Esteban Ocon was “lucky enough” to bear witness to the birth of 2025’s blockbuster storyline, Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari.

12 months after announcing he’d be leaving Mercedes to join Ferrari having signed a multi-year contract, Hamilton officially began life as a Ferrari driver on 21 January.

‘Something crazy’ as Lewis Hamilton joins Ferrari

Visiting the team’s Maranello headquarters, the seven-time World Champion met his new team members, including his race engineer Riccardo Adami, drove the Ferrari simulator, signed autographs for the Tifosi and posed for photographs.

The latter included photographs taken outside of Enzo Ferrari’s iconic red-doored house where Ferrari’s higher-ups joined the Briton for the historic moment and then came that first-ever photograph of Hamilton in a Ferrari race suit.

“First time in red,” Hamilton said in the caption on social media.

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Hamilton’s pre-season preparations later kicked off with his first on-track run in a Ferrari F1 car as the 40-year-old put an SF-23 through its paces at the Fiorano circuit, covering 30 laps on a misty morning.

More than 1,000 Tifoso, some reports claim as many as three thousand, flocked to the Ferrari test track to catch a glimpse of Hamilton – considerably more people than the crowd that arrived for Michael Schumacher’s first Ferrari run back in 1995.

Also watching on was one man, an unexpected figure, who declared he was “lucky enough” to bear witness to the historic moment.

It was the new Haas driver Esteban Ocon.

“Great image,” he told Canal+’s ‘La Boîte A Questions’ when shown the photograph of Hamilton posing in a Ferrari race suit.

“In fact, I was lucky enough to be in the same place on the same day because I was also at the Ferrari simulator.

“There was a crazy atmosphere, people were going crazy and it’s just wonderful to see that there’s so much passion for Ferrari, for F1 of course, in the world and that it’s growing all the time.

“It’s clear that to have the greatest driver of our generation in the most successful team is just something crazy. So yeah, I can’t wait to be able to fight on track with him, that’s for sure.”

Ocon was at the Ferrari factory in Maranello at the same time as Hamilton as the 2025 Haas driver drove the simulator.

Haas have a technical partnership with Ferrari, one that not only includes the American team using Ferrari engines and other parts such as the gearbox and suspension, but also their resources. As such they have access to Ferrari’s simulator.

That is expected to change in the months or years to come as last year Haas entered a new partnership with Toyota that will see the Japanese carmaker help Haas create their own simulator.

“We never had a simulator on site in Banbury, ever,” team principal Ayao Komatsu told the media including PlanetF1.com. “We’ve only got a very limited number of personnel.

“Trackside engineers, we’ve got what you see on the trackside and there’s not many people behind that.

“So imagine in between races doing a simulator session in Italy, I cannot ask my UK-based guys to come back from those 24 races and then spend another 10 weeks in Italy to do simulator sessions.

“Without this partnership, it’s very difficult for us to have a simulator programme.

“One, we don’t have the hardware, so we need to find the hardware, we need to buy hardware, we need to install it, then it takes ages to get that simulator up and running and to get good correlation etcetera.

“TGR has expertise in the simulator, both for themselves and for their customer projects, so they have the hardware and they have the expertise, in terms of operation, in terms of cueing – all the aspects of a simulator operation.

“So, again we are going to be taking the benefit of that through this partnership.”

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