Martin Brundle feels Lewis Hamilton could take an early retirement from F1 if his form doesn't improve

Martin Brundle feels that Lewis Hamilton could potentially take an early retirement from F1 if his form doesn't improve. The 7x F1 champion had a disastrous race in Hungary, where he could only qualify in P12. What made it even worse was that his Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc was in pole position.

The 2025 F1 season has not gone the way Hamilton would have hoped. He joined Ferrari with the expectation of fighting for the title. As it became clear very early in the year, the team didn't have the car capable of doing so. While that killed any hopes of a title charge, what has followed has been quite disappointing.

For a while, Lewis Hamilton has found it hard to adapt to the car. When the adaptation process was complete, the driver had still not been able to close the gap to teammate Charles Leclerc. In the first 14 races of the season, the driver has only outperformed his teammate over one weekend, and that was in Silverstone.

Other than that, it has been one-way traffic. With a poor race and poor qualifying in Hungary, a track where he has won eight times, Hamilton was quite downbeat when he met the media. Looking at his demeanor and the kind of performance the champion had, Martin Brundle felt that the driver might not last the two years at Ferrari if this is his level of performance. In his Sky Sports column, he wrote,

“He sat in the car in parc ferme post-race for what seemed an age, was very downbeat in interviews again, and then declined to attend a stewards’ enquiry about a rather ambitious move Max Verstappen made on him during the race in the blind and fast Turn 4, in which Lewis chose to drive off the road to avoid contact."

He added,

“The summer break couldn’t be more timely for Lewis to have a reset. It’s painful to observe this great champion in so much strife, and we have to expect that he can weather the storm and return to form given his talent and experience, but otherwise I simply can’t see him enduring two more seasons at Ferrari, or anywhere else, like this.”

Martin Brundle claims Lewis Hamilton wanted to punish himself with "useless" quote

On Saturday after a bad qualifying, Lewis Hamilton said to the media that Ferrari should think of changing drivers as his performance continues to not be at a good enough level. Talking about the moment when Hamilton said this, Brundle felt that this was just the driver wanting to punish himself in front of the media for the kind of weekend he had. He wrote,

“Lewis Hamilton struggled for ultimate pace in qualifying, and with the pack so close he would start only 12th when his team-mate Leclerc was on pole. He would then describe himself as ‘useless’ in post-qualifying interviews and suggest the team should change the driver. That was best left unsaid, but he obviously wanted to openly punish himself."

Lewis Hamilton still has a contract that continues until 2026 with an option to extend it to 2027. Whether the driver would be at Ferrari for that long is certainly a question that many have started to ask.