Schumacher to Ferrari, Hamilton to Mercedes, Verstappen to Red Bull. None of them was obviously right at the time.
Formula 1 careers are usually remembered through championships, wins and rivalries. Some of the biggest turning points happen before the driver gets in the car.
Choosing the right team at the right moment can define an entire career. A move that looks irrational in one season can look inevitable five years later. A safe decision can leave a driver stuck in midfield machinery, while a gamble on the right project can create a dynasty. Even the smartest decision still needs timing and luck.
Over the last 30 years three moves stand out, because they changed the shape of Formula 1 as well as the careers of the drivers involved.
None of them was guaranteed to work, which is the interesting part.
When Michael Schumacher joined Ferrari for the 1996 season he was already the biggest prize in Formula 1, having just won back-to-back World Championships with Benetton in 1994 and 1995.
Ferrari had not won the Drivers’ Championship since Jody Scheckter in 1979. The team had history, money and prestige, and had spent years failing to turn those advantages into consistent championship success. In purely short-term competitive terms, Schumacher was leaving a championship-winning environment for a team still trying to rebuild itself.
The attraction was bigger than driving a red car. Schumacher later explained that Ferrari’s difficulty was part of the appeal: he was not looking for a situation where victory was expected immediately. Ferrari gave him the chance to help create something rather than inherit it.
Ferrari was not only signing a driver. Jean Todt was constructing an organisation around him. Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne, both central to Schumacher’s Benetton success, eventually followed him to Maranello. Together with Todt and Schumacher they became the core of the group that transformed the team.
The move was not Schumacher joining Ferrari so much as Ferrari rebuilding itself around Schumacher.
This part tends to get forgotten in hindsight, because Schumacher did not arrive at Ferrari and immediately dominate.
He won three races in his first Ferrari season in 1996, without the championship. He fought for the title in 1997 and ended the season disqualified from the standings after the collision with Jacques Villeneuve at Jerez. He challenged again in 1998 and lost to Mika Häkkinen. In 1999 he broke his leg at the British Grand Prix and missed much of the season; Ferrari won the Constructors’ Championship that year, but the Drivers’ title had to wait again.
At one point people inside Ferrari questioned whether the project was working. Jean Todt later recalled management wondering whether Schumacher himself might be the wrong driver for the job.
It is worth sitting with how differently the move would be remembered if the story had ended there.
In 2000 everything aligned. Schumacher beat Häkkinen and delivered Ferrari its first Drivers’ Championship in 21 years, then won four more. From 2000 through 2004 he took five consecutive titles, one of the most dominant stretches in the sport’s history.
Not in the sense that Schumacher was lucky to win five championships. That required extraordinary driving and an extraordinary organisation. The luck was in the timing of the pieces coming together.
Ferrari found the right technical leadership. Schumacher’s trusted collaborators joined. The structure matured, reliability improved, and the competitive cycle shifted. Schumacher had to stay committed long enough for that transformation to happen.
A slightly different sequence of events, another injury, a key engineer leaving, or Ferrari losing patience after 1998, could have produced a very different career. Instead he went from being a two-time champion to the defining driver of an era.
Lewis Hamilton’s move to Mercedes may be the clearest modern example of a decision that looked questionable in real time and brilliant in hindsight.
Hamilton had spent his entire F1 career with McLaren. He had nearly won the championship as a rookie in 2007 and won it in 2008. McLaren was still capable of winning races in 2012. Mercedes was not: the works team had returned to Formula 1 in 2010, and by the end of 2012 it had one victory and a fifth place in the Constructors’ Championship to show for three seasons.
Hamilton left anyway. Plenty of people thought he was making a mistake, and he later said that so many people told him the decision was wrong.
Part of the answer was dissatisfaction. McLaren had speed, but reliability problems and operational mistakes had repeatedly cost Hamilton results. His retirement while leading the 2012 Singapore Grand Prix became one of the moments associated with his decision to go.
The rest was what Mercedes was promising. Ross Brawn and Niki Lauda sold him on the long-term plan and the scale of the investment being made ahead of the new engine regulations. Hamilton later said he was drawn to the idea of joining a struggling team and applying what he had learned elsewhere, and that he was convinced by the plan to scale up and fight for championships.
He was not choosing the better current car. He was choosing the future he believed in.
Hamilton joined Mercedes in 2013. One year later Formula 1 introduced its turbo-hybrid power-unit regulations, and Mercedes got that change spectacularly right. The team became the dominant force of the era. Hamilton won the 2014 and 2015 titles before adding 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, six Drivers’ Championships with Mercedes and seven in total.
It looks almost obvious now. It was anything but obvious in 2012.
Hamilton made an informed decision. He listened to the plans, believed in the investment and took the risk. He could not know with certainty that Mercedes would dominate the new rules, because no driver can know that.
