What we can expect from F1's most evenly-matched team-mates in 2023

The closest team-mate contest in Formula 1 last year was at Mercedes, between a seven-time champion and a man who at the start of the season had not won a race.  George Russell, the new boy, came out on top in the championship by two places and 25 points. So did Russell ‘beat’ Lewis Hamilton last year? Did the points table accurately reflect the balance of power at Mercedes? And what do the answers reveal about how their contest may develop into the new season?

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff describes last year’s championship statistic as “irrelevant” in the context of a difficult year in which the team battled its worst car for a decade, with neither driver in title contention. It’s the answer you would expect from a man managing two of the biggest stars in F1 in one team. Nevertheless, Wolff has a point.

Russell finished ahead in the standings and took both a race victory and a pole position, of which Hamilton achieved neither for the first time in his career. A closer look at the details of the season, though, shows that the stronger Mercedes driver over the course of 2022 was in fact Hamilton. Just.

The most successful driver in the history of Formula 1 had, prior to the start of last year, never been beaten on pure pace by a team-mate in his 15 years in the category. He still hasn’t. Even on a basic count of their qualifying head-to-head, Hamilton finished the season 13-9 ahead of Russell.

Delving deeper, and counting only the sessions in which a fair comparison can be made, the ratio was 11-5 to Hamilton. But his average pace advantage was only 0.051 seconds – which puts Russell as Hamilton’s fastest team-mate since Fernando Alonso, whose margin to Hamilton was almost identical at McLaren back in 2007.

Russell impressed as he put Hamilton under stern pressure

Photo by: Alastair Staley / Motorsport Images

Pace exploration

 That’s just one measure of Russell’s performance, and how closely matched the two were through last season. In the races, it was a similar story. Putting the points aside, the score was 10-9 to Russell in terms of which driver crossed the line ahead, in races where both finished.

But as a measure of performance, those statistics are misleading. Take, for example, the run of races in the first part of the season when Russell finished ahead seven times in a row between Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan, but in which three times Hamilton was behind only because of events outside his control.

In both Australia and Miami, Hamilton would have finished as the leading Mercedes driver had the timing of a Safety Car not worked out perfectly for Russell on an offset strategy and vaulted him ahead. Likewise, in Spain Hamilton suffered a puncture in a first-lap collision with Kevin Magnussen’s Haas, and mounted a superlative comeback drive in which he was at times the quickest car on the track. With a trouble-free race, he might even have contested for victory with Max Verstappen after the Red Bull driver’s early spin into the gravel and Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari engine failure while leading.

Despite the closeness of their performance, the relationship between them remained positive throughout, in contrast to Hamilton’s partnerships with Alonso and Rosberg, both notorious for their tension

There is also Zandvoort later in the season to take into account. Again Hamilton was the leading Mercedes driver, and battling for the lead with eventual winner Verstappen for much of the race, only this time to suffer for the decision not to change his tyres during a late safety car, and drop to fourth at the flag. Without these misfortunes for Hamilton, Russell’s final points advantage in the championship is wiped out. Factoring them all in, Hamilton actually finishes ahead of his team-mate by a scant five points.

At the same time, while Russell was absolutely superb in winning in Brazil, and holding off Hamilton in the closing laps after his earlier clash with Verstappen, the other truly outstanding Mercedes race drives last year were all from Hamilton – Spain, Silverstone, Hungary and Zandvoort.

But getting so close says a vast amount for the quality of Russell’s performance, bearing in mind Hamilton has been beaten in the championship by a team-mate over a season only twice before in his career. Each time there were extenuating circumstances – in 2016, Nico Rosberg benefited from a significant reliability advantage and still only scraped to the championship; and in 2011 personal problems for Hamilton affected his on-track performance and his messy season contrasted with a strong year for Jenson Button.

In essence, there was effectively almost nothing to choose between Hamilton and Russell over the season in 2022 – just as between Hamilton and Fernando Alonso in 2007. So Russell emphatically underlined his credentials as a future world champion and one of the leading lights of the new generation of drivers.

The results paint a somewhat misleading picture of Hamilton's season, as he was hampered several times by the timing of safety cars and strategy not falling his way

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Internal battles

Despite the closeness of their performance, the relationship between them remained positive throughout, in contrast to Hamilton’s partnerships with Alonso and Rosberg, both notorious for their tension. Even with Button there was occasionally acrimony, even if both men were better at hiding it. Hamilton, as the senior driver and fully invested in the Mercedes project for two decades, took an almost a fatherly approach to Russell last year.

“George is doing a great job,” he said during an interview in Austin in late October. “I don’t have any problems with it. There’s no issues in the background with us. George, I would say, and his team, they don’t experiment the same, obviously. But that’s because I’ve been here for a long time, so I’m willing to take these risks. I have the big, deep conversations with people I’ve been with for 10 years. So, me and ‘Shov’ [chief engineer Andrew Shovlin] can have arguments, constructive arguments.

“It’s his first year with the team, so he’s come in and he’s just doing his job to the best of his ability. Very little movement of set-up. I’m doing all the leg-work, back and forth here and there, different wings, all these different things. And I like that anyway.”

