With the 2025 Formula One season entering the seventh game of this year’s World Championship, the distance from the legendary Ferrari is so short that the track, tour, from dino enzo e enzo e enzo e dino ferrari, feels like a horse racing victory and once a victory.

The most successful driver in F1 75-year history has 105 Grand Prix wins, the only racer to hit a triple-digit racer. Next month will be the 18th anniversary of his first victory, but the month after that will be the anniversary of his latest victory. It doesn't seem that long for mortals, but for superheroes who make a living it feels like driving into the abyss.

Unless, of course, Hamilton figures out how to successfully get his SF-25 hairpin away from that edge and finishes the podium on the present-to-present podium. The problem is that the greatest Ferrari ever, the greatest Ferrari team of the greatest F1 organization of all time, gave us no signs that they could do it.

Just ask the man himself. We do it every weekend of the competition.

There are a few words about the past three games of the seven-time world champion around the weekend, and he turned 40 in January:

“I didn’t go all weekend.”

“Not a second (I feel comfortable).

"It's obvious that this car can be a P3. Charles (Leclerc) did a great job today. So, I can't blame the car."

Lewis, are you full of hope? “Prayer is more like this.”

“We will continue to work hard, we only played six games, but we are struggling.

And the most convincing bombshell?

"It's just my performance. Not doing well. There's no reason. I just didn't do the job. I just didn't do well with me. So, I just had to keep improving...it's definitely not a good feeling."

This is also a strange feeling. Or at least past.

With Hamilton entering Imola, it's been 291 days since his recent victory, he was at the spa in July 2024. He inherited the victory after his then-leader teammate George Russell first captured the checkered flag, but was disqualified due to insufficient weight. However, Hamilton crossed the line for the first time on Silverstone three weeks ago.

Prior to these results, he suffered a 56 unwind streak, which could easily be the longest game of his career. Add to that his current 16-0 win, which is two of his last 75 attempts, while his former team is his former team, which is two in this year's Builders Championship, 47 points higher than Ferrari.

This is a racer who averaged nearly 7 wins per year from 2007 to 2021, with six wins in double digits, and all of them had multiple wins except one of these 15 seasons.

This is the spiral of an athlete, from someone who exudes confidence effortlessly in the past, making victory seem almost too easy to be noticeable to someone who is self-doubted. No fixed. Wave in the darkness. Looking at the crystal ball, you can only see the cracks. They don't feel good either.

But they also feel familiar to many others. Those who also face the harshest truth of car racing: one day, the victory stops.

Richard Petty stopped, winning his 200th NASCAR Cup Series victory on July 4, 1984, before ending his career in 241 powerless DREARK. It stopped AJ Foyt, who won his 67th IndyCar match in 1981 and then failed to win again on years of attempts. That even stopped Michael Schumacher, the Hamilton F1 Goat, who won seven titles in his final season in 2006, only four years later in an unretired season and ended his legendary career, with only one podium and one step to show three seasons of hard work before working to rebuild the then-Mercedes.

“I played at least 16 years a year and then I won zero in the last three seasons,” recalls seven-time NASCAR Cup series champion Jimmie Johnson, who has known Hamilton in different competitions over the years. “Man, once this momentum shifts and starts working with you, it’s hard to turn it around.

"It's hard to see what the problem is, or how to correct it, how to solve it. From a time point of view, I can see it now. I've had the same staff for most of my career and then there was a big change at the end, which is hard because now you have to start learning the clock again. Test your patience. It tests your fire.

The test of fire is very real. Like a bucket of cold water. Johnson recalls different stages of the test. He remembers those who questioned his fire "are angry" but then realize they are not wrong. Acceptance, then acceptance, perhaps what is missing is not just the learning curve for cars or new teams.

Rick Mears confessed: “The moment I knew I had done it, I remember it just like yesterday.” He shocked the open racing community in the United States when he retired at the end of the 1992 season, pulling away only a year from his record fourth Indy 500 victory. “Our whole career, when I woke up in the morning, my first thought was, ‘This is what we’re going to try today.’ Then one day, I arrived at the garage and asked the team, “What are we doing today? "I knew then that the fire was extinguished."