A major regulation change is one of the great sources of uncertainty in Formula 1. One manufacturer gets the engine concept right and another gets it slightly wrong. One aerodynamic philosophy works and another creates problems that take years to fix.
Had Mercedes produced merely a good power unit rather than the benchmark one, the move might still have been respectable without rewriting the record books. The decision created the opportunity and the regulation cycle magnified it, which is a distinction worth keeping. Good career decisions put a driver in a position where good luck can matter.
Max Verstappen’s move was different from the other two. He did not leave one organisation for another; he was promoted inside the Red Bull system, and it happened suddenly.
Verstappen had entered Formula 1 with Toro Rosso in 2015 at 17. He scored points in only his second Grand Prix and showed enough speed that speculation about a promotion followed quickly.
Four races into 2016, Red Bull acted. Daniil Kvyat was demoted back to Toro Rosso after a difficult Russian Grand Prix and Verstappen was promoted to partner Daniel Ricciardo. Red Bull also knew that rival teams, Mercedes among them, were interested in Verstappen and wanted him secured. It was a ruthless piece of management and one of the most consequential mid-season driver changes in modern Formula 1.
Verstappen was still extraordinarily inexperienced. When he arrived at Red Bull for the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix he had completed 23 F1 races. His new teammate was Daniel Ricciardo, a proven Grand Prix winner and one of the most highly regarded drivers on the grid.
Red Bull believed Verstappen’s ceiling justified the risk, and rather than easing him into the role later in the year it acted immediately. That is one of the defining characteristics of the Red Bull driver system: opportunities arrive very quickly and can disappear just as quickly.
Verstappen qualified fourth on his Red Bull debut, behind Ricciardo and the two dominant Mercedes drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. On the first lap Hamilton and Rosberg collided and eliminated each other, and a race Mercedes had been expected to control was suddenly open.
Red Bull split its strategies between its two cars. The split favoured Verstappen, who took the lead and spent the closing stages holding off Kimi Räikkönen. At 18 years, seven months and 15 days he became the youngest Grand Prix winner in Formula 1 history, in his first race for the team.
In part. Two faster Mercedes cars eliminated each other and the strategy calls fell his way, which created the opportunity. Verstappen then had to execute: preserve his tyres, withstand pressure from Räikkönen and make no significant mistake in a car he had barely driven. Luck opened the door and performance walked through it, which is a fair description of most great sporting careers.
The Spanish Grand Prix did not instantly turn Red Bull into the dominant team. Verstappen had years of development ahead of him and Red Bull had to work its way back toward championship contention. The promotion changed the trajectory of both.
By the end of 2017 Red Bull had committed to Verstappen as its long-term future. He became the team’s central driver and won his first World Championship in 2021, followed by three more in a row.
Timing mattered again. Had Red Bull waited until the end of 2016, another team might have tried harder to sign him. Had the two Mercedes not collided in Spain, the debut might be remembered as a promising fourth place. Instead the first weekend created a mythology around the partnership straight away.
Schumacher, Hamilton and Verstappen made, or benefited from, very different moves, and all three illustrate the same principle: the best career move is not always the move to the fastest car available today.
Schumacher joined a famous but struggling team because he believed he could help build it. Hamilton left a proven winner for a project whose biggest advantages had not appeared yet. Verstappen accepted an early promotion into a team where the pressure and the competition both increased overnight.
Every one of those decisions involved uncertainty, and in every case later events amplified the choice dramatically. That is where timing enters a Formula 1 career. A driver does not control:
They control only the decision available to them at that moment.
It is tempting to look backward and conclude that Schumacher should obviously have gone to Ferrari, that Hamilton should obviously have joined Mercedes, and that Verstappen obviously belonged at Red Bull. None of those statements was obvious when the decision was made. Each move was a trade-off between what was known and what might happen next.
Talent determines how much a driver can do with an opportunity. Timing determines which opportunities exist at all.
Sometimes a career-defining decision is signing with the strongest team. Sometimes it is leaving the strongest team. Sometimes it is being ready when a phone call arrives four races into the season.
| Move | The case for it being the boldest |
|---|---|
| Hamilton to Mercedes | Most counterintuitive on the information available at the time |
| Schumacher to Ferrari | Largest rebuilding challenge to take on |
| Verstappen to Red Bull | Fastest consequence: promoted mid-season, won on debut |
All three careers could have turned out very differently, which is why the moves still get argued about.
Would you leave a championship-winning team to rebuild Ferrari? Would you leave McLaren for a Mercedes team that had won one race in three seasons? Would you accept a mid-season promotion to face one of the strongest drivers on the grid?
In Chasing P1 those are the decisions that shape your career. You start at sixteen, choose your opportunities season by season, and find out whether they lead to championships or to a very different kind of F1 career. Free, no sign-up, plays in a browser.
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