Hamilton photographed in London in February, with Aroma the stallion Credit - Scandebergs for TIME

On Valentine’s Day, Lewis Hamilton enters a sprawling studio space in northwest London and intently stares at the magnificent creature standing off in the distance.

“Sh-t,” says Hamilton to no one in particular. “I’m nervous.”

Soon enough, however, the seven-time Formula One world champion overcomes his anxiety and is standing face-to-face with a shiny black stallion named Aroma. He pets his nose, massages his neck, generally spreads his hands all over Aroma’s thick coat. He is doing his allergies, the source of his initial fear, no favors. But Hamilton, a literal knight, is enamored, peppering the horse master with questions. Where’s Aroma from? (Portugal.) Can he sleep lying down? (Yes.) How much does he weigh? (About 1,300 lb. Only a few hundred less than Hamilton’s race car.)

He’s throwing health caution to the wind in order to commemorate his much ballyhooed move from Mercedes, where he won six of his seven F1 driver titles, to the venerated Scuderia Ferrari HP race team: a photo of himself positioned in front of an actual black horse standing on his hind legs, mimicking the Italian automaker’s famous logo. Like Hamilton, Aroma—who is retired but still does the occasional photo shoot—has an impressive resume, including appearances in Robin Hood and Maleficent, ads for Hermès and Burberry, and a Dua Lipa video; he is joined by Theo, a stunt horse you might recognize from Bridgerton, among other things. “This is going to be such an iconic picture,” says Hamilton while trying on outfits for the shoot. “Super timeless.”

That depends, of course, on what comes after. At 40, Hamilton is aiming to not only win a record eighth F1 driver title—cementing his status as the greatest F1 driver to ever live and ending the longest-ever championship drought for the most storied race team on the planet—but also fulfill a lifelong dream. His move to Ferrari, announced before the 2024 season, was shocking worldwide front-page news: he had suited up for Mercedes for more than a decade, helped build a more diverse workforce there, and hoped to someday acquire an ownership stake in the team. It seemed he would ride into the sunset with the Silver Arrows.

Hamilton had other ideas. “You can’t stand still for too long,” Hamilton tells TIME, in his first in-depth interview about his decision to leave Mercedes for Ferrari. “I needed to throw myself into something uncomfortable again. Honestly, I thought all my firsts were done. Your first car, your first crash, your first date, first day of school. The excitement I got by the idea of, ‘This is my first time in the red suit, the first time in the Ferrari.’ Wow. Honestly, I’ve never been so excited.”

During the 2024 F1 season, Hamilton, out of respect for Mercedes—with whom he was still under contract and racing—didn’t talk much about the switch. The situation was awkward and unprecedented. (Picture LeBron James suiting up for the Los Angeles Lakers knowing he’d be playing the following year for a rival, like the Boston Celtics. Exactly. It would never happen.) All sides appear to have handled it as professionally as possible: Hamilton ended a 945-day losing streak by winning his hometown race, at Silverstone in Britain, in July before winning again in Belgium three weeks later. Meanwhile Carlos Sainz, the Ferrari driver whom Hamilton is replacing this year, helped Scuderia finish second in the constructor, or team, standings, just a few points behind 2024 champion McLaren.

Hamilton’s road to the title record won’t be easy. Some critics have questioned Ferrari’s strategy of signing an aging driver, whose best days could very well be in the rearview. They’ve wondered whether Ferrari’s more interested in marketing than winning—Hamilton is still F1’s most popular driver, by a mile, as well as an internationally known cultural figure with a hand in fashion, film, and business. (He’s co-chairing the Met Gala in May alongside Colman Domingo, Pharrell Williams, A$AP Rocky, and Anna Wintour; LeBron James is honorary chair.) Plus, a slew of younger drivers like reigning four-time champion Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, 27; McLaren’s Lando Norris, 25; and Hamilton’s new Ferrari teammate, Charles LeClerc, 27, could keep him off the top of the podium.

“The old man is a state of mind,” says Hamilton. “Of course your body ages. But I’m never going to be an old man.”

