Hamilton exclusive: Why being F1's GOAT isn't the goal

As he turned back into the pitlane after winning the Eifel Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton put his helmeted head in his hands. His Mercedes W11 was passing underneath a gigantic LED screen showing his face alongside Michael Schumacher's - between them were emblazoned the words: "equal wins". This was the moment, nestled in a car coloured to promote a cause he cares about more than winning Formula 1 races, that Hamilton realised he had equalled a record many thought out of reach - 91 victories, Schumacher's total.

It's been eight years since Hamilton was announced as Schumacher's replacement at Mercedes. The result at the Nurburgring also put Hamilton on the brink of equalling his predecessor on seven world titles, a feat he accomplished at the Turkish GP.

In 2012, he chose to leave the team where he'd started out on his journey to Formula 1 aged 10, famously introducing himself to McLaren supremo Ron Dennis at the 1995 Autosport Awards. Hamilton had been frustrated by McLaren's reliability that season - four years since his first championship triumph, after which he'd seen Red Bull surpass the McLaren and Ferrari squads that had largely dominated the previous decade.

Niki Lauda, then Mercedes' non-executive chairman, convinced him to make the move. The manufacturer's potential was clear thanks to the looming switch to V6 hybrids, despite it being labelled a perennial underachiever as a works outfit since winning as Brawn in 2009. But Hamilton was additionally enticed by the chance to build something special at Mercedes, at a time when it had been noted that leadership was a missing aspect in his game. It's a familiar story for many successful drivers - the chance to rebuild a fallen giant or new prospect. But not all of them end up triumphant.

Hamilton and Mercedes, however, are still rewriting the definition of F1 success. Together they have scored 74 wins, matching another Schumacher-Ferrari record, that for driver wins taken with one team. They've added six world titles to Hamilton's palmares - with Mercedes taking every constructors' championship in the past seven seasons, and one more drivers' title going to Nico Rosberg in 2016.

Hamilton is the only consistent driving link since Mercedes became F1's dominant squad. Valtteri Bottas joined for 2017 and is a calming influence at the team, which had at times nearly descended into all-out intra-squad war before Rosberg's retirement following his title triumph.

Right now, Mercedes is an unstoppable force. Thanks to the coronavirus cost-saving measures that will carry over much of the current cars' designs into next season, there is no reason to expect that the team - which Hamilton is still known to call regularly, wanting to know the latest windtunnel and simulation numbers - will lose its position at the head of the pack looking into 2021. He loves Mercedes and it loves him right back.

"We wouldn't be able to deliver a car if not for the collaborative power that has been deployed since 2013 and we wouldn't have been able to get the results without exceptional drivers," says team boss Toto Wolff. "And in the same way, Lewis recognises that without the car that he has under him there wouldn't be any records."

The 35-year-old Hamilton is different from the 27-year-old who joined Mercedes. He has found more of himself at the team - it was clear to see that he had become a more rounded individual even before he became a vocal promoter of the world's pressing social and environmental issues - and given more freedom to enjoy and express his personality too.

Team insiders have suggested that since that title loss Hamilton has worked to avoid leaving anything on the table in his own overall performances, which leaves fewer chances for his rivals to steal a march and protects him from potential reliability dramas, which proved so costly in 2016

His answers here and in the usual Formula 1 press conferences, now as a senior F1 driver - even if he still feels the same age as rivals such as Max Verstappen in spirit - are generally eloquent and forthcoming. That's if he's properly engaged by the questioner or it's not immediately following an on-track disappointment. But a motorsport cliche is detectable: Hamilton is simply a more complete driver than he was in 2013.

The 'old' Hamilton still roared to back-to-back world titles once the V6 hybrid era arrived. But in the following season, a stinging defeat to Rosberg - famously losing points to unreliability, but also at times to his own poor starts, something his rival nailed - forced Hamilton to reconsider his approach.

After witnessing Rosberg's efforts to find an edge outside the car, the quest was to effectively become bulletproof in every area. Team insiders have suggested that since that title loss Hamilton has worked to avoid leaving anything on the table in his own overall performances, which leaves fewer chances for his rivals to steal a march and protects him from potential reliability dramas, which proved so costly in 2016.

