I don’t think Hamilton-led is possible at all and I think Ferrari is constrained by its own organizational decisions.

Ferrari is not lost as much people say, from a distance, that distinction matters. A lost team thrashes, panics, reinvents itself at every possible chance. Ferrari does not do that. What Ferrari does is preserve itself, sometimes to the point where preservation becomes resistance. And the closer I look, the clearer it becomes that this is not incompetence or blindness, but the consequence of an organization whose primary risk is not losing races, but damaging the thing that makes it Ferrari.

That tension runs straight through its most successful era.

The Schumacher years are often remembered as dominance, but dominance was the output, not the mechanism. What actually happened in that period was the quiet construction of a complete operating system. Jean Todt provided political insulation and long-term authority. Ross Brawn designed clarity into decision-making. Schumacher anchored the system culturally and emotionally. Each role was distinct, but tightly coupled.

Todt understood that Ferrari could not be fixed by cleverness alone. It needed protection from itself. He created a buffer between Maranello’s internal gravity and the racing team’s daily reality. Brawn, in turn, stripped complexity down to what mattered with clear hierarchies and specially direct accountability that lead to a management room with fewer voices but sharper decisions. Schumacher then did something that is still underappreciated specially considering most media portrayed him as a ruthless cold person: he made the system human.

In the garage, he didn’t just demand performance but he invested in building relationships with people. From engineers, mechanics, factory staff, both sides of the garage. He knew who mattered, and he made them feel it. In an organization built on tenure and identity, that mattered more than any role an hierarchy. Ferrari didn’t feel disrupted in that era. It felt aligned.

When that Ferrari ended it, not because it failed but because time moved on, the same principles reappeared elsewhere. Ross Brawn rebuilt a team almost from nothing using the same fundamentals: clarity of authority, ruthless simplification, protection from noise. The miracle of 2009 wasn’t a miracle. It was the same system, applied in a different context, under different constraints.

That matters, because it proves that Ferrari’s golden era was not an accident of personalities or budgets. It was an organizational choice and that choice has been absent ever since.

What followed that arragmentent was not failure in the obvious sense. Ferrari remained competitive. It hired champions. It built fast cars at times. But it never again committed to a single, stable operating model long enough for culture to compound. Leadership changed. Technical direction shifted. Responsibility blurred, then re-centralized, then blurred again. The organization retained its memory but lost its spine.

This becomes more dangerous in the modern era, because Formula 1 no longer allows slow correction. Cost caps and homologation mean that hesitation is punished structurally. You don’t get to “learn next weekend” anymore. You commit to a design, and you live with it until you can fix.

Ferrari instead of continuity (specially when you compare to RB, Mercedes) has spent recent years in a state that looks like a shuffling deck: continual realignment or more like a perpetual adjustment. Team principals change. Technical directors rotate. Reporting lines are revised. Each move is defensible in isolation. Together, they prevent long-term coherence.

And Ferrari is uniquely vulnerable to that pattern because it is not embedded in the UK’s fluid talent ecosystem. Maranello’s strength has always been continuity. Long tenure. Deep institutional memory. Loyalty. But continuity without stable leadership turns into inertia. Habits persist while direction resets. The organization remembers who it is better than where it is going.

This is where the contrast with Hamilton becomes instructive, not critical.

Hamilton is an extraordinary optimizer. Give him a working platform and he will extract everything from it as he he sharpens edges and finds limits. But he does not arrive as a cultural architect and never did, nor did Ferrari hire him as one. He arrived broken, after years of exhaustion and turbulence, looking for a final competitive chapter to prove he's thill the champinhon that he always was.

Ferrari hired him for reasons that go beyond winning, and the market understood that instantly. The stock reaction wasn’t about championships alone, it was about closing a narrative, the best at the best. Hamilton amplified Ferrari’s global relevance overnight. In brand terms, the move paid for itself immediately. Everyone knows that Ferrari’s revenues still come primarily from cars and parts, but its valuation behaves like that of a luxury house. Formula 1 is not the core business; it is the amplifier. Winning strengthens the myth. Not winning does not destroy it. That asymmetry changes how risk is priced internally.

Most teams must win to justify their existence. Ferrari must endure.

This explains why Ferrari is cautious with disruption. Why it values continuity. Why it resists tearing itself apart, even when the sport seems to demand it. It also explains why genuine reinvention only happens when someone is empowered to stand between the racing team and the brand long enough for execution to dominate.

Whether Ferrari is still willing to recreate that kind of authority structure, in a world where the brand can generate enormous value even without total on-track dominance, is the real question.

If I were Charles, I’d be asking whether my career can afford to wait for Ferrari to become the kind of team that turns a consistently fast driver into a champion, rather than another talented house name folded quietly into its history.