees nothing

Greatness in F1 is not merely a function of statistics, although Lewis’s numbers are so stratospheric that they almost defy comprehension: seven F1 drivers’ world championships, 105 F1 grand prix wins, 104 F1 grand prix pole positions, 202 F1 grand prix podiums. Those are the bare bones, the cold data, the lines in the record books. But greatness is also about context, about quality of opposition, about adaptability across eras, about a driver’s ability to raise his game when the stakes are highest and the margins thinnest. Lewis has done all of that, repeatedly. He has won with different teams, different cars, different engines, different team-mates, different regulations, and different pressures. He has beaten world champions and would-be world champions. He has won in the dry and in the wet, from the pole and from the midfield, with serene control and with ferocious audacity.

Yet, for all that, he now finds himself at a career crossroads, and it would be disingenuous for us to pretend otherwise. As I say, he will turn 41 tomorrow, and in 2026 he will embark on his 20th F1 season, his second with Ferrari, the most mythos-laden team in the sport’s history, a team that promises everything but guarantees nothing. I dearly hope that the 2026 Ferrari will be a car worthy of his talent, ambition, and legacy. I would love nothing better than to watch him win races in rosso corsa, and to see him add to his already unparalleled magnum opus with a late-career flourish that would have Enzo Ferrari grinning from ear to ear in whatever celestial paddock he now inhabits.

But hope, in F1, is a fragile currency, and realism demands that we acknowledge the doubts and worries about Hamilton that pervade the paddocks, the pitlanes, the press rooms, and the grandstands. In a nutshell, it is possible that he may not be quite as scintillatingly quick as he once was – and, perhaps corroborating that unhappy thesis, we have to concede that in 2025, which in his defence was his first season with the infamously opaque Scuderia, he was comprehensively outperformed by his team-mate Charles Leclerc, who, although he has started 171 F1 grands prix, is 13 years his junior. Worse, Lewis often seemed bewildered by his own underperformance, and his descriptions of it were sometimes not only self-critical but also defeatist.

Lewis Hamilton puts his hand on his forehead in the F1 paddock at the 2025 Azerbaijan Grand Prix

Hamilton in Baku, where he only managed to qualify 12th on the grid

Grand Prix Photo

Ferrari is Ferrari, glorious and exasperating in equal measure. It can build a masterpiece then trip over its own shoelaces. It can outthink the grid one weekend then outthink itself the next. It is set in its ways: it rarely bends its culture to suit the preferences of an incoming megastar, especially one whose age dictates that such bending might have to be undone, or at least adapted, before too long. The 2026 regulations will usher in a new technical era, and, while that offers opportunity, it also magnifies risk. Insiders, pundits, and fans all harbour the fear that the car that Lewis will drive in his 20th F1 season may not be the one he deserves, and may not therefore allow him to express his genius as he once did with such majestic regularity. And time waits for no man, and no driver, not even one as supremely gifted and as obsessively fit as Hamilton.

Or, to put it another way, we who respect and admire Lewis are becoming troubled by the spectre that no one who loves our sport, and who loves Lewis, wants to see: the possibility that his F1 career might peter out unimpressively, as Michael Schumacher’s did after his injudicious return to F1 with Mercedes in 2010, 2011, and 2012. The old gunslinger, the colossus of his era, came back ever so slightly diminished when, also aged 41, in Bahrain in 2010 he rode back into town after a three-year layoff. He was not diminished in courage or commitment but in out-and-out sharpness, and the sight of him being serially outqualified, outraced, and outpointed by his much younger team-mate Nico Rosberg was painful for those of us who had witnessed at first hand just how brilliant he had been in his prime. It did not tarnish his F1 greatness, but it complicated his F1 narrative, for it added an unnecessary and regrettable coda. Now, many in F1 fear, quietly and reluctantly, that Lewis could be facing a similar fate, not because he lacks ability, but because the sport is unforgiving, because its variables are numerous and perplexing, and because Ferrari still appears to be a few seasons away from achieving technical, operational, and political equilibrium.

From the archive

That is not to say that Lewis has lost it, far from it. Even in recent seasons, in cars that have not always flattered his driving style, he has delivered drives of real quality. Only 10 months ago he won the 2025 Shanghai Sprint, consummately beating Oscar Piastri (second) and Max Verstappen (third). He won two grands prix, at Silverstone and Spa, in 2024. And think back to the closing races of 2021, a season that should have crowned him F1 world champion for the eighth time but did not, owing to what can only be described, without exaggeration, as a regulatory aberration and a sporting disgrace.

