Assessing Hamilton's remarkable decade as a Mercedes F1 driver

Next Monday will be the 10th anniversary of something unfortunate happening to Lewis Hamilton: the Mercedes chapter of his storied Formula 1 career getting off to rather a bad start…

After just 15 laps behind the wheel of the W04 challenger Mercedes had produced for 2013 – Hamilton’s first season with the Brackley-based squad after departing McLaren – he locked up going into Jerez’s Dry Sack hairpin. Hamilton skated across the gravel and went straight into the barriers. He climbed out, the damage relatively minor, but it came just a day after Mercedes had been forced to cut short its running due to an electrical gremlin with Nico Rosberg at the wheel.

Quite the down note on which to start one of F1’s most famous success stories. What followed, starting from what was to be a mainly challenging 2013 campaign, were six world titles, 82 wins and 77 poles for Hamilton. For Mercedes itself, the run included eight straight crowns after it vaulted to the front of the F1 pack when the V6 hybrid era rewrote the established formbook from 2014 onwards.

The tale is well known. So too, that Hamilton opted to leave McLaren in part because he was frustrated with its underachievement in a period when Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull had swept away the records the Briton and the team he’d joined aged 13 in 1998 had established when making an instant and instantly impressive full arrival on the F1 scene.

This time a decade ago, no one could have predicted precisely how pivotal a decision Hamilton had made when it came to cementing his F1 legend. Mainly because, for all his 21 wins and 2008 world title with McLaren, he simply hadn’t yet reached that status.

Famously, in a sport so complex and covered as motorsport, there are many ways to define greatness. But in F1 one such criterion must be winning titles with multiple teams. It’s as relative as all the others – for instance, harming Jim Clark’s loyalty with Lotus and boosting Juan Manuel Fangio’s five titles with four teams in a time when success swung more rapidly from one squad to another.

But in the modern era, multi-team champions are restricted to Michael Schumacher and Hamilton. By that definition alone, Hamilton’s 10 years at Mercedes can be said to have forged his F1 legend. As ever, things are more complex in F1, but in this case they’re all the more impressive too.

The W04 with which Hamilton began his Mercedes career in 2013 was no match for Red Bull, but did shade Ferrari and Lotus for second in the constructors'

Photo by: Emily Davenport / Motorsport Images

Hamilton’s first 10 seasons with Mercedes, which were bookended by the tyre-chomping W04 and porpoising-plagued W13, can be said to span four distinct mini-eras. First, the narrative was all about Hamilton moving on from his upbringing at McLaren. The former de facto Mercedes works team had brought him through the ranks, building his skills with a comprehensive and oft-forgotten testing programme that further elevated his outstanding natural talent. But it piled on the pressure.

Hamilton was required to win at every junior level or face being dropped. It worked. He added Formula Renault, Formula 3 and GP2 crowns to his British, European and world titles in karting, and he arrived in F1 with a reputation as a fine racer that was immediately enhanced by his around-the-outside pass on Robert Kubica and Fernando Alonso at the first corner of the 2007 season.

But comments from team supremo Ron Dennis left Hamilton feeling too much like ‘just an employee’ during his McLaren tenure – let alone the breakout star in the mould of his hero Ayrton Senna that he wished to become. And at the same time, his status as a homegrown driver meant the Hamilton of his early F1 career was too often reliant on McLaren making big calls in races, which can be said to have cost him a stunning rookie title when he slid off on worn tyres in the wet in China 2007.

Little wonder that he recalled that moment as understanding “most often, my gut feeling is right” when in similar conditions in Turkey 13 years later, as he opted not to pit for fresh inters and scored a famous win while sealing his seventh title. It showed how far he’d come, the leader he’d grown to become.

Comments from team supremo Ron Dennis left Hamilton feeling too much like ‘just an employee’ during his McLaren tenure

Reports from 2013 indicate that Hamilton was as enthusiastic about his new F1 home as anyone embarking on a huge career switch would be expected to be. But he was fully embracing what leaving well-defined surroundings at McLaren could mean – that at Mercedes he was given the freedoms to establish his many outside interests in a way that ran rather contra to the Dennis tight ship at Woking (albeit by then helmed by Martin Whitmarsh, Dennis gone for the first time from McLaren, in part because his relationship with Hamilton had broken down).