The 2025 F1 campaign, which kicks off in Australia on March 16, comes laced with intrigue. Hamilton sits at the epicenter. Ferrari is religion in Italy; when the team wins an F1 race, the bells of the Church of St. Blaise in Maranello, the small city near Bologna that houses Ferrari headquarters, ring in celebration. So Hamilton’s quest to end Ferrari’s agony, while breaking the individual title record set by Michael Schumacher—who won five straight titles with Ferrari from 2000 to 2004—will be appointment theater. Meanwhile, Hamilton is co-producing, along with Jerry Bruckheimer and others, an F1 movie, aptly called F1, that is almost literally a Brad Pitt vehicle. The film, which comes out in June, plus a competitive race for the championship, could deliver a jolt to the sport’s popularity, especially in the U.S., where F1 has boomed but flattened out a bit, given Verstappen’s predictable dominance.

A Hamilton championship in red, in the twilight of his racing life, would be nothing less than one of the greatest mic-drop moments in sports history. “I don’t know if I can find an adjective to describe that,” says American racing legend Mario Andretti, the 1978 F1 champion who raced for Ferrari in the early ’70s. “Nothing is missing in his career. But oh man, how better can you describe your career after that? Oh my God, he’d be the king of all kings.”

Two weeks before the stallion photo shoot, Hamilton is striking golf balls into a simulator at an indoor club on the banks of the Thames. (He has a pronounced slice.) He doesn’t golf much these days, but Hamilton being Hamilton—a man who has taken full advantage of this sport’s jet-setting ways to become one of the world’s most prominent collectors of influential people—he last played a round with actor Tom Holland, a.k.a. Spider-Man. His other golf partners have included Samuel L. Jackson and Kelly Slater, the surfing GOAT. He was once supposed to play with another GOAT, Michael Jordan, but when Hamilton got to the course, he says, Jordan “didn’t end up being there.”

As we’re taking swings, I ask Hamilton if he’s checked out TGL, the indoor golf competition founded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy that just launched its first season in the U.S. He hasn’t. I explain some of the particulars—it’s a team league, ESPN is showing it on weeknights—before it sounds familiar. But Hamilton is involved with so many projects—movies, art, fashion lines, the Denver Broncos, a pet-food company, a plant-based burger chain with Leonardo DiCaprio—that he can’t quite remember whether he poured some money into this new outfit. “I might have,” he says, with a laugh. (He did.)

Hamilton takes a break from golf, reclines on a couch, and orders a latte before sharing the story of how he arrived at this moment. It began a long time ago, when he was a kid growing up in public housing north of London. His first Ferrari memories have stuck with him. He would drive Schumacher’s car in racing video games. The Ferrari replica featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—the 1961 250 GT California Spyder—is still, to this day, Hamilton’s favorite. “That’s the ultimate retirement car,” he says. “I can just see myself with Roscoe, him with a scarf and goggles in the seat next to me, driving down the PCH.” (Roscoe, Hamilton’s pet bulldog—who, like his owner, is vegan—has an Instagram account with 1.1 million followers.)

McLaren signed Hamilton to a driver’s deal in 1998, when he was 13. In 2006, Hamilton won the championship in what is now known as Formula Two. “I did have the bit of red on my helmet,” he says. During that F2 season, and the one prior in F3, Hamilton raced for team principal Frédéric Vasseur, whose management style and ability to recruit top engineering talent to his lower-level operation impressed the young driver. Hamilton figured Vasseur would be a F1 leader one day.

Hamilton won his first F1 championship in 2008, his second season with McLaren. He competed there for four more seasons before jumping, in 2013, to Mercedes, a middling team that Hamilton lifted to championship heights. Through it all, Hamilton maintained cordial relations with Ferrari leadership. He’d walk past the Ferrari garage at races, say “ciao” to the mechanics, and hear them say “vieni Ferrari” (come to Ferrari). Around 2018, Hamilton met with Ferrari chairman John Elkann. Both sides expressed a desire to see Hamilton in red. But by the end of the 2020 season, Hamilton had four straight championships with Mercedes. He had no reason to jump ship. “If I’m really honest, I had accepted the fact that I’m probably not going to drive for Ferrari,” says Hamilton. “I was OK with that.”

After the 2021 season, Hamilton nearly walked away from racing. He—and millions of his fans—felt his record eighth driver title was stolen from him, when during the final race of the year, in Abu Dhabi, an official’s controversial decision allowed Verstappen to overtake Hamilton in the last lap and clinch his first title. Hamilton ultimately refused to quit without a fight, but he failed to win a single race as Verstappen cruised to another pair of championships. Hamilton signed a two-year extension with Mercedes in the summer of 2023, but the deal allowed him an option to leave after one year.