"I am definitely one of those people that thinks the losses have made me stronger than the wins," Hamilton tells Autosport, when we ask if he draws motivation from defeats, citing that loss to Rosberg.

"I definitely say that the hardest races are the ones that you grow from most. And that's not only on the driver's side, that's also with all the engineers and mechanics - we feel it for days. And it definitely feeds you to come back and fight faster, harder the next time."

Since 2016, Hamilton is undefeated in the championship stakes. The seasons since then have included some of his finest career wins. It has been a mini era where, until Mercedes pulled away again in this campaign, the team's advantage was much smaller over its opposition, as Ferrari in particular provided a strong challenge.

There were his wheel-to-wheel passes to beat Sebastian Vettel at Barcelona and Austin in 2017, plus his charging drive through the pack from 14th on the grid at Hockenheim in 2018. Then, three races later, Hamilton defeated the faster Ferraris - with help from the spinning Vettel at the start, after Lewis had made a bold pass - in a thrilling duel at Monza, forcing Kimi Raikkonen to eat through his Pirellis.

Last year, he completed a massive 64-lap stint on medium tyres, versus the hards on Max Verstappen's Red Bull, to hold on for an emotional win at Monaco (six days after Lauda had died) and he wowed Mercedes with his battling recovery in Mexico after a lap-one clash with Verstappen.

His record and great individual performances - another example surely being his win at the Spanish GP earlier this year, where he reached a "clear zone" in the pursuit of perfection, en route to a commanding win - suggest a driver getting ever better through their peak years.

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"I'd be lying if I was to say that I wasn't improving," Hamilton says. "I mean, if I wasn't getting the results, and then perhaps it wouldn't be improving, but I definitely am having to... I can't stay still. This sport doesn't stay still, technology is constantly evolving."

The complex combination of F1's high-technology cars and the fragile Pirelli rubber - not a feature when Hamilton's career in the championship began, nor when Autosport turned 60 - means the drivers have to work immensely hard. This is masked by the planted nature of the high-downforce modern F1 monsters.

But Hamilton feels there may not be enough respect granted to the drivers, who in 2020 are quite possibly setting speed records that will not be matched again - at least not for a generation of cars given the move to cut downforce levels by 10% on the carryover designs for 2021.

"I think there's an under-appreciated workload that goes on for the people in the background and for the drivers in terms of interpreting the tools that we have," he explains. "The detail to which we go to try to adjust these small things - a millimetre here, half a millimetre there of ride, for the shift of the front end, whatever it may be. But each year, I get this new set of tools and have to study like anybody has to study to be on top of those things [and] try to be ahead of the [other] drivers.

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"I personally just don't think, 'Yes, I have six world titles'. I could just sit back on them and think, 'I'm pretty good'. But that's not how my mind works. My mind is like, 'Jeez, these guys are chasing me, how do I stay ahead? How do I stay steps ahead? How do I help push the team to stay steps ahead?' And that's a really big process, because we can easily go down the wrong road - if we rest on our laurels."

"If you look at last year, it made the races so much harder for me when I didn't perform to the best of my ability, generally, on the Saturdays" Lewis Hamilton

Hamilton clearly relishes the challenge of taking on a new generation of F1 talent, having won out, in terms of titles, in his own initial era, alongside Fernando Alonso, Kimi Raikkonen and Vettel. His seemingly relentless focus on ironing out weaknesses has been on show again in 2020, even if, he says, that's not a term he and his engineers ever use.

In 2019, Hamilton scored what was for him a paltry five poles. This glib description does seem appropriate given that he had taken seven, 11, 12, 11 and 11 in each year since 2014. After recognising this anomaly once he'd clinched his sixth title - Hamilton waits for a campaign to end before taking time to assess where he can find further gains - he made it an aim to readdress his qualifying form in the current campaign.

"If you look at last year, it made the races so much harder for me when I didn't perform to the best of my ability, generally, on the Saturdays," Hamilton says of his 2019 qualifying 'slump' (he still ended up with the joint-second highest pole total that year, shared with Bottas, two behind Charles Leclerc on seven).

"It just meant that the pressure was even higher for the Sunday, which I think is sometimes unnecessary pressure. So, this year, being able to work on that, with Bono [Peter Bonnington] and the engineers to make sure we're delivering better performances on the Saturdays, that's been a relief [in that it] makes Sunday generally, not easier, but just less pressured."