By 2014 Mercedes insiders were explaining how well Hamilton had begun to put roots down within the squad, his bond with team boss Toto Wolff – who hadn’t been involved in signing Hamilton – flourishing. But with the new title pressures from the dawn of the V6 hybrid era, his once close relationship with Rosberg broke down. The next mini-era of Hamilton’s Mercedes decade became one that descended into all-out intra-team war at times, with Wolff struggling to calm the waters, all while F1’s latest superteam was gathering massive momentum.

Once Rosberg had retired, after giving all he had to beat Hamilton to the crown in 2016, F1 itself changed – the ugly, low-downforce chassis were switched out for the ultra-high-downforce cars in which Hamilton’s legend was finally cemented. These rule changes brought Vettel’s Ferrari squad into play, while Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo gave Mercedes regular problems from aboard their Red Bulls too. Mercedes’ advantage over its opposition shrank in car performance terms, but Hamilton’s output went the other way – he saw off Vettel’s challenge in 2017, and then stunned him in Ferrari’s best chance to end its long title drought in 2018.

Hamilton didn't have to wait long to secure his first title with Mercedes, beating Rosberg to the 2014 crown in the Abu Dhabi finale

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro/LAT Photographic

While Ferrari in particular eased Hamilton’s path in 2019, he was surely at the peak of his powers. When Mercedes’ dual-axis-steering-armed W11 restored the team’s pace advantage to early V6 hybrid era levels in 2020, Hamilton set records that will likely stand for a generation or more – including F1’s fastest-ever pole lap at Monza.

Then came 2021, which demonstrated F1’s cyclical nature once again, as the Hamilton-Verstappen title fight for the ages represented the latest instance of a young pretender taking on an established master. Unlike, say, the enigmatic Kimi Raikkonen or wily Fernando Alonso, Hamilton has been rather an ever-changing character in the F1 spotlight.

Against Verstappen in 2021, F1 witnessed Hamilton unleash his absolute best at times, while also altering his tried-and-tested post-Rosberg approach of avoiding unnecessary collisions to match Verstappen’s ferocity. But for the Abu Dhabi officiating shambles, his efforts would have been rewarded with an eighth world title and previously unknown F1 glory.

Given their F1 stories are now forever intrinsically linked, what better place than the team for which he signed as a 28-year-old to understand how he has evolved within its embrace?

“We all like to think we develop as we go through our careers,” says Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ director of trackside engineering. “If you knew what you know today 10 years ago then I think we’d all have been more successful!

“Lewis, as a driver, puts an awful lot of effort into looking for where that edge is going to come, and a lot of that constant searching for how he can emerge into a new season as an even better driver than the one that we had before is just born out of his love of winning. He doesn’t want to be beaten and he puts an awful lot of effort into that.

“He’s very engaged with the engineering process now, he’s talking to all [engineering departments] – on the aerodynamics side, vehicle dynamics side. He’s very familiar with all the people within the team and he knows where to go to ask questions and give feedback.”

There’s an interesting subtext to Shovlin’s words. The inference being that when he joined Mercedes, Hamilton was not as engaged with its engineering processes. Of course, this is also all relative. The team and its capabilities have grown with its considerable successes and, even back when he joined the team, Hamilton firmly insisted that no one set up his cars for him. Indeed, one of the features of his Rosberg rivalry was Hamilton’s clear frustrations that his team-mate could benefit from seeing his data traces and therefore adapt his own approach accordingly.

Shovlin says Hamilton's work ethic is not in question

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Throughout his entire time in F1, Hamilton has made it clear that he’s not a driver who lacks motivation. The painful defeats of his fallow years at McLaren can be seen to have contributed to the relentless way he has racked up wins and titles with Mercedes. And after losing to Rosberg in 2016, particularly given the way circumstances beyond his control contributed to that defeat, it is clear to see how Hamilton made it his business to overcome such misfortune.