Meanwhile, true to Hamilton’s prediction, his de facto coach in the minors, Vasseur, took over an F1 team in 2016. Before the 2023 season, he was hired for a new team-principal gig—at Ferrari. Vasseur got wind of the loophole in Hamilton’s new deal—“He told me at one stage,” says Vasseur. “Good news”—and aimed to sign an agreement with Hamilton before the 2024 season. He wanted his drivers under contract last year, LeClerc and Sainz, to be free of whispers regarding their status. So while Hamilton was at his home in Colorado in December 2023, he got a call from Vasseur asking him to join Ferrari starting in 2025. “I remember getting off the phone and, like, almost shaking,” says Hamilton, who’s now almost shaking while recalling the moment. “I was like, Oh God!”

He told a friend who was with him about the call; they both sat in silence on a bathroom floor in shock. “I was like, Holy sh-t,” says Hamilton. “I literally just signed with Mercedes.” Breaking up with a team that felt like family was far from a no-brainer. And he didn’t have much time to decide. “It was a lot to take in, and my emotions were really high,” says Hamilton. “So I honestly had to go for a walk.” He left the house for an hour to decompress.

Hamilton then spent a few days meditating. He was leaning toward Ferrari. “My eyes felt really calm and present,” he says. “This is the right thing for me.” When he’d switched from McLaren to Mercedes all those years ago, he solicited too much advice. Here, he confided in just a few family members and trusted friends. “One cannot discount the Ferrari influence on the sport, especially through the eyes of a child,” says Mellody Hobson, co-CEO of Ariel Investments and the former chair of the Starbucks board, who’s very close to Hamilton. During negotiations, after every phone call with Ferrari, he’d jump around like a little kid.

“We’re in a time of reimagining the future, reimagining what really dreaming is about,” says Hamilton. “I’m going to Ferrari, man, and that’s the biggest dream.”

Not everyone is so thrilled. The day after he informed Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff of his decision was Hamilton’s annual paintball outing with his race-team mechanics. When he arrived, he was too nervous to get out of his car. “These are guys I’ve been with so many years,” says Hamilton. He eventually stood on top of a table to address his decision. His squad appeared understanding and supportive. But they let him have it in paintball. “They lit me up, hard,” says Hamilton. “It was so painful.” At one point, he was hiding behind a barrel shooting at the other team when he was struck from behind. A member of his own squadron had nailed him. “Freaking guy,” says Hamilton.

They laughed about it afterward and managed to get through the season. “There is no bad blood,” says Hamilton. “Absolutely not. We won so many championships.” (Mercedes declined to comment for this story.) Andrea Kimi Antonelli, an 18-year-old from Bologna, will take Hamilton’s place in the Mercedes lineup. “They have all the ingredients to win world championships, and they will win more world championships,” says Hamilton of Mercedes. “I have no doubt.”

In a book published in November—Inside Mercedes F1: Life in the Fast Lane—Wolff says Hamilton’s move “helps us because it avoids the moment where we need to tell the sport’s most iconic driver that we want to stop ... We’re in a sport where cognitive sharpness is extremely important, and I believe everyone has a shelf life.” The comments caused a stir, and Wolff clarified that Hamilton is still “very sharp.”

Hamilton insists Wolff’s remark doesn’t bother him. He points to athletes like Tom Brady and LeBron James who’ve achieved success into their 40s. “Don’t ever compare me to anybody else,” says Hamilton. “I’m the first and only Black driver that’s ever been in this sport. I’m built different. I’ve been through a lot. I’ve had my own journey. You can’t compare me to another 40-year-old, past or present, Formula One driver in history. Because they are nothing like me. I’m hungry, driven, don’t have a wife and kids. I’m focused on one thing, and that’s winning. That’s my No. 1 priority.”

He also dismisses criticism from the broader racing community. Former F1 team owner Eddie Jordan said in a December podcast that it was “absolutely suicidal” for Ferrari to drop Sainz from its roster, given the strong working relationship between him and LeClerc. (Sainz will now race for Williams.) “I’ve always welcomed the negativity,” says Hamilton. “I never, ever reply to any of the older, ultimately, white men who have commented on my career and what they think I should be doing. How you show up, how you present yourself, how you perform slowly dispels that.”

