Hamilton's first experience of turning silver into gold

When it became apparent at the start of the 2022 Formula 1 season that Mercedes was in trouble, some observers claimed that it was the first time Lewis Hamilton had been given an uncompetitive car. But those with longer memories recalled 2009, when the McLaren MP4-24 proved to be a total disaster at the start of the year. Hamilton was left struggling in the wake of Brawn and Red Bull in a season that was dominated by the double diffuser.

There are many parallels between the situations in 2009 and 2022, as well as some differences. The common link is that Hamilton never gave up and helped to drive the team on, and in both cases his engineers responded and worked away to improve the car.

In 2009, McLaren went from close to the back of the grid to Hamilton winning the Hungarian Grand Prix in July. This year, Mercedes didn’t start from quite so far down the field, but initially there was a huge gulf to the pacesetters. By the recent Hungarian GP, the car was capable of taking pole in the hands of George Russell and, after an issue in qualifying, Hamilton logged his fifth consecutive podium with second place.

Even within the Mercedes camp, the comparison with 2009 has been very evident, and in effect used as a motivating tool. “We talked about it,” reveals team boss Toto Wolff. “Lewis said by Hungary we turned the car around in McLaren and it was competitive again. I must really say I admire both of our drivers who, in a very personal way, have contributed to develop the car throughout the season. Together, these two drivers at very different stages of their career were a tremendous force together in order to keep the spirits high.”

So what went wrong at McLaren in 2009, and how did the team that had carried Hamilton to the previous year’s world championship drop the ball?

That winter represented a huge package of rule changes, of a scale similar to those that caught out Mercedes in 2022. Just as this year’s cars were intended to make it easier to follow, for 2009 the Overtaking Working Group had come up with a substantially revised aero package, including a wider front wing with adjustable flaps, a narrower and higher rear wing, and fewer aero appendages. Throw in a move from grooved to slick tyres and the arrival of KERS, and the overall package represented a significant change.

F1 cars underwent fundamental changes for 2009 season, just as they have done for this year

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The general idea was a massive downforce cut and, as ever, the job of the teams was to claw it back. And no one was to do that more spectacularly than Honda under its boss Ross Brawn. While others continued to work on their 2008 cars, Brawn’s crew focused on the future. In the summer of 2008, rivals were given a hint of what Honda had already achieved.

“We were in a meeting of the Technical Working Group in probably about August or September,” recalls Paddy Lowe, who was then McLaren’s technical director. “Ross came into the room and he quoted some downforce numbers for what they’d got to. And we were a) shocked that he should tell everybody, and b) shocked at the numbers.

“We all said ‘that’s completely unbelievable’ to ourselves. The other teams are going, ‘Ross, what’s he been smoking? No way they’ve got that sort of downforce.’ And he was saying we need to change the regs, we’ve completely overcooked it here. These regs are much more powerful than they should be. That was his pitch.

“I remember arriving in February or January and they said that from their interpretation it was 50% less downforce than the previous year. And they were, ‘We’ve already hit our targets’. And I remember being, ‘Wow, really? That means you’ve probably not set it high enough…’” Lewis Hamilton

“And basically, the conclusion of the TWG was we didn’t need to change the rules, because Ross is obviously on some special drugs. Everybody had these sort of wide-ranging targets that they all felt reasonably comfortable with.”

McLaren and others didn’t take the hint. The Woking squad was anyway focused on beating Ferrari to the 2008 title, which Hamilton managed to do on the last lap of the season finale in Brazil.

It was to be a tumultuous winter for F1. Honda pulled out, but Brawn was able to save the team under his own name, helped by McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh agreeing that Mercedes could supply a second team with engines. And work progressed on the MP4-24.

Brawn benefited from not being involved in a title fight in 2008 to steal a march on McLaren

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“I remember it very clearly, 2009,” says Hamilton. “I remember arriving in February or January I think it was, coming back from winter training, and walking along or being in a meeting with the guys. They said that from their interpretation it was 50% less downforce than the previous year. And they were, ‘We’ve already hit our targets’. And I remember being, ‘Wow, really? That means you’ve probably not set it high enough…’”

Others say that the actual number was probably more like 25%, but Hamilton’s memory is essentially correct. “I remember that they were clearly happy because they had met the targets,” says former McLaren test driver Pedro de la Rosa. “They showed me a graph of the 2008 downforce level across all speeds, and then the 2009 expected development targets during the winter.

