It's been a bruising end to the Lewis Hamilton/Mercedes relationship in 2024, but Abu Dhabi at least provided a glimmer of what Hamilton can still do.

His drive through the field after a freak Q1 exit to fourth was the drive of a "world champion" reckoned his team boss Toto Wolff.

But Wolff has also said everyone has a shelf-life after Hamilton announced his exit, and Hamilton himself has implied something has been wrong with his car on occasion when he has struggled much more than team-mate George Russell - especially in qualifying.

We asked our team to consider what Abu Dhabi and the 2024 season as a whole told us about this relationship, Hamilton, his place in the sport, what comes next as he heads to Ferrari and Mercedes takes on an 18-year-old, and more.

Qualifying deficit is a real concern

Ben Anderson

Abu Dhabi didn't really tell us anything we didn't already know - we know how well Hamilton can race and look after the Pirelli tyres. He was perhaps flattered a bit too by being the only driver on that alternate strategy of starting on the hard tyres - plus taking the benefit of the Verstappen and Bottas induced chaos on lap one.

The worry for Hamilton, and Ferrari, will be the increasingly consistent pattern of him being slower than George Russell in qualifying over their three seasons as team-mates.

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That probably tells us Russell is every bit as good, if not better, than Mercedes thought he was when it chose to finally promote him from Williams. But it also creates the nagging doubt - a doubt that has nagged Hamilton at times too - that he might not be the driver he once was.

Hamilton has flip-flopped between defiantly insisting the car is to blame, to questioning his previously ironclad self-belief. That's what having a quicker team-mate can do to a driver when they struggle to find an answer.

Russell is probably the toughest team-mate Lewis has faced since his rookie season alongside Alonso at McLaren in 2007. Hamilton will likely find the 2025 Ferrari a bit easier to drive than the 2024 Mercedes was, but I highly doubt he's going to find Charles Leclerc an easier team-mate than Russell.

So next year I expect we'll all finally discover the answer to that crucial question that has troubled Hamilton: does he still have what it takes to properly cut it at the sharp end in ground-effect F1?

Abu Dhabi: Exactly what Hamilton needed

Scott Mitchell-Malm

Remember Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur saying in Qatar he wasn't worried about Hamilton's speed because of his drive in Las Vegas?

Something about this performance from Hamilton feels more significant than that second place.

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Maybe it's the fact Hamilton has looked so convincing from start to finish in Abu Dhabi. His Q1 exit was a freak event that was totally out of his hands. He's been the faster Mercedes driver throughout and raced brilliantly on an alternative strategy to everybody else.

Did that end up being the best strategy? It looks that way. But Hamilton had to make it work. He got a great launch when he could have lost ground to those starting on grippier tyres. He opportunistically grabbed a couple of extra places in the first lap melee. And he methodically worked his way forward from there.

Once again, tyre management and race pace was absolutely where it needed to be.

And of course he finished with a flourish passing team-mate George Russell around the outside on the final lap. Did Russell fight as hard as he could have? No.

But he didn't make it as easy as he might have either.

This is one of Hamilton's most convincing weekends all season long and it couldn't have come at a better time for him or Ferrari.

2025 is finely poised

Gary Anderson

It’s the end of the longest season in F1 and any team or driver performance over the last few races always builds momentum into what in effect will be a very short winter.

So if we take that into account, McLaren is looking strong, it’s not just its out-and-out performance it’s the consistency of performance, this consistency far outweighs Ferrari, Red Bull or Mercedes.

Lando Norris still has that little bit of extra speed on Oscar Piastri and earlier in the season, I said that Norris wasn’t aggressive enough over that first race lap whereas Piastri was. Norris now seems to have fixed that.

McLaren has a very good understanding of what these ground effect cars need to be fast and on top of that two very competitive drivers both for pole positions and race wins.

Ferrari were the second best team over the latter part of the season and next year Lewis will be in red alongside Charles Leclerc. Both of them had exceptional drives in Abu Dhabi, Leclerc from 19th to 3rd, Hamilton from 16th to 4th.

My worry is that Lewis has been doubting himself lately, he has been out qualified by Russell and with all the best will in the world he is not getting any younger.

Over one lap, Charles Leclerc is no slouch so for Hamilton it’s all about how he fits into his new environment and how the season kicks off.

Driving for Ferrari is no easy feat, if you are winning, the Tifosi love you, and if you are not, they are not frightened to let you know it.

If Ferrari doesn’t give its drivers a car to do the job, I’m not sure Lewis is mentally strong enough to take that on the chin.

Hamilton isn't a no-brainer upgrade on Sainz

Val Khorounzhiy

Hamilton has had a great Yas Marina weekend - he should've outqualified Russell and he outraced Russell handily. Ferrari is not getting a dud of a driver, obviously.

But I don't know how you can say with certainty that Ferrari has upgraded its line-up, on the basis of 2024.

Sainz, too, was good in Abu Dhabi, and has been generally convincing over this last stretch of races. He and Hamilton were 12 points apart after Spa - they finished the season 67 points apart. The machinery has contributed to that, obviously, but anyone who believes that is the only reason has not been watching closely enough.

When you look back at 2024 as a whole, there is a case for putting Sainz in the top five as far as driver performance is concerned - and no such case for Hamilton. Over a race stint you'd still take the latter, but over one lap you'd, on current evidence, absolutely take the former. And there's a gap of nearly 10 years here. 

It's to Sainz's credit that he has made Ferrari's big-name coup less of a no-brainer than it seemed 11 months ago.

He's proven role model credentials

Jack Benyon

At times this year I’ve been annoyed with how Lewis Hamilton has conducted himself amid the adversity of not gelling with this year’s Mercedes. Given the success it has helped him to, I think the team has deserved better.

But unlike so many other drivers on the F1 grid, he’s been at pains to acknowledge that over the last week, saying in multiple different interviews things like “I hope the good and the highs far outweigh the negatives and how I've handled it or behaved”, saying he wouldn’t apologise for being human but acknowledging times when he hasn’t held his own high standards, and has promised to work on his shortcomings for the future.

Hamilton is the perfect role model in that sense.

He’s not always perfect, he’s flawed, he gets things wrong in the heat of the moment, he hasn’t always picked the right fights and he hasn’t always done a good job of managing his emotions.

But he is human, and he wears his heart on his sleeve. In the end, he always knows what he has done wrong and is incredibly reflectful. For that, he is a great, great champion. And someone F1 won’t truly appreciate until after his career is over.

2024 has added an unfortunate asterisk

Josh Suttill

While 2022 and 2023 didn't produce any race wins like 2024 did, ultimately 2024 leaves an unfortunate asterisk over Hamilton's Mercedes stint.

It's been Hamilton's worst ground effect era season and the first one where he'd been undeniably the weaker performer across the whole season than Russell.

So even though 2024 doesn't take away any of the championships they've won together it does stick out as 'Hamilton's worst Mercedes year was his last'. Compare that to other great eras like Michael Schumacher ending his Ferrari stint with a heroic title failure in 2006 and even Ayrton Senna-McLaren, while there was no title there was no doubt that Senna played any role in that.

And how Hamilton performs in 2025 will alter the perception of it too. Either 2024 will be seen as an odd outlier, more easily underwritten when assessing this era, or it will be a clear marker of the first season where Hamilton was past his peak to the point where it prevents him from delivering an A grade season.