Others, including former Ferrari driver Jacky Ickx, have suggested that Ferrari has signed Hamilton primarily for his commercial value. “I think it’s really unfair to Lewis, some of the comments saying, ‘This is a marketing operation,’” says Elkann, the Ferrari chairman. “Truth said, Lewis doesn’t need that. Ferrari doesn’t need that. What we need to do is win championships and do great things on the track. If that happens, what we can do outside of the track, in some ways, takes care of itself. There’s unlimited possibilities.”

The pressure, internal and external, Hamilton faces is immense. No F1 team owns more constructor titles than Ferrari, but they last won in 2008. Ferrari also owns the driver record, with 15, but the last Ferrari driver to win an individual crown was Kimi Raikkonen, in 2007. Ferrari fans are so passionate that they go by their own name, the tifosi. At the Ferrari museum, not far from the team’s 9.3 million-sq.-ft. campus in Maranello, Italy, pilgrims often start crying, or propose marriage, in the Hall of Victories, which showcases the team’s championship cars and more than 100 trophies.

One night in early February, at the Ristorante Montana, which displays a trove of Ferrari memorabilia in its dining room, Andrea Puttini, a seller of building materials from Naples, is outside enjoying a smoke. “In Italy, we say it’s not important if you speak bad or speak good about something,” says Puttini. “The importance is that you are talking about this. And Hamilton, just for being here, he lets us talk all over the world about Ferrari.”

Hamilton connected with as many of his new co-workers as possible during his first visit to Maranello in January, shaking hands until his arm was pulsating. “The amount of ciaos and grazies and piaceres I was saying, aye aye aye,” he says. After his first test run, he went out to greet the supporters lining a bridge that overlooks Ferrari’s private racetrack. A few weeks later, a fan decked out in a red Ferrari shirt and cowboy hat cut down a tree to allow the tifosi a better look at a Hamilton practice.

Hamilton first spotted himself in a Ferrari suit while in, of all places, the loo; he was washing his hands and looked up into the mirror. “I’m in red, I’m like, Whoa!” he says. He paused for a moment to take in the reflection. He liked what he saw. “The suit looked so good on me,” says Hamilton, laughing. “I’m like, Damn.” When seated in a Ferrari race car for the first time, he closed his eyes when the engine started and smiled. “The vibrations are different,” he says. He let them course through his body. “You just wonder how that feels,” Hamilton says. Now he knows. “It’s a really, really special moment.”

Still, Hamilton is well aware that Italian sports fans have not always been so welcoming of Black athletes like himself. He competed in karting races there in his younger days, starting at around 12, and experienced racist abuse, just as he had in England. He prefers not to go into details. “I don’t want to dwell,” he says. But he’s heard the racist chants directed at Black soccer players in particular. “I’m not going to lie, it definitely crossed my mind when I was thinking about my decision,” he says. “Like in so many things, it’s often such a small group of people that set that trend for many. I don’t think that it’s going to be a problem.”

Ferrari’s diversity—or lack thereof—was Hamilton’s more pressing concern. In the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, as part of the worldwide sports protest movement against racial injustice, Hamilton started the Hamilton Commission to offer recommendations for more Black representation in U.K. motorsports. Mercedes launched its own diversity initiative in the months that followed and began hiring personnel from underrepresented groups, including Black engineers. “I did think, Oh my God, I’ve finally got a more diverse working environment that we’ve built over time,” says Hamilton. “And now I’m going back to the beginning of my time with Mercedes, where it wasn’t diverse.”

Along with every other F1 team, Ferrari signed a Diversity and Inclusion charter in November. While the new Trump Administration has made a point of attacking diversity—the President has signed a series of executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—Hamilton, for one, remains locked in. “I’m not going to change what he does, or the government does. All I can do is try to make sure that in my space, in my environment, I’m trying to elevate people,” he says. “There’s going to be forces along the way that don’t want that, for whatever reason I can’t fathom. That doesn’t stop me. It is a fight that we’ll just keep fighting.” Hamilton is confident that Ferrari is committed to inclusion.

Vasseur, Hamilton’s new boss, agrees that it’s important, though as he fiddles with a binder clip in an office at Ferrari headquarters, where trade secrets are so closely guarded visitors must place stickers over their mobile-phone cameras (red ones, of course), he suggests that it may not be his top goal. “It’s not politically correct, but first is performance,” he says. “I’m keen to go into the direction of diversity and so on. We are doing our best effort. We are trying to push in this direction, but I want to build up the best team.”