“Clearly there was a gap between 2008 and 2009. So they were expecting a huge downforce reduction. And the line of the figures for the weeks that they had been testing the new car in the windtunnel just met perfectly well the targets. The team was clearly on target. The problem was that the target was too pessimistic and obviously too easy to achieve. And it generated complacency.”

“We had a target, which was clearly not ambitious enough,” Lowe admits. “And we did meet it, just about. I think everybody had targets which they all felt they probably met.”

De la Rosa’s concerns were realised when he saw the MP4-24 for the first time. “None of us had seen the proper car,” he recalls. “Lewis, Heikki [Kovalainen] or me. I remember launching the car or removing the cloth it was covered with. And we all went, ‘Oh dear, how ugly it looks!’ Normally everyone goes, ‘Wow’.

“It looked slow when we unveiled it. It was like a shoe box with wheels compared to the 2008 car, which had so many winglets and bargeboards, and was a beautiful car. It looked bulky, and heavy. And it had no science behind it; it just looked too simple to be fast.”

Hamilton’s own concerns were realised when he tested it for the first time. “I remember getting in the car in Portimao and it was horrendous to drive,” he recalls. “It was the worst car that I had driven, apart from the engine was good. But I was three-wheeling everywhere, the wheel was coming up massively.”

Hamilton instantly realised the MP4-24 was off the pace at Portimao test

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Meanwhile, the Brawn BGP 001 soon emerged – complete with controversial double diffuser. The goalposts had not just been moved; they’d been dismantled and taken to another stadium…

In those days, McLaren alternated project leaders. The 2008 car had been the responsibility of Tim Goss – in a twist of fate now working for the FIA and charged with addressing porpoising – while the MP4-24 was overseen by current Alpine technical director Pat Fry.

“I remember at the first test, we were four seconds off the pace,” Fry says. “And we brought our first race upgrade along to the second test, and in reality it was one of those good days, because you put all this stuff on the car, and we went 2.4 seconds a lap quicker, I think it was. In any normal day, that’s a good development! But that just left us 1.5s off where everyone else was.”

“There were lots of people rushing around like headless chickens, whose names I’d better not mention. But it was quite clear why we were slow. Everyone was going, ‘We’ve got problems with the suspension’. We were just putting less load on the tyre” Pat Fry

The root of McLaren’s problems was something we’ve seen many times, and which almost certainly played a role in the struggles of Mercedes in 2022. The team had to focus on winning the 2008 title and, as such, the following year’s project didn’t get enough attention.

“I think it was very much the case,” says Lowe. “The evidence for that is we were fighting tooth and nail with Ferrari to the bitter end in 2008. And they were also very shit in 2009! And then you had the opposite, because you had Brawn, who had literally done no work at all on their car in 2008, and then they came out at the front.”

“In reality, we had done three windtunnel tests by September on that car,” states Fry. “And all the windtunnel time was going into winning the championship. And what’s the easiest championship to win? The one you’re leading. So, ultimately, we didn’t get anything fundamentally wrong. We just didn’t start it anywhere near early enough. Ross had five windtunnels working on the Brawn for a year and a quarter.”

Fry believes Mercedes' performance woes are more complicated to solve than McLaren's in 2009

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Fry insists that there’s a key difference compared to this season. While Mercedes is still struggling to fully come to terms with the W13 and porpoising, in 2009 McLaren knew exactly what it had to do – pile on downforce.

“We hadn’t screwed anything up,” he says. “We just hadn’t started early enough. And then you play catch-up. When it’s a new aero rules package, there’s a massive learning curve, then you flatten out. And we just delayed our bit.

“So I think that’s quite a different situation from Mercedes today, because they obviously put loads of time in, chose a concept, and credit to them, they’re sticking with it. You’ve got to know where you’re going. And you’ve got to realise what mistakes you’ve made. It’s harder for Mercedes to dig themselves out of it this year because it’s almost like they’ve gone down a route that’s made life hard for themselves. And how you back out of that is always a challenge.”

