The daughter of the last Italian to win the F1 drivers' championship with Ferrari has warned that Lewis Hamilton's career will end poorly.

Patrizia Ascari, whose father Alberto was the last Italian to win the drivers' championship (in 1952 and 1953) before Kimi Antonelli wrapped up the 2026 title in Mexico City on Sunday, offered a gloomy prediction about the team her father used to drive for.

Ascari, the sport's first two-time champion, died at Monza in 1955 after crashing in a Ferrari test session. His daughter was just eight at the time, and she doesn't seem to have especially fond memories of the team from Maranello.

Of the legendary Enzo Ferrari, she told Il Giornale: "I never met him, he never came to our house. He wasn't a family friend."

Ascari: Ferrari will never win again

She is, however, a fan of one Italian fixture in the sport her father used to dominate: new champion Antonelli, the first Italian champion of the sport since her father in 1953.

"He's fantastic," she said of the sport's youngest ever title-winner.

"Kimi is cute, friendly, young, smiling. I don't know who wouldn't like him. He's magnificent."

"Before him," she added, "I liked Hamilton, but poor thing, he ended up at Ferrari. He met a bad end."

There aren't an awful lot of people in the world who would say 'poor thing' about someone going to drive for the most famous team in motorsport in the twilight of their career, but Ascari justified her comment with a pretty strong follow-up.

"Ferrari will never win again."

While that seems almost impossible across the history of the sport, the Prancing Horse have blown past their previous worst run of 16 years without a constructors' championship (1983-99), which will stretch to 18 seasons when Mercedes officially wrap up the 2026 crown - quite possibly this Sunday in Brazil.