“I can’t believe you guys screwed me like that”, Lewis Hamilton had said during an angry rant on the team radio at the Dutch GP two years back. The Silver Arrows racer had ended that season without a single Grand Prix win. In fact, even in 2023, race wins did not come for the seven-time World Champion. The last time Lewis appeared competitive enough to vie for a record-breaking World Championship was in 2021. Since then, it has been a downhill road for the Briton as Max Verstappen has completely dominated F1 in the last few years.

Now, Lewis is nearing his 40s but he has shown no signs of slowing down. So, in February of this year, he took the leap of faith to exit Mercedes, seeing that the team had not helped him win a single Grand Prix in over 2.5 years. He announced his switch to Ferrari in a shocking revelation to the whole of the F1 world. “One of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make“, Lewis Hamilton said while describing how he decided to leave the team he has been a part of since 2014.

Following the Briton’s announcement regarding his future at Ferrari, the speculations started on Mercedes sabotaging his races. It went as far as an anonymous email being sent to several F1 journalists which claimed that the Silver Arrows were performing a “systemic sabotaging” of Hamilton’s results. While Lewis vehemently denied those claims, doubt crept into the back of his fans’ minds regarding their idol’s experience at Mercedes.

Perhaps, all of this has pushed Hamilton even further towards severing his 12-year-old bond with Mercedes. And former F1 Champion Damon Hill supported this as he told talkSPORT, “I think it’s a learning [experience]. The whole new environment is a big one. I think it’ll be stimulating for him–he’ll come in reinvigorated and I don’t think he’ll look over his shoulder.”

Thus, Hill views the $100 million a year Ferrari deal as a fresh page for Lewis Hamilton after a “stale” experience at Mercedes. But does the former Williams racer believe Lewis can win an eighth World Championship?

Hill claims Lewis Hamilton can still win his 8th title despite the ’21 Abu Dhabi “anomaly”

Lewis Hamilton is the only racer, apart from the German F1 legend Michael Schumacher, to have won 7 World Championships in the sport. And he had come very close to snatching a record-setting 8th title in 2021 when Max Verstappen was his main Championship challenger. The close fight between Lewis and Max had gone on to the very last race of the season–the 2021 Abu Dhabi GP. However, that race was controversial enough to go down in the history books as the then-FIA Race Director made a faulty decision that denied Hamilton his eighth World Championship.

Since then, Lewis Hamilton’s form at Mercedes has had a steep fall. But Damon Hill believes this will change once the Silver Arrows racer moves to Ferrari. Hill commented, “I would prefer if a Brit is at the top of the tree in that department. I was rooting for him [Lewis Hamilton] but the anomaly of Abu Dhabi and the, you know, the tantalizing lost Championship…Um, it wouldn’t be great if he could recover that in a Ferrari, it would be a tremendous story.”

Thus, Lewis Hamilton has just landed a huge backing from former World Champion Damon Hill. The Briton has also wished that the new Ferrari experience will “reinvigorate” him–but do you think his prediction about Lewis winning another Championship might be right?