The result was 10 poles in 2020 - five more than Bottas, with Lance Stroll in Turkey and Max Verstappen at the Abu Dhabi finale the only other drivers to start from the front. Qualifying is another area where Hamilton has history; witness his outright pole record - currently 98 - and recent breathtaking illustration of the commitment that the W11 lets it drivers show with an incredible lap in qualifying at Spa. This was followed a week later by F1's fastest-ever lap: Hamilton's 164.267mph to take pole at Monza.

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"What impresses me the most is that as a human being he develops from year to year and the Lewis Hamilton that we see today has nothing to do with the Lewis Hamilton that I met in 2013," says Wolff. "[He's] getting better outside [and] inside of the car."

For Mercedes, what also sets Hamilton apart is how he has paired his quest for improvement and greater understanding with his phenomenal talent, honed through his years racing in the junior categories and pre-F1 debut testing with McLaren.

Citing the example of the 2015 Singapore GP, where Hamilton retired after his engine's intercooler disconnected from the plenum, causing a loss of boost pressure, Mercedes chief designer John Owen reckons that because "his unconscious brain is so connected to the car, it's basically part of the race car", Hamilton can do things, without thinking, that he can't explain.

In this case, a rare example of Hamilton's skills actually providing a bizarre disadvantage, his W06 wouldn't reach full power. But Hamilton wasn't pushing his throttle pedal to the maximum - because his unconscious brain was telling him the car was already giving all it had. In actual fact, he could have pressed the pedal further, but the boost issue was preventing the car accelerating fully.

"It took him probably a week of going through the data afterwards to realise that the throttle pedal would travel all the way - he just wasn't pressing it," Owen tells Autosport. "And it's truly amazing. Honestly, he'd have bet his whole fortune on the fact that wasn't
the case. That's just how coupled he is to the car."

Throughout his career, if there's one standout criticism of Hamilton's performances, it's that he has tended to let his head drop when he feels things are going against him. This was the case during his messy penultimate year at McLaren in 2011, not helped by the team being alarmed by his mental state in the midst of his personal problems, and was also an issue in 2016 against Rosberg.

Since then, Mercedes has been geared for harmony, which reduces the chances of this happening. The unsettled state that stemmed from his fractious relationship with Rosberg has been replaced by consistent dealings with Bottas.

The respect between the pair is clear. There have been no clear instances of intra-team on-track contact, aside from a small brush on the first lap in Hungary last year as they chased Verstappen. But contact between the Mercedes cars was sprinkled through the 2014-16 campaigns, most famously at Barcelona in 2016.

Recently, again at the Nurburgring, Hamilton and Bottas engaged in a thrilling battle at that race's opening two corners, which might have ended in disaster had the racing boundaries that Mercedes now insists on not been respected.

"I would say this year more than ever, we've shown that the best team is not just the team that's winning. It's also the team that's really looking in deep, and having the biggest global impact in the shift around the world" Lewis Hamilton

Respect towards Hamilton emanates from Mercedes overall. It has allowed him the freedom he desires to indulge his various interests away from the track, which has led to fashion lines, a seemingly budding music career as XNDA, and a celebrity status and social media presence that far outstrips any of his peers. He is an F1 promoter's dream in this regard, capable of reaching a billion people through his Instagram network alone.

But perhaps nothing encapsulates how far Mercedes will go for Hamilton than its current F1 challenger: the W11. This machine could yet go down as one of the championship's best-ever designs, and it is painted in a special livery, revealed on the eve of the season, to promote the global Black Lives Matter campaign for racial equality.

"I was honestly blown away that the team listened," Hamilton says of the decision process behind making the Silver Arrows into the Black Arrows. "[They] heard my case, opened their eyes and saw what was happening out there, and acted.

"A lot of people out there refuse to believe that there is social injustice, systemic racism. There are others out there that just refuse to believe it even if it slapped them in the face. So, I was really just incredibly proud.

"Not only are we the best team... I would say this year more than ever, we've shown that the best team is not just the team that's winning. It's also the team that's really looking in deep, and having the biggest global impact in the shift around the world. And I think, really, fighting for human rights is one of the biggest things that we can do."

