Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen will continue to be the drivers for Ferrari in 2018.
Sergio Marchionne the Italian team boss hinted that their discussions with Lewis Hamilton did not give any results.
Marchionne mentioned that “Ending his career with Ferrari would be a privilege, but up until now we did not get very far with Lewis. I will not talk about the future.”
Hamilton’s contract with Mercedes ends after 2018 season and thus he could move to Ferrari only for 2019 season. The three times world champion has driven for Mercedes all his F1 career. But occasionally he has admitted his admiration for the Italian team’s cars.
For 2018 Marchionne has confirmed the Ferrari drivers line is unchanged, “We have two great drivers in the house and do not want to talk about alternatives.”
“I think I have been public on the Sebastian issue, if he wants to stay he is more than welcome to stay. And in the case of Kimi, we are pretty well sure…we know he wants to stay. Hopefully, we will bring them on soon.”
There has been a lot of speculation of Raikkonen future in Ferrari. So when asked about the Finnish driver’s future he said “Probably better than 50 percent chance. We will wait and see…”
Ferrari has a tradition of announcing their next season drivers in September. so we will know for sure after the Monza race.
So will Ferrari continue the tradition? we asked Marchionne, and he said, “That’s what I heard. I heard Maurizio [Arrivabene] was going to do that. I have no planned timing, it is early enough. This is the 11th race out of 20 so we have a lot of races to go.”
For many years Ferrari has been building up a pool of younger drivers. We can see the fruits of that work in Antonio Giovinazzi and Charles Leclerc. Apart from these two, we have also heard of Max Verstappen, Daniel Ricciardo, Sergio Perez and Romain Grosjean being part of the driver development program.