I show Vasseur, who hails from France, a photo I found online: it’s him and Hamilton some 20 years ago, celebrating a win. He shows me some photos on his own phone, of his children, who are now grown, with Hamilton. He’s enjoying the walk down memory lane. But, he says, “We can’t be sentimental.”

Switching teams is difficult for any driver. The steering wheel, the cockpit, the terminology, they’re all different. “I’m literally learning a completely new book,” says Hamilton. F1 regulations allow limited practice time in the new car. He’s made strides in his Italian, thanks to lessons, but he’s by no means fluent. It took Hamilton more than four months to win a race in his first season with Mercedes. What gives Vasseur confidence that Hamilton will accelerate that learning curve?

“I could reply like a book and give you something that you want to write,” Vasseur replies. “But at the end of the day, at this part of the season, the feeling, the first time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, will be nothing compared to race one in Australia. You will forget about everything that happened before. It’s all about pure performance.”

While Hamilton swears his devotion to Ferrari, his schedule has remained plenty full. A Fashion Week and red-carpet regular, he has his own production company, a Dior line, and other enterprises. He says he’s in the preliminary stages of developing scripts for a comedy—it doesn’t involve racing—and a film pertaining to pets. (That’s all he’ll offer.) But the biggest thing on the horizon, besides of course the 24 Grand Prix races in the season, is the upcoming F1 movie.

Tom Cruise had first connected Hamilton with director Joseph Kosinski because Hamilton was interested in an acting role in Top Gun: Maverick. Kosinski was ready to bring him on board, but Hamilton was still fighting for championships with Mercedes and couldn’t afford the time commitment. Cruise screened the movie, which grossed $1.5 billion worldwide upon its 2022 release, for Hamilton in London. “I was crying a bit inside,” Hamilton says. “Ah, that could have been me!”

So when Kosinski called Hamilton about his F1 project, Hamilton jumped at the chance to be a producer. Early in the process, he took Pitt, who plays a veteran F1 driver in the film, for a drive around a track near Los Angeles. “He gave Brad the scare of a lifetime in a lap,” says Kosinski. “Brad was clawing at the windows, begging to get out.” Hamilton was also part of the casting process and offered instructive feedback. “The notes are so detailed,” says Bruckheimer. “‘When you’re going into that next turn, you have the car in second gear, it should be in third. I can hear it. I can hear the sound of it.’” He pushed for Hans Zimmer, composer of The Lion King, Gladiator, Dune, and other hits, to score it. His close relationship with F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali, a former Ferrari team principal, helped the filmmakers gain access to F1 tracks and races to shoot scenes. “He opened all those doors for us into that world,” says Kosinski. “We would not have been able to do this without him.”

Hamilton is predicting box-office success. “It’s going to blow away anything that’s ever been done in Formula One before,” Hamilton says. The Netflix behind-the-scenes docuseries, Formula 1: Drive to Survive, has been properly credited for expanding F1’s popularity, especially in the U.S. Hamilton believes this movie will compel viewers from all different backgrounds to become fans, or even pursue a career in F1. “Netflix has been huge,” he says. “This is going to be even bigger, on more of a global scale.” While F1 might not count as art-house fare—“I don’t think we set out for it to be, like, an Oscar-winning movie,” says Hamilton—he’s promising a memorable experience. “The goal is to make people feel good, to bring people in, to inspire people,” he says. “We want you to leave the cinema and be like, ‘Wow, that was freaking wicked.’”

But even with his creative juices flowing, he’s as energized as ever to drive. In other words, unlike Aroma, whose presence does not seem to have triggered Hamilton’s allergies at all, he has no plans to slow down. “What I can tell you is, retirement is nowhere on my radar,” says Hamilton. “I could be here until I’m 50, who knows.”

Hamilton believes that he and LeClerc are the strongest team pairing in the sport and that Verstappen is “absolutely” beatable. “I know exactly where the North Star is,” says Hamilton. “I know where I need to go. I know how to get there. It’s far, and it’s going to be tough to get there, but I know I’ve got all the ingredients, all the people, an amazing team around me. So it’s how much you want it. And I can’t express to you how much I want it.”

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Set design by Thomas Bird; styled by Eric McNeal; grooming by Yuko Frederiksson and Angela Rivera; horse wrangling by Steve Dent Stunts; production by Rosco Production

Write to Sean Gregory at sean.gregory@time.com.