The champion traits that Hamilton will draw on in Mercedes’ sternest test

This might be the toughest test Lewis Hamilton has faced in Formula 1 for some time. How to win a fifth consecutive world championship, which would make a record eight in total, against a resurgent Red Bull team resolutely focused on denying him the satisfaction?

Max Verstappen is super quick, hungry and bang in form. The RB16B is fast, consistent, reliable – exactly the sort of tool Verstappen has longed for. Conversely, Mercedes’ W12 sometimes looks a bit wayward, unstable and difficult to tame. Certainly, it’s nowhere near as dominant as its predecessor.

After a strong run of early races: victory from behind in Bahrain, recovering brilliantly to second at Imola, winning from behind (again) in Portugal and again (comfortably) in Spain, Hamilton suddenly has his hands full. Either the tyres aren’t warming up properly, or they’re degrading too quickly; Hamilton’s flicking switches he shouldn’t and losing races because of it; Mercedes is making strategic errors and conceding victories that are there for the taking.

Red Bull is in the ascendent, and Mercedes – that giant, dominant winning machine of seven seasons and counting – is creaking. Valtteri Bottas looks all at sea. He sounds angry too, as he watches his dreams (and perhaps his Mercedes career) slip away. Toto Wolff looks pensive, struggling to compute the fact his usually well-oiled machine isn’t humming its usual harmonious tune. But Hamilton looks… well, relaxed.

There are no public histrionics, no social media shaming, no ‘it’s them not me to blame’ snide remarks – though he came close in Monaco, it must be said. Generally, Hamilton stays cool, calm and collected – even when emotions and adrenalin are running high right after the race. He remains resolutely focused on what’s gone wrong, how mistakes can be rectified, the car improved, the next race maximised.

It wasn’t always like this. Even as a triple world champion Hamilton sometimes struggled to process the injustices of motor racing’s cruel twists of fate and luck. He’s had to learn, through painful experience, how to mould himself into a relentless machine that will not let up until the final chequered flag has fallen.

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12 garage

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Loyalty bonus

Hamilton’s extraordinary levels of success are undoubtedly a function of the fact he has driven some of F1’s best cars. Every one of the McLarens he drove from 2007-12 was a winner, so too the Mercedes of 2013 to present day.

But Hamilton’s loyalty has also propelled him forward: he has only driven for two teams and one engine manufacturer his entire career, which now spans 15 seasons. As former McLaren and Mercedes technical director Paddy Lowe points out, this creates a stability that helps the people around him thrive.

“Lewis is a fantastic driver,” says Lowe, “one of the best. I think one of the reasons his records are so strong is that he’s actually been so consistent and dedicated and loyal. He’s not a troublemaker.”

This aspect of Hamilton’s character seems analogous to modern professional football club management, which tends to operate a revolving door policy – usually without success. There are exceptions, but generally the most consistently successful teams generate that success by sticking with a manager through thick and thin, allowing their ideas to penetrate properly.

"I think one of the things Lewis has learned in life later on, in the last few years, is 110% focus. And you see now he turns up to every race absolutely on it" Paddy Lowe

Committing for the long-term helps build and solidify the relationships necessary for success, even when inevitable curveballs are thrown. Hamilton has experienced plenty of them: being team-mate to Fernando Alonso as a rookie; ‘Spygate’ (the 2007 design-sharing scandal for which McLaren was fined $100m by the FIA); ‘Liegate’ (when Hamilton was instructed to tell the 2009 Australian GP stewards fibs about how he’d overtaken Jarno Trulli’s Toyota behind the Safety Car); ‘Ali G-gate’ (when he made a poor joke about the real reasons Monaco GP stewards penalised him for ramming Pastor Maldonado in 2011); and Nico Rosberg, circa 2014-16…

Hamilton has dealt with a fair few destabilising elements – and added one or two himself – in his time, but he’s generally not made a habit of blowing up the people around him, or turning his back on them. Loyalty engenders trust, which is a massive bedrock for success.

Lewis Hamilton, Paddy Lowe, 2014 Chinese GP

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Full focus

The need to remain fixated on the task at hand and not become distracted by superfluous events is something that typifies modern-day Hamilton. He showed a propensity for this in the way he handled the extraordinary circumstances of 2007, not allowing Alonso’s fury at Ron Dennis, or the events of Spygate, to become distractions, as Hamilton went about producing the greatest rookie F1 season ever, which almost culminated in a world championship.

“It was a complicated year,” recalls Lowe. “The only thing that was directly affecting him was his team-mate. People always think there’s lots of stuff between team-mates, but what you observe in and around the garage and meetings, they just ignore each other to a large extent. But they do that normally.

“I mean, we’ve had this sort of Lando/Sainz thing, but that’s really, really rare. They normally just don’t hang out, they don’t really talk to each other, except perhaps across the table in a meeting about something to do with what the car did – but you normally have to pull that out of them. Generally, they keep their distance, so when there’s some friction, you don’t really notice much difference, to be honest.

“But as I observed Lewis within that year [2007], he didn’t really get stuck into any of it. He just ignored it all and got on with his driving.”

