As he turns 40 on Tuesday, Lewis Hamilton is hearing plenty of voices scornful of his decision, announced almost a year ago, to leave Mercedes, his home for more than a decade, and join Ferrari for the 2025 season. For a man whose record of seven F1 world titles is matched only by Michael Schumacher, and whose total of 105 grand prix wins is unequalled, he will step into one of the red cars for the first time knowing that he has everything to prove – and not just to the Italian team’s global army of supporters.

Obstacles and challenges are nothing new to Hamilton, who has been listening to criticism from the day he first ventured into a historically all-white sport, a mixed-race child whose father worked three and sometimes four jobs at a time to pay for his kart racing.

From his cutting-edge wardrobe and his friendships with rappers to his use of a private jet and his decision to live in Monaco rather than Stevenage, Hamilton’s activities have provoked those nursing a barely concealed resentment of his presence in the world of grand prix racing, attracting more publicity than his work for charities including Unicef and Save the Children and his success in persuading Mercedes to replace their traditional silver bodywork, which goes back to the 1930s, with a new livery acknowledging the Black Lives Matter movement.

The current chorus of scepticism, however, is directed at his activities on the track. As the F1 championship prepares to celebrate its 75th anniversary, Hamilton’s new alliance with the sole surviving team from F1’s inaugural year is given an extra significance and is likely to provide a major talking point throughout the 24-race series, which starts with the Australian Grand Prix on 16 March.

Some are suggesting that he may simply be too old to compete with the currently dominant generation of Max Verstappen, Lando Norris, George Russell and his new teammate, Charles Leclerc, all of them in their mid-20s, not to mention the next generation – Oscar Piastri, Oliver Bearman, and Liam Lawson – already snapping at their heels.

In response, he can refer to the example of three drivers who won the world championship in their fifth decade. Nino Farina was a month short of his 44th birthday when he was crowned F1’s very first champion in 1950. Juan Manuel Fangio’s five titles came between 1951, when he was 40, and 1957, when he had turned 46. And Jack Brabham took his third championship in 1966, aged 40.

Hamilton could also point to a compatriot, Graham Hill, who was only 12 weeks shy of his 40th birthday when he took his second title in 1968. Only those ignorant of the sport’s history would claim that Farina, Fangio, Brabham and Hill raced in a less competitive era.

Some claim that age has already dulled Hamilton’s competitive edge. They look at 2022 and 2023, when he failed to win a single race in a dismal period for the Mercedes team. At the end of the 2024 campaign he wound up seventh in the drivers’ standings, two places below Carlos Sainz Jr, the man whose place at Ferrari he is taking. But he could still look back at two wins during the year, one of them – at a rain-hit British Grand Prix in July – evoking the memory of his most thrilling victories.

After that triumph at Silverstone he admitted there had been “some days since 2021 when I didn’t feel like I was good enough, of whether I was going to get back to where I am today”. The revelation of self-doubt was a reminder that on occasion his state of mind can affect his performance. In 2011, three years after his first title, turbulence in his life away from the track showed in his driving, which was unusually erratic, leading him into a series of collisions with his rivals, for which he took the blame.

What we are unlikely ever to know is how much the decision to reveal his move to Ferrari a month before the first race of 2024 affected his final season with Mercedes. It would be understandable for a team, even unconsciously, to put more of an effort behind Russell, whom they knew to be staying for at least two further years. To exclude Hamilton from discussions about future technical developments would simply be observing normal practice in F1, where design secrets are tightly held.

But Hamilton also remembers that people were queueing up to call him stupid 12 years ago, when he announced his move from McLaren to Mercedes. It was a bold decision to leave the team that had nurtured him since boyhood, guiding him through the steps necessary not just to reach F1 and to win grands prix but to capture the greatest prize of all.

McLaren represented Hamilton’s comfort zone. Mercedes, on the other hand, were a struggling outfit, three seasons into their full-scale return to F1 and still battling to match the top teams, despite the presence of Schumacher, the seven-times world champion, and a top technical group led by Ross Brawn, who had guided the German driver to his titles with Benetton and Ferrari.

Schumacher’s decision to retire at the end of 2012 allowed Niki Lauda, the team’s chairman, to lead the successful effort to recruit Hamilton, who joined up despite knowing that in three years Mercedes had won only one race.

It was Nico Rosberg, his new teammate, who took their first two victories of 2013. Hamilton had to wait for his debut Mercedes win until midway through the season, in Hungary, which was made to seem like a false dawn when Sebastian Vettel’s nine consecutive wins gave the championship to the Red Bull driver.

But, starting in 2014, Hamilton won six championships in seven seasons with Mercedes, the odd one out going to Rosberg. Another championship for Hamilton was thwarted by a bizarre – and, to many, outrageous – manipulation of the racing rules in the closing laps of the final race of 2021, handing the brilliant young Verstappen his first title.

Now Hamilton will be aiming, after four barren years, for that eighth title, to take him clear of Schumacher. If it comes, it will be in a car provided by the team with which the German took five of his seven championships. And just as Schumacher benefited from the presence of technical staff with whom he had already worked successfully in another environment, so the English driver can rely on the support of Frédéric Vasseur, Ferrari’s current team principal, a collaborator in his pre- F1 successes.

But at Ferrari there are no guarantees, even for multiple champions. Alain Prost, Fernando Alonso and Vettel each arrived, as Hamilton is doing, expecting to crown their careers with an additional title won as a member of the sport’s most glamorous team. Each left empty-handed and disillusioned.

The lure of becoming Ferrari’s 10th world champion, succeeding where those men failed, involves a risk to his reputation. But to win the title with a third team, in a sport where only Fangio took titles with more than two, would represent the most remarkable feat of his sporting life. Its pursuit is his last great gamble.