After Brawn dominated the 2009 season opener in Australia, it became clear that the double diffuser was regarded as legal, although it was just part of the renamed team’s magic package.

“The best thing for Brawn was Martin Whitmarsh,” says Fry. “He negotiated the deal that got them the Mercedes engine that made their car one second a lap quicker! Going through times like that it shows the strength of an organisation really, and it was quite interesting, seeing how people reacted and panicked and whatever. And you’ve just got to stay calm, and keep working through it.

“There were lots of people rushing around like headless chickens, whose names I’d better not mention. But it was quite clear why we were slow. Everyone was going, ‘We’ve got problems with the suspension’. We were just putting less load on the tyre.”

The success of Brawn's double diffuser meant McLaren had to follow suit

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McLaren and others had no choice but to copy the double diffuser and get it to the track as soon as possible. “This recovery, when we went from the back to front, I think is probably the best recovery in the history of the sport,” says Lowe. “Part of that was bringing out our own double diffuser. You had to reach this point of, if you can’t beat them, join them. We had to do it ourselves quickly. And the guys did a really brilliant job of it.

“We did a whole lot of work and simulation, and we worked out that in our units, we were 40 points down. And I set a challenge to the team. It became sort of biblical – I said we’ve got to find 40 points in 40 days, you’ve got to find one point a day. And then we got to make it obviously, in real bits. So it was more than 40 days, there were probably another 40 days to make the bits.”

Fry adds: “It was just a constant aero upgrade. I can remember sitting on a plane on the way back from some early race with Lewis and his dad, and his dad was giving me a bit of coaching! He said, ‘You’ve got to get rid of this KERS system, it’s rubbish, it’s just heavy’. I said, ‘Well, we’re on the weight limit, we’re at the right weight distribution, and it’s worth three tenths. So I don’t think it’s actually the problem, the problem is aero.’”

“I remember getting a big upgrade at Nurburgring and, going through Turn 6 and 7, it was the first time we could take it flat. I accidentally had the radio on, and I made this whoo-hoo kind of noise, and they played it back to the guys back in the factory!” Lewis Hamilton

McLaren also had to come to terms with the fact that there was a fundamental flaw in its windtunnel that the 2009 package exposed. “Teams like Toyota, Williams and Sauber had leapfrogged us with bigger tunnels,” says Lowe. “They didn’t leapfrog Red Bull, because Red Bull just by a quirk of history had a very, very big tunnel, an old concrete thing from the Ministry of Defence. Ferrari and us both suffered, because this new ruleset really found the weakness in people with small tunnels.

“The fact that the front wing was so wide, and the rear wing was so high, completely screwed us in our tunnel, because frankly it was just much too small. The outboard wake from the front-wing endplates was going into the wall of the tunnel. And there just wasn’t the gap between the front-wing width and the tunnel width, and the same in our case between the tunnel height and the top of the rear wing.

“As the trend showed, the quick guys had this outswept front-wing endplate; we had to copy that blindly. It didn’t look good in the tunnel, but we just made it and put it on the car, and it worked. We had to develop blindly against the tunnel’s numbers.”

Puncture for Hamilton hid McLaren's progress at German GP

Photo by: Daniel Kalisz / Motorsport Images

In another intriguing parallel with 2009, Mercedes recently put a floor on its car that hadn’t run at all in the tunnel, so keen was it to see the results. Hamilton kept faith as his team worked away. A major new package finally arrived for his car for the German GP at the Nurburgring in July. At the previous four events his starting grid positions were 14th, 19th, 16th and 18th.

“I remember the struggles of that year, qualifying 15th or whatever it was in the first race and then just continuously chipping away,” he recalls. “And I remember getting a big upgrade at Nurburgring. They only had one kit and, because I was ahead on points, I think it was, I got the upgrade. I remember going through Turn 6 and 7, it was the first time we could take it flat. I accidentally had the radio on, and I made this whoo-hoo kind of noise, and they played it back to the guys back in the factory!”

The double diffuser made the whole car work better. Hamilton qualified an encouraging fifth in Germany, although his race was compromised by a first-lap puncture. But there was more to come for the next race.