But before that stain besmirched the sport in Abu Dhabi in 2021 — under immense pressure, for it had seemed that the F1 drivers’ world championship was slipping through his fingers — Lewis had responded not with petulance or panic but with bravado and brilliance. After finishing second to Verstappen in Mexico, and finding himself trailing his young rival by 19 points therefore, he then won superbly in Brazil, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, thereby hauling his world championship points total up to precise parity with Verstappen’s: 369.5 points apiece. And in Abu Dhabi he had been leading the race, and he had been touching the hem of his eighth F1 drivers’ world championship, until fate, and a misapplication of the rules, intervened.

What followed was, in its own way, as impressive as anything Hamilton has ever done in a race car. He behaved with admirable restraint and commendable decorum. He did not rant. He did not rail. He did not fan the flames. Instead, he withdrew. He silenced his social media accounts. He granted no media interviews. For weeks, he said nothing publicly, absorbing a profound injustice with a dignity that is all too rare in a sport that thrives on noise. It was a masterclass in self-control, and it spoke volumes about his character.

Lewis Hamilton congratulates MAx Verstappen after the 2021 F1 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

Hamilton congratulates Verstappen after the controversial 2021 finale in Abu Dhabi

Lars Baron/Getty via Red Bull

Yet sometimes, because of what has happened since — because, in other words, he so rarely had a fully competitive car in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 — I find myself wishing that when he had emerged from that self-imposed purdah, which in my imagined version of events he should have done on January 7, 2022, his 37th birthday, he had chosen a different path. I wish, selfishly perhaps, that he had emulated one of his best ever team-mates, Nico Rosberg, who quit at the apex of his career after winning the 2016 F1 drivers’ world championship, having achieved his ultimate goal and knowing that the cost of staying might outweigh the rewards. For Lewis, the apex would have been Abu Dhabi 2021. Not because he won the F1 drivers’ world championship there — on the contrary, we all know that he was robbed of it there — but because he had earned it there, on track, on merit, in performance, and in spirit.

In my fantasy, on the morning of January 7, 2022, Lewis would have stood before a video camera and said, calmly and clearly, something like this: “I have spent the past month carefully considering my position. Over 15 seasons I have devoted 100% of my energies to the sport I love, and I have been fortunate to work with some fantastic people and thereby to have achieved a good deal of success. That has been a wonderful privilege. I want to thank all those people, and my family, my fans, and the media who have reported my efforts so diligently. But that side of my life is now over. Today is my 37th birthday, and I am now old enough to know my own mind, young enough to be able to plan an exciting next phase of my professional life, and satisfied that I have fulfilled my potential as a racing driver. Had the F1 regulations been applied more equitably and more appropriately in Abu Dhabi last month, I might have come to a different decision, even if I had still failed to win the 2021 F1 drivers’ world championship. But such was not the case – and, for that reason more than for any other, I find myself unwilling and unable to continue to race in F1, which is a demanding and dangerous pursuit, with the commitment that it requires and my team and my fans deserve. So today I am announcing my immediate retirement as an F1 driver. I congratulate Max Verstappen on his recent success, for he is a great driver with a fantastic future ahead of him, and any injustices perpetrated in Abu Dhabi last month were absolutely not of his making. Finally, more than anything else, once again, I would like to thank my family, my teams, the media, and above all my unswervingly loyal fans for their indefatigable support. Goodbye, and God bless you all.”

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Had he done that, his F1 story would have been neat — devastatingly so. He would have left with his dignity intact, his legacy unassailable, and his eighth F1 drivers’ world championship morally, if not officially, secured. History — and, crucially, the F1 powers-that-be — would have been forced to reckon with the injustice rather than move on from it. And Lewis, freed from the F1 treadmill, could have turned his formidable intelligence, influence, and energy to the many causes that clearly matter to him.

But he did not do that. He chose to carry on, to fight on, and to believe that the sport that he loved could still be a place in which merit is rewarded and excellence recognised. That choice, too, deserves respect. It speaks to his competitive fire, his optimism, his resilience, and his refusal to be cowed by disappointment. It also means that, as he approaches his 41st birthday and his 20th F1 season, we are still watching him – which is a privilege, of course it is – although we are doing so with a mixture of hope and apprehension.

Whatever happens in 2026, and beyond, Lewis Hamilton’s place in the F1 pantheon is secure. He has changed the sport, he has broadened its horizons, and he has elevated its standards. He has been a champion on and off the track. My hope is that his next F1 chapter will add headlines rather than footnotes; my fear is that it may not. But perhaps that tension, that uncertainty, is fitting for a driver who has never taken the easy route, who has always embraced the challenge. Tomorrow he will turn 41. Happy birthday, dear Lewis. F1 is richer — far richer — for having had you, and it is still better — far better — for still having you. Whether or not it has always deserved you is a different question.

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