While Lewis Hamilton is still struggling to get fully up to speed at Ferrari, David Croft is convinced that F1 2025 is not the final season for Formula 1’s most successful driver.

That being said, Croft – Sky F1’s lead commentator – views the upcoming Canadian Grand Prix as a vital checkpoint for Hamilton and his Ferrari career, as he heads to a track where he was won a record-equalling seven times looking to recapture some momentum.

Lewis Hamilton to race on beyond F1 2025?

While there has been fleeting highlights for Hamilton such as his China Sprint win from pole, and a strong Grand Prix at Imola, overall Hamilton is struggling to live up to the hype as a Ferrari driver.

And his woes continued to deepen in Spain where he was ordered to move aside for Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc early in the race, Leclerc racing on to the final podium spot, while Hamilton was sixth.

The seven-time World Champion cut a despondent figure after the race, claiming it is “probably just me”, not the Ferrari in a frosty interview with Sky F1’s Rachel Brookes, for which he later apologised.

But, after a tough final season with Mercedes, followed by a slow start at Ferrari, the question of Hamilton’s potential retirement was brought up on Sky F1’s ‘The F1 Show‘ podcast.

Croft’s view on that topic was quite clear.

“Very simply, Lewis will be around next year,” Croft affirmed.

“He’s not going anywhere.”

However, should Hamilton struggle next weekend in Canada, a stop on the F1 calendar which “he loves”, then Croft believes the alarm bells must start ringing.

“I think we were all hoping for more positives, to be honest, especially after China, when he looked an absolute world beater once again,” Croft admitted on the Hamilton and Ferrari partnership.

“He was so down on Sunday. Rachel Brookes was saying that he actually apologised to her after his interview in the pen, and he went and said sorry, because he was so down and not the best interviewee she’s ever had.

“Let’s try and offer a bit of hope on this one for him. Ferrari haven’t specified exactly what the issue was, but according to Fred Vasseur [team principal], there was an issue with the car in the final stint, and that wasn’t helping him.

“Nico Hulkenberg was on a brand new set of soft tyres, and they made a huge amount of difference whatever car you were driving. So it wasn’t a surprise that on a new set, Hulkenberg has got past Lewis on an old set of softs.

“He should have been passed by Charles Leclerc a bit sooner, though. Ferrari left their team orders one or two laps too late once again, despite being aware that they might, with the drivers on different strategies, need to go through this one.

“But he didn’t have that race pace for the first two thirds of the race, let alone the last one. You go back to the drawing board, don’t you, and you go and find what’s wrong. And if there was something fundamentally wrong with the car, then I think that offers a morale boost to Lewis.

“And I think the next race is quite critical for Lewis, because Canada is a place he goes so so well at, it’s a place he loves. It’s where he got his first pole, first win as well.

“This is Lewis Hamilton’s track. And if he has another downer day, like he did in Barcelona, then there’s issues. But look, if anyone can do it and turn it around, the seven time World Champion, that is Lewis Hamilton, can definitely turn that around.”

Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc head-to-head in F1 2025

👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head qualifying statistics between team-mates

👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

Former F1 driver Karun Chandhok believes Hamilton is already quite far along that “critical” timeline by this stage, with nine of the 24 rounds complete in F1 2025.

Chandhok fully believes a decline in ability is not Hamilton’s problem, but rather Ferrari have not managed to put the SF-25 in a consistent happy place for their 105-time grand prix winner.

“I think it’s starting to get a bit critical though,” said Chandhok of Hamilton’s Ferrari situation. “We’re coming into the second third of the season now, and he’s not finding the rhythm, he’s not finding the consistency where week in, week out, he’s in a happy place with the car.

“Imola, woeful in qualifying, suddenly the car is brilliant in the race. And Monaco, he wasn’t quite there. He was a chunk behind Charles throughout. And I think that there’s got to be a degree of concern creeping in.

“I think when you look at the race, the fact that Charles overtook him and drove away from him quite comfortably, even before we go into the different tyres and stuff later on.

“I’d be concerned. If I was Lewis, if I was on the Lewis side of the garage, engineers, etc. I’d be concerned about, ‘Okay, we’re nearly halfway through the year now. We need to start understanding is this a fundamental issue, that we need to change the direction of the setup of the car… Because I’m not disputing the fact that he’s still got the ability, he clearly does. He’s able to win races, we saw in China, right?

“But they need to find a sweet spot for him, that every weekend he knows what he’s got, and they haven’t got that, he’s still having too many good days and bad days. It’s like the fluctuations are too much.”

Hamilton sits P6 in the current Drivers’ Championship standings, one position and 23 points behind Leclerc.

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