“We didn’t have enough front wing to balance the car properly,” says Fry. “And in the windtunnel on the Sunday before Hungary we found a change in the lower nose shape that actually gave us enough balance, and improved the efficiency. I got in early Monday morning, saw the report, and it was, ‘Right, I want that for Thursday’. And it was drawn, moulded, made. First set went in the hand baggage with me, a plane flew the next set out for Saturday. And in Hungary we won the race.”

De la Rosa says: “It was one of those upgrades that delivers more than what you’re actually expecting. It was the real beginning of the season for us. Suddenly we were competitive, and fighting for wins.”

Hungarian GP win marked a significant turnaround from the start of the season

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The Hungarian victory signalled what a remarkable turnaround the team had achieved. “We were quite embarrassed at our own failure in the face of Mercedes having done a great job on the KERS,” says Lowe. “But Hungary was really nice, because we had brought the team back to the front. And in the race Lewis overtook Mark Webber with the first KERS-boosted overtake.”

Over the final seven races of the season, Hamilton logged four pole positions, and scored a second win in Singapore. F1 had never featured a change in form quite like it.

“It’s one year I look back on with great pride,” says Lowe. “That was an incredible recovery. And I was happy to be the leader of it, a fantastic team turned around a very, very difficult situation.

“And we had great support from our management, we never got a bollocking from Ron [Dennis] or anyone. It was just we know what we’ve got to do, let’s get on with it. So it was really one of the years I look back on with the most pride around what can be achieved in F1.”

“Lewis was excited back then, he was the world champion, he was fighting, he still had this belief that he could do it at the end, he could recover the points. And this hasn’t changed” Pedro de la Rosa

“Hungary sticks in my mind because of the effort to get there,” says Fry. “You have good days and bad days, but when the entire organisation has worked their arse off for a week to make something, and that makes a difference so you can win a race, then everyone through the entire company can feel proud of it, can’t they?”

The punchline to the story is that McLaren’s 2009 recovery perhaps wasn’t fast enough for Mercedes and, at the end of the season, the manufacturer decided to buy and rename Brawn GP, and gradually back out of its involvement with McLaren. Eight constructors’ titles later, that has proved to be a good move.

Mercedes' Shovlin recognises the parallels between Hamilton's 2009 and 2022

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

McLaren’s progress in 2009 was observed by Brawn’s Andrew Shovlin, now engineering chief at Mercedes. “There may well be parallels,” he says of the comparison. “If you looked at the situation with McLaren back then, the car that they launched wasn’t really equivalent to the capability within the team.

“When they started to understand what they had to do with the regulations, the development rate was really impressive. And a parallel might be that within our team, we’re just starting to really get back the enjoyment for that engineering challenge, and the development challenge. There’s a lag between your understanding, and your learning, and actually bringing bits to the track that make it quicker. But the atmosphere is one of a team that’s determined to get back to the front.”

And at the heart of it all is Hamilton, who also recognises the comparisons with 2009: “This year, at the start of the season, very, very similar when we were in February sitting down in the room. We’d got a lot of performance on the car, a lot of confidence, the car’s going to be good. And then you get in the thing and it was bouncing, and it’s taken us a long time to fix that, taking a lot of performance off that car to enable it to stop bouncing. But it’s impressive to see a group of people just continuously not giving up.”

And, as in 2009, Hamilton is providing crucial motivation from the cockpit. “One thing that has not changed is Lewis’s attitude,” says de la Rosa. “Lewis was excited back then, he was the world champion, he was fighting, he still had this belief that he could do it at the end, he could recover the points. And this hasn’t changed, because if you look how happy he was in Paul Ricard, he looked like he had won the race. And to do this after 300 grands prix is impressive.”

“That is the signature of the great drivers,” says Lowe. “If you want to talk about Lewis or Mansell or Senna, or Alonso being a boost to the guys at Aston Martin, these are the guys everybody gets out of bed for. Why did we do 40 points in 40 days? Because we knew we didn’t have a tugger in the car. We had a guy who is going to really wring its neck. And that’s how it works. It’s so important.”

Hamilton is once again galvanising his team to recover from a tough start

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images