How stylistic struggles hampered Hamilton’s emotional Mercedes swansong

From the moment when Lewis Hamilton sat down on the sofa in the front room of Toto Wolff’s house in Oxford in late January, to tell his boss he was leaving for Ferrari at the end of the season, he knew it was going to be an emotionally difficult year. As Hamilton would remark when the curtain finally came down on it all in Abu Dhabi, it was akin to telling your spouse you wanted a divorce, but then having to live together in the same house for a whole year.

At times in 2024 you could sense the awkwardness of it all. The loneliness of being the person about to walk out the door mixed with paranoia about not having the kind of full support that had been there in the past.

And this was in spite of Mercedes not shutting Hamilton out of any of the regular engineering meetings he had always been a part of – even if he was not involved in some of the chats regarding 2025 later on in the year. The seven-time world champion admits that it was hard to deal with the mental challenges that had been thrown at him.

“I anticipated it would be difficult, but massively underestimated how difficult it would be,” he acknowledges. “It was straining on the relationship very early on. It took time for people to get past it. And then just for my own self, it’s been a very emotional year for me. I think I’ve not been at my best in handling and dealing with those emotions.”

Piled on top of the mental challenges of the situation was a season during which Hamilton found a Mercedes W15 he did not get on with particularly well – in contrast to team-mate George Russell, who was better able to deal with its quirks.

And while the pair were often evenly matched on race pace, Hamilton found it much harder to equal his team-mate on Saturdays. Over the course of the season, from the 30 qualifying sessions in total (six sprint shootouts and 24 main sessions), the stats were 24-6 in Russell’s favour. It was 19-5 without the sprints.

Qualifying was a regular struggle for Hamilton in 2024, as he was comprehensively overshadowed in this department by Russell

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

It has long been suspected that Hamilton’s driving style – he’s brilliantly strong on the brakes – has not been ideal for the current generation of ground effect cars, whose super-stiff suspension settings allied to the narrow sidewalls of the 18-inch tyres make them much more susceptible to front locking.

As Wolff said: “I think one of the strengths is always how he’s able to brake late, attack the corner. That car can’t take it. When you’re very strong on the brakes, you need a car that’s strong on turning in. Then, when you hit the throttle and you need lots of traction and the car is not giving you any of that, it’s very difficult to drive around. Then if the car slides more and lacks grip, it comes alive.”

These elements combined meant that when Hamilton pushed the Mercedes to its limit in qualifying, he found himself unable to extract the full benefit and bite from new tyres. He was further hampered by a W15 that suffered from low-speed understeer and required drivers to rotate it on the throttle more than would be ideal. This is not great for keeping a lid on rear tyre temperatures – something that the 2024 challenger was already struggling with.

As Hamilton and his crew dug into what was happening and struggled to find answers, an element of paranoia took over

Throw into the mix the fact that the W15 had a narrow set-up window, and it all added up to a big challenge. When conditions or track characteristics suited it – a cool day at a circuit such as Silverstone or Las Vegas, where low-speed turns and traction zones aren’t so much of a factor – the car flew in Hamilton’s hands, especially on race day.

Ramp up the temperatures and go to a venue such as Interlagos, where you need that low-speed rotation but have to keep the rear tyres cool, and things fall apart. This above all else explained the roller coaster of form that Hamilton endured.

“Some people have a bigger working window with a car and some have a narrower working window in terms of the aero package,” explained Hamilton late on in the campaign. “Then there’s the tyres. If you look at [Las Vegas], why were we so fast? Because we could get the tyres in the window and others struggled. Everyone’s facing something different.”

The car’s difficult-to-explain behaviour characteristics and that tricky narrow balance window made it hard to predict whether weekends would be good or bad. This, allied to the lack of clear answers for why things swung so much, inevitably triggered suspicions from Hamilton fans that not all was totally equal across both sides of the Mercedes garage.

Cooler conditions tended to help Mercedes in 2024, but struggles to identify where the package would perform well proved frustrating

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

The gap between Russell and Hamilton at times seemed abnormal. As Hamilton and his crew dug into what was happening and struggled to find answers, an element of paranoia took over. Feeding into this were team and strategy calls – which were often triggered only by the fact that Hamilton had not qualified as far forward as he needed to, so being brave was more appealing – that did not go his way.

Whenever circumstances went against Hamilton – such as in Belgium, when Mercedes allowed Russell to change strategies and pull off a one-stop win (before he was disqualified), or Singapore, when Hamilton began the race on soft tyres in a move that proved to be a disaster – you could sense the growing frustrations.