Mears was one of the lucky guys who recognized the flashing flames and walked away on his terms while he seemed to be in a winning mindset and drove for a team that won the game. For most people, this road is a long way to the desert until they have gone too far.

"You act the same way. You act the same way. You ask the same questions and have the same answers and rely on the same knowledge and experience as you always have, but you don't get the same results," explained three-time NASCAR champion Darrell Waltrip. He won 84 games, the fifth in history, but his Hall of Fame career lasted 243 and watched his self-owned team go bankrupt. "They say that the definition of insanity does the same thing over and over with the same result, but when it's the same thing as what you've done over and over for over 20 years and achieved the best results, what do they say? Why not keep doing it? Because one day, it has to come back again, right?

In order to defend those who have tried it, sometimes they do come back. See: People who many people think of as Nasca goats.

It's often forgotten now, but Dale Earnhardt's legendary Daytona 500 victory in the 1998s was his 100 victory from early 1996 to spring 1999. Then, as he overcomes health issues, he keeps it largely untreated, his team won his team, Richard Childress, who won five titles in the next increasing pains, he won five titles, after 2000, after 2000, after 2000, after 2000, which was the second place in 2000. Before the tragic death of the Tona 500 in that era.

"That's the hope that when you're stuck, one day it's going to hit again, and maybe you have a great moment." Helio Castroneves said he somehow resurrected the Indycar career, which was thrown onto a bunch of gasoline pavilions to win his fourth Indy 500 in 2021, his 2021 500 in 2021, his 2021 300 in 2021, his 3rd year after his 2021, his 3rd year. "We're talking about Hamilton and Formula One, right? Well, here's my conversation here with Fernando Alonso here (2017, 2019 and 2020 Indy 500s): "Hey, old guy, why are you still doing this?" ''

This fall marks the 20th anniversary of Alonso's two world championship titles. His last F1 win was 12 years ago this week. Yet he was still chasing behind his Aston Martin team at the age of 43, which never won the Grand Prix under the current guise. Why?

"Because we still believe we can," Castrovs continued, "this weekend, he will try to 500 for the 2500th consecutive time. this. 'Being the guy who put that team on the podium, that's the one that's hard to get there, and that makes the fight worth it. ”

“I won many games, some famous and some infamous,” said Damon Hill, the 1996 world champion and 22 F1 champion at the Miami GP earlier this month. When I won the game with Williams, it was amazing except for one of them. But when I won a team that had to be scrapped for Jordan, the rewards there were hard to describe. No one would call Ferrari Jordan, but if you can be a team struggling with it, no matter who it is, can verify their efforts.

For Hamilton, whether this is worth it, we haven't seen it yet, and may have not seen it for a while. For many people, the "road" is already around 2026. With summer on the way, Ferrari fades into the rearview mirrors further, with all focus shifting to the next generation of the F1, a lighter, more aerodynamicly active potential reset button for debut next season. Hamilton had already suggested his excitement.

But at the same time, it was ground. Those bad feelings. That self-doubt. Like everything in racing, only one victory will be a painful balm, with eyes pointing more in 2026 and beyond. Before Hamilton, it was a dream for many, a reality for many, Hamilton was a lengthy roster of champions including Alonso, who all came to Maranello to seek to do what Schumacher did. When wearing red, lift the World Championship trophy.

The last time anyone did this was Kimi Räikkönen in 2007, the same year a kid named Hamilton made his debut and quickly won four games.

"Whenever Lewis decides to hang up, he can look back, which is even more stating. His gut or his heart leads him to the conclusion that he may not see right now," Johnson said. "But for now, being one with the team. Leclerc, who has been on these cars for a few years, knows that system. Then, the next moment, you know, if his heart stays inside, he can spend that time there and that new gen comes around the corner for these guys, it's all going to be shaky."

If that is not the case, then the answer to our original question is easy. No, he won't win anymore. That fire will be put out.

But if Ferrari is indeed ready for 2026, this may just be one of the most compelling stories in racing history. The unicorn of an occasion, when the victory stops, but in some way violates one of the most powerful natural laws of car racing, starts again.

In other words, Lewis Hamilton did the last time he had done.