This wasn’t always the case in Hamilton’s McLaren career. He later became preoccupied by things that perhaps detracted from his on-track performance. The inevitable fame and fortune that came with his meteoric rise to the very top of Formula 1 was clearly challenging for a young man to deal with while growing up under the glare of the public spotlight. It has taken Hamilton, as it does most people, a great deal of time and personal growth to achieve the correct balance.

“One of his features back then was, you know, not always focused,” confirms Lowe. “And that came more to the fore after the first year, when life starts to become more complicated. It’s just an inevitable part of it. I think one of the things Lewis has learned in life later on, in the last few years, is 110% focus. And you see now he turns up to every race absolutely on it. And we all know that wasn’t the case throughout his career.”

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes, with Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director, Mercedes AMG

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Trusting instinct

Hamilton’s propensity for being exceptional in wheel-to-wheel battle is legendary. This part of the craft can’t really be taught, only refined with experience. There is an instinct to the art of racing that is deeply personal to the individual. Certain limits and rules are obviously imposed and generally understood by all, but there also exists an unwritten law of the jungle, which can only be intuited as you take risks and are rewarded or punished in kind.

When everyone is fighting over the same piece of track, to a certain extent you simply take a deep breath and dive right in. Some drivers find this comes naturally, and Hamilton is one of those. Others, like his former archrival Rosberg, find it more difficult to know where the limit is. Some have even been known to need diagrams drawn for them, to help explain where to place the car in order to claim a particular corner is ‘theirs’ in wheel-to-wheel contests.

"The bottom line is Lewis is an extremely talented racer. He knows every centimetre of track that he’s allowed to be on and how to play it" Paddy Lowe

This is trying to make the art of racing scientific, but it doesn’t really work that way. In a sport of science, measurement and instrumentation, this is where instinct, flair and spur-of-the-moment judgement take over. This buys Hamilton a certain amount of prior credit when it comes to internecine warfare. He’s nearly always in the right, so when conflict does arise he usually just has to go through the motions with the team and let it get sorted out, without worrying too much about the need to adjust his own technique.

Early in his career, Hamilton had plenty of scrapes and collisions – with Felipe Massa, Jenson Button, even Maldonado – that cost him dearly. The odd one recently with Alex Albon too, but the examples are now vanishingly rare. He’s refined his own judgement over time, and you hardly ever see him collide with other drivers. When he does get too close, as has happened a couple of times with Verstappen this season, Hamilton is careful to look at the bigger picture and ensure he lives to fight on.

“The bottom line is Lewis is an extremely talented racer,” says Lowe. “He knows every centimetre of track that he’s allowed to be on and how to play it. A lot of this stuff is very, very difficult to capture analytically – it’s something you have a sense for. For example, if you try and overtake around the outside, that’s your risk. In all of that really, Lewis is [generally] faultless. He’s so good at racing and car positioning and placement.”

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12 and Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB16B battle

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Work, work, work

Generating a work ethic that means you avoid simply relying on your innate ability to drive the car, while improving the support network around you so performance itself becomes easier to access, thus generating spare capacity to work on things tangential but beneficial to the process of driving, is another facet of what separates the great from the very good.

Some drivers never entirely buy into this process; some become exhausted by it; others, like Hamilton, take time and the painful lessons of bitter experience to realise the benefits fully. As Lowe says, the Hamilton we see today is “110%” focused on maximising every race as it comes, leaving no stone unturned in pursuit of perfection. When Red Bull dishes out painful defeats, as has happened a few times already this year, Hamilton immediately sets his mind to the work of hitting back.

Even when races slip through his fingers, as the French GP did after Mercedes’ strategic miscalculations helped Verstappen to victory, Hamilton shows equanimity in defeat, taking solace from the fact he has given his all. On the few occasions he falls short of his own high standards, he is quick to apologise rather than appear beyond reproach. This is the maturity and mental strength of a true champion on display – and like many revelations, it has its roots in the experience of a bitter setback.

Hamilton almost lost the plot when Rosberg beat him to the 2016 world title. He became sullen, stroppy and even intimated he wasn’t getting a fair deal from Mercedes given how disproportionately he suffered from engine failures. Many of the perceived injustices Hamilton experienced actually came from an unfortunate spiral of negative consequences, but it didn’t feel like that to him at the time. It got him down and he didn’t bring everything he had to the table until it was too late.

Lowe says this season was “the final piece of the jigsaw” in making Hamilton the driver you see today – someone who tries to extract the maximum from every single race, focuses utterly on the job at hand, and his since become a relentless winning machine: Britain’s best F1 driver ever, and maybe F1’s greatest of all time.

“When Nico beat him in 2016, he realised he couldn’t leave any races on the table,” Lowe explains. “And he had done so up to that point in his career. Because he, like many of these drivers that have supreme talent, they’ve got supreme self-belief, and the other side of that coin is that they sometimes think ‘well, I’m so good it doesn’t really matter what I do, it will come through’.

“2016 was a turning point when he switched into ‘Yeah, I can’t completely rely on my talent; I’ve got to leave nothing to chance’. That’s what he’s done. 2016 made him into an unbeatable force, which we’re seeing playing out still.”

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images