After watching Rosberg gather momentum towards his 2016 title tilt with three walk-off wins at the end of 2015, that memory was recalled when Hamilton made a rapid return to action after contracting COVID-19 in late 2020. In 2015 and 2020 he paid considerable attention towards improving his qualifying results to make life easier come race days, where in any case his racecraft brilliance shone time and again.

“That loss would have been difficult for Lewis and you can go back through that year and say a lot of that was not down to Lewis, it was an unfortunate engine failure at certain times that set him back,” Shovlin says of Hamilton’s focus post-2016.

“I think the mechanism by which he is always looking to improve has always been there, the difference is he has realised how much more he can draw out of the team and the people around him to help that learning and that improvement phase. And that’s the thing – that he’s become more and more comfortable and settled within the team, and confident and happy to go and speak to different people about different areas. He’s just drawing more effectively on the resource.

“Very often you’ll see Lewis as being one of the last drivers, if not the last driver, to leave the paddock. He’s just going round and round, making sure he knows what it is he needs to do” Andrew Shovlin

“But, ultimately, if he finds an area that he thinks he’s not good enough at, he just solves it by hard work. The amount of work a driver has to do these days out of the car, the homework – ‘understanding what the tyres are going to do, what do I need to be doing to manage them well, how am I going to get them at the right window in qualifying?’ – that workload is much higher than it’s ever been.

“And very often you’ll see Lewis as being one of the last drivers, if not the last driver, to leave the paddock. He’s just going round and round, making sure he knows what it is he needs to do.”

Hindsight’s benefit means we can see that the concerns many F1 observers had about Hamilton’s Mercedes switch back in 2012 – for instance “off-track lifestyle impinging on his driving”, as described in the 4 October 2012 issue of Autosport magazine – ended up being very wide of the mark. Ross Brawn, in signing Hamilton at the start of his Mercedes era, was unconcerned and proved very right in the end. These things go together, however. Mercedes had to produce the best car, and in return Hamilton give his top form from his best circumstances.

And it can be said as Hamilton’s 11th Mercedes campaign finally starts rolling in the next few weeks that he has done exactly that. In 10 years at Mercedes, exactly as he set out to, Hamilton has truly become his own person.

Hamilton has even flattered Mercedes, winning with its “diva” W12 car in 2021

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

At times, Hamilton has even flattered Mercedes, winning with its “diva” W08 and W12 cars of 2017 and 2021, and not wilting against the Vettel/Ferrari and Verstappen/Red Bull challenges of the more recent silver years. Flaws remain such as the odd massive gaffe (think Imola and Baku 2021, or Spa 2022) in his overall brilliant game. These happened early on at McLaren and can even be said to be increasing in frequency again, suggesting F1 is now witnessing Hamilton returning from his ‘peak’ years.

Plus, Hamilton retains something of a mercurial streak – he insisted in one press conference that he has a poor memory, yet recalled the specifics of radio messages and certain car upgrades in another. At Singapore last year, he went out of his way to explain that it wasn’t in the city state that he’d decided to join Mercedes after his McLaren gearbox failed in 2012, but rather while “sitting in Thailand in a very peaceful place and it really came to me that I was going to take this leap”, having been approached by Brawn and former non-executive Mercedes chairman Niki Lauda. The narrative, for some reason, needed clarifying.

For now, in anticipation of the W14’s unveiling at Silverstone in two weeks’ time, F1 is about to see exactly what 10 years at Mercedes has made Hamilton in terms of resilience. The generation-bridging battle with Verstappen didn’t last into a second consecutive season thanks to the W13’s various deficiencies last year, although it was clear in Brazil that, given one chance to really race each other, things haven’t moved on for either from 2021.

Hamilton admitted late in 2022 that he’d not been driving at his previous best level, but insisted that was in part due to having to focus his efforts into addressing the problems baked into Mercedes’ first ground-effects car and, in his words, “geeing people up” at his team to make the required gains. Given his latest Mercedes team-mate George Russell made the W13 a winner, these efforts were rewarded as part of the typical team-driver entanglement F1 has long been about.