Hamilton was often keen to point out his experimental focus to set-up in the first part of the season whenever the subject of their comparative performance came up. It was a factual statement, but also served to explain and defend some of his shakier weekends earlier in the year, when some ill-advised commentary was even suggesting he should retire.

Russell’s personal standards are every bit as high as Hamilton’s so he, too, had mixed feelings about the year. Mid-season, just before the summer break, he mentioned in an interview how he had things to improve on despite leading Hamilton in the championship – this being a reference to the fact that he knew Hamilton was beginning to establish a small but decisive performance advantage in both qualifying and races.

In fact, from Canada onwards, the internal battle swung in Hamilton’s favour. He outqualified Russell 10 times in the remaining 14 races, and one of the ones he didn’t was Hungary, where Russell took a brilliant pole, but a DRS failure prevented Hamilton from competing.

“If you had told me at the start of the season [that I would finish ahead], I would have been incredibly proud and happy, because nine times out of 10 if you finish ahead of Lewis Hamilton you are probably going to be world champion,” Russell said. “The car hasn’t been performing and we’ve both had our difficulties. I have no doubt he is going to be back to his normal level next year if the car is capable of a championship win.

“He had a very difficult start to the season. Things weren’t going smoothly for him and they were a bit more smooth for me. That form swung around a bit in the second half of the season but over the season it probably balanced itself out.

“I feel incredibly fortunate to be with a team like Mercedes and a team-mate such as Lewis. He has really pushed me to my limits as a driver and I have learned a huge amount. Going up against someone like him in the same car, there is no better reference.”

The pair were evenly matched for much of the year, although the qualifying battle swung away from Russell in the second half of the season

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Did Russell stay at Williams too long?

 Within Mercedes it was always known Russell would be good, and a step up from his predecessor Valtteri Bottas. Wolff had tried to get Russell out of Williams for 2021, but baulked at the multi-million dollar fee then team boss Claire Williams demanded for releasing him a year before the end of his contract. Why pay it, Wolff thought, when he could have Russell for free if he just waited a year?

Still, Wolff admitted during last season that Russell probably stayed at Williams for a year too long. He explicitly referred to the driver not needing that extra year of development – something Russell agrees with. But unspoken – out of respect for Bottas – was the realisation that, in hindsight, it would have been better for another reason if Russell had joined Mercedes for 2021.

Through Hamilton’s titanic title battle with Verstappen, only once all year did Bottas beat the Dutchman on merit – when the Finn won the Turkish Grand Prix. So Bottas gave precious little assistance to Hamilton’s title campaign. Given how Hamilton and Russell compared in 2022, it’s reasonable to assume Russell would have fared rather better. Would that have been enough to turn the tables in Mercedes’ favour?

Russell says that he is going to be approaching his second year at the team the same as his first, regardless of whether the car is capable of winning or not

Mercedes watched with interest the development of the contest between its two drivers in 2022. At mid-season, it was genuinely unclear who would come out on top, or how they would compare in detail. By the end of the year, though, a pattern had emerged.

In the races, the margins are fine, but Hamilton generally speaking had the edge, partly because of his experience and adaptability and how they enabled him to get the most out of whatever is asked of him in the race, whatever the nature of the stint in question.

On the same strategy as a rival, the team feel Hamilton will more often than not hunt them down and beat them. Come up behind someone with a tyre advantage as small as two laps and he’ll get past, in a way that is not always easy to explain, but comes down to his innate feel for the tyre and his greater wisdom and guile, and his superlative race-craft.

Russell, though, has a better view of a race in which he is not in direct on-track competition with someone – separated by a pitstop, for example – perhaps because of the extra time he spends in the simulator, where Mercedes pumps him with information. 

Russell and Hamilton have particular strengths that will serve them well if the 2023 W14 is able to contend at the front

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

It’s all down to the car

All of which makes the prospect of 2023 all the more enticing. How will they shape up if Mercedes is able to return to full competitiveness? How will their relationship develop if they are competing for the title?

How will Wolff manage any tensions that emerge? Will Hamilton, out of contract at the end of the season, make good on his statement last autumn that he would sign a new deal? All are questions that remain to be answered.

Russell says that he is going to be approaching his second year at the team the same as his first, regardless of whether the car is capable of winning or not. While acknowledging that Hamilton and Verstappen have more experience at the front than him, he says he feels ready to fight for a title.

“If you go out and you put it on pole and win every race,” Russell says, “you’ll be world champion. You’ve just got to focus on smaller details, and it’s in your own hands.”

Back in Austin, Hamilton was anticipating being outscored by Russell by the end of 2022 – but already laying down a marker for 2023.

“If next season we have a car we’re much happier with, we can be more focused on that whole… not having to go crazy with set-ups,” Hamilton said. “Then we can have a better battle. If he’s ahead at the end of the season, I don’t really feel anything about it. We’re not in the championship. We are fourth and sixth. If it was first and second, it’s different.”

Should the new car be a stronger contender, expect fireworks in the Mercedes camp as the British duo battle for supremacy

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images