Autosport and Hamilton are not in the same room when this interview takes place. We're in one of the freezing commentary boxes overlooking the Nurburgring's pit straight, with Hamilton and a Mercedes press officer speaking via Zoom in the paddock beyond the garages we're facing. But we made sure to be directly opposite Mercedes' garage, Hamilton's impressive W11 in sight.

Such is the way of 2020 thanks to the pandemic, which has upended so many norms, and the F1 season too. But, of course, any break from normality provides opportunity for reflection. This, allied with the growing thrust of the Black Lives Matter campaign, has made what will more than likely be the statistically most-monumental championship of Hamilton's career stand out.

Away from the track he has set up the Hamilton Commission, which aims to understand the reasons for the lack of black people working in motorsport and address the circumstances that have led to this situation, and he has made his first foray into motorsport team ownership, with the X44 squad that will enter Extreme E. Now, more than ever it seems, a driver who likes to "live life day-by-day because you just never know when your days are up" is thinking much further ahead.

Before the 2020 season started, Hamilton said winning this championship would mean more than any other because of the new, intense attention on racial inequality around the world this year. He has been instrumental in keeping that focus going within F1, even if he has found "keeping it alive" to be "energy-sapping".

"[There have been] many times in my life when I've tried to speak about it, but now I'm having to speak about it a lot more and you're often saying the same thing - it takes a lot of conversations, having the same conversations with different people who don't understand," he explains.

"It would be great if you could do it on a bigger scale, but one-to-one conversations are usually where the real breakage [happens] - that's where things get broken down, and then you can move forwards. And that just means you're having a lot of the same conversations."

It's to Hamilton's credit that he can acknowledge that being among the world's most high-profile figures pushing for racial equality does take a toll, and yet he has not allowed that to impact his job: maintaining his on-track form.

After overtaking Schumacher's wins milestone, Hamilton is approaching 100 F1 victories. Had it not been for, among other things, a contentious stewarding decision (Spa 2008), six reliability failures from strong positions with both McLaren and Mercedes, Nico Hulkenberg's costly slip in the rain in Brazil in 2012, a win lost to poor strategy at Monaco 2015 and one to poor luck (with his loose headrest in Baku two years later), he'd be there already.

This list serves to reinforce how long Hamilton has been at the top in F1. As Daniel Ricciardo noted after the Eifel GP, 91 victories is effectively winning every race for nearly five seasons...

But for Hamilton, there's only one goal left. A statistical legacy is not what matters to him personally - nor, for that matter, does where he stands in the debate over who is F1's greatest driver.

"Winning is all good, but it's kind of the least important" Lewis Hamilton

"The real main target is why I'm doing the Hamilton Commission," he says. "It's to try to leave this place with changes that will hopefully make it a more diverse sport in the future. So, if I come in five-10 years' time, and I walk in, I won't be the only person of colour that's in this sport. Hopefully it will be more diverse. Hopefully these teams will be more diverse and continue to progress.

"It's [about] having a sport that is reflective of society and the outside world. Yes, our world is multicultural - lots of different colours and people from different religions - and we don't see a lot of women here too. I hope in years to come you see [that] women have high-up roles, you see people of colour that can also be in high-up roles - [it goes] from mechanics to catering because you don't see that, even to marshalling. There's a lot of work that needs to be done.

"It goes back to accountability at the forefront of it. And even in [Autosport's] world - I think of my whole F1 career I've seen one black guy that's been [working as a journalist]. OK, we've got a couple of reporters that are behind the camera, but you know I just hope that in 10 years' time [it's different]. That's my mission, that's my purpose here. Winning is all good, but it's kind of the least important."

And this is what truly separates Hamilton from all the other F1 greats. His immediate sporting legacy will be the records he leaves, which will surely take a generation or more to better.

But he is trying to change a world that has not always embraced him, given his childhood experience of racism, which he has also had to endure as an adult in the sport he loves. Even taken in isolation from all else he has achieved in his career, in trying to change ignorant, frustrating and downright disgusting attitudes he demonstrates greatness.

His critics will highlight his fortune and privilege (as if these have not been hard-earned, given his family's humble background). To some he is a hypocrite for daring to be a racing driver with a worthy cause. And yet, in choosing not to stay silent, he further cements his position as the greatest F1 driver of his generation - and to many, the greatest of all time.