Something that Hamilton has been unsettled by all through his career – braking instability stealing confidence to hang onto the oversteer he and few others can really handle – certainly occurred in 2022. Taking all that into account, his season high points (Paul Ricard, Zandvoort, Austin and Mexico City) were all the more impressive, even if they didn’t produce Russell’s glittering result, and Hamilton went winless for the first time at Mercedes and in F1 overall.

By now, Mercedes knows what it has in Hamilton the driver. But what of the championship’s many fans and Hamilton the superstar?

His story, compared with many of his well-funded and well-connected peers, is truly compelling. Hamilton remains F1’s only black driver and came from a humble background to dominate what in so many ways is an ‘elite’ sport. That alone is impressive. Add in his wild and fast driving style – one not as evident during his Mercedes chapters as it was in his McLaren days with lighter cars running robust rubber – and it’s clear why he’s popular.

The magnitude of that reach is seriously impressive too, with Hamilton possessing a network on Instagram alone that can reach a billion people. And it’s worth considering how his story has flourished through the social media age compared to the champions who came before – winning Hamilton new fans while also exposing him and them to the toxic elements from other partisan camps. He has exploited social media’s power to connect with people directly, and it has given him confidence to address narratives he feels he must for whatever aim.

Hamilton is F1’s only true megastar – as comfortable in the cockpit as in the company of chat show hosts or royalty

Photo by: Michael Potts / Motorsport Images

All in all, Hamilton is F1’s only true megastar – as comfortable in the cockpit as in the company of chat show hosts or royalty, while working on fashion lines, music as XNDA, and building a team ownership portfolio in and out of motorsport (including part-ownership of NFL team the Denver Broncos). He’s charming too, while remaining wary of media scrutiny and ready to rebuff it at will, sometimes with jarring narrative shifts.

Hamilton knows and understands his messages and their power to inspire, which has taken on a whole new meaning at Mercedes. He’s banished the days where he made ill-thought-out references to Ali G in the context of sporting penalties or published McLaren’s Spa 2012 qualifying data readout on Twitter. Hamilton has used his platforms to champion many social and environmental causes, and has established his Hamilton Commission and Mission 44 initiatives with his own funding.

Only explained by our horribly polarised current world, to some Hamilton is a hypocrite for being a successful racing driver highlighting society’s ills. But in a purely narrative-considering way, he’s all the more interesting for it. In terms of morality, it’s inspirational. In 2020, he admitted to Autosport that having the repeated conversations to make real change could be “energy-sapping”, but he admirably shows no signs of stopping.

Mercedes deserves enormous credit for how it has allowed and assisted Hamilton to become his true (three-pointed) star. It won’t be forgotten how grateful the now-38-year-old was that the team, with the colossal corporate structure of its manufacturer backing in consideration, painted its cars black in 2020 and 2021 to highlight his desire to improve diversity in motorsport at a time when the world was reeling from the COVID pandemic. In fact, it’s clear that he has concerns about leaving his now-well-established Mercedes home and F1 overall.

Mercedes deserves enormous credit for how it has allowed and assisted Hamilton to become his true (three-pointed) star

“It is going to be really, really hard when I stop racing,” Hamilton said recently on the On Purpose podcast. “I have been doing it for 30 years. When you stop, what is going to match that? Nothing is going to match being in a stadium, being at a race, being at the pinnacle of the sport and being at the front of the grid or coming through the grid and the emotion I get with that. When I do stop there will be a big hole, so I am trying to focus and find things that can replace that and be just as rewarding.”

That point is a way off yet, with Hamilton saying late last year that he planned to sign a “multi-year deal” with Mercedes. Wolff reckons that will be done when he’s back from the off-season relief of holidays and then training ahead of the final year of his current contract, “physically being back in Europe, sticking our heads together, wrestling a bit and then leaving the room with white smoke after a few hours”. That’s quite a change from 2012, when Hamilton’s then-management company XIX Entertainment contacted Red Bull and Ferrari on his behalf only to be rebuffed. Now, he negotiates his own contracts.

There will be at least one more Mercedes mini-era to come for Hamilton. Given all that has already been established, it will be compelling – for him and for us.

There will be at least one more Mercedes mini-era to come for Hamilton

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images