Speaking a few days after Singapore, Hamilton said: “I was a bit perplexed by it because, in the past, when we have been in that position… normally, if George has qualified well like he normally does and I’m out of the top 10, then we will split the strategies.

“But, when we were so close [they lined up third and fourth in Singapore, with Hamilton ahead], it didn’t make sense to me. I was so angry. Already from that moment, I was frustrated and then I tried my best to keep up with the guys ahead.”

There was the Monaco front wing intrigue too, where Hamilton expressed some annoyance after qualifying that he had been beaten by Russell, who had at his disposal the first of the Mercedes squad’s new ‘flexi wing’ concepts.

Hamilton’s Monte Carlo remarks hinted at mystery forces at play to hold him back as he emphasised the gains Russell had enjoyed from the new front wing. “I don’t anticipate being ahead of George in qualifying, particularly this year, but we’ve just got to keep pushing,” he said.

The reality regarding the front wing was that Hamilton had been offered it first, and turned it down because there was no spare available – so any crash in qualifying would have resulted in a pitlane start.

The seeds of doubt remained about what was going on at Mercedes – and it peaked in the sending of an anonymous email, claiming to be from a Mercedes employee, suggesting sabotage. Mercedes ultimately found itself in a catch-22 situation; the more it denied the talk of conspiracy, the more those peddling that idea felt it must be true. Wolff lost his patience with it all at times.

Not picking a new front wing that went to Russell in Monaco fuelled discussions over unequal treatment which proved a distraction

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“I don’t know what some of the conspiracy theorists and lunatics think out there,” he railed. “[Only] if you don’t believe all of that can you believe that we want to win the constructors’ world championship. Part of the constructors’ world championship is making both cars win. So, to all of these mad people out there, get a shrink.”

Amid a particularly bad spell of races at the end of the year – which included Brazil and Qatar – it was obvious that Hamilton was worn down by it all and the self-doubt that he sometimes carries with him emerged once again.

In Qatar his comments gathered great traction, after he had ended up four tenths adrift of Russell in qualifying, when he remarked: “I’m definitely not fast anymore.”

Yet there were enough good days in 2024 when the car worked for him – like that brilliant victory at Silverstone, that charge through the field at Vegas and that emotional send-off in Abu Dhabi – to show that Hamilton was indeed still fast.

As he heads to the next chapter of his career, back into the fold of an environment where he feels centre stage and with a Ferrari challenger that looks to be more balanced than what he has had underneath him this year, it would be foolish to write him off.

Hamilton bowed out with superb drive to finish fourth in Abu Dhabi, beating Russell with a final lap pass

Photo by: Lubomir Asenov / Motorsport Images

Shovlin on Hamilton’s 2024 struggles

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin explains why Lewis Hamilton has struggled so much with the W15 this year.

“Most of what we’ve been doing is just working on the car as a whole. The car hasn’t been quick enough, and that’s been the thing that we’ve been trying to solve. The car hasn’t been easy to get into a nice balance window. And particularly once you get there, keeping it there has been a challenge. So that has been another thing to solve.

“Then, beyond all of that, Lewis has struggled on a single lap. His race pace has been there throughout the weekend, it’s just that with a close grid, you often start a few places behind your team-mate. Then you’re held up and you can’t show what you can do. But the read on Lewis’s race pace has been very good. He showed in Vegas that if he has a car that works the way he wants, he can fight back to the front.

“The issue for him has really just been that when you’re trying to extract that last tenth or two, it’s been difficult in terms of trying to avoid brake locking, trying to avoid snaps on exit. The way the team looks at that is that we needed to give Lewis a car more like the one we had in Vegas, where it does suit his style, and he can do his best work with it.

“I think these days, a lot of it is keeping heat out of the rear tyres. If you approach a corner in a way that means they’re hot, or if you’re having to turn the car on the throttle, then you will struggle with that. You can see that ultimately, when the drivers really start pushing, that’s when you start to get the snaps of oversteer on exit. And that, on occasion, is an area Lewis might suffer more than George.

“You look at all this, but the focus for our year has been ‘how do we get the car the way that Lewis needs it to allow him to drive it on the limit and not suffer those problems?’”

It was a forgettable year for Hamilton in 2024, but he will join Ferrari with plenty to prove

Photo by: Mercedes AMG