Why everybody's talking about "absolutely useless" Hamilton after F1 Hungarian GP

Lewis Hamilton has always been a driver who wears his heart on his sleeve. His successes and failures come writ large on his face when he emerges from his Formula 1 car.

After being eliminated from qualifying in Q2 in Hungary, he walked back to the Ferrari garage, then on to the motorhome, with his crash helmet still on and his gloves shielding the view of his face through the visor. Meanwhile team-mate Charles Leclerc took a pole position which might have owed something to a changing track and weather conditions and the McLaren MCL39’s sensitivity to crosswinds, but which was pole nevertheless.

“Useless, absolutely useless,” was a disconsolate Hamilton’s verdict later, the subject being himself.

“The team has no problem, you've seen the [other] car is on pole, so we probably need to change driver.”

This offhand remark naturally triggered the nattering nabobs of the commentariat, including serial rent-a-quote Ralf Schumacher, a six-time grand prix winner now paying the bills as a pundit for Sky Germany. Schumacher, perhaps following the principle that even a stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day, has been predicting since April that Lewis would retire during the summer break. He naturally pounced on Hamilton’s self-excoriation.

“This is exactly what I said at the beginning of the year,” said Ralf. “If it continues like this, the point will come where Ferrari has to choose a driver and can’t build the car for both. And then it gets tight. Now he’s starting to doubt himself more and more.

The seven-time world champion has underwhelmed since his blockbuster move to Ferrari for this year

Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images

“I’ve been in that situation myself. That was in the DTM, when I said: ‘Okay, this makes no sense anymore’. I handed the car back a year early.

“I believe he’s capable of doing that – and that he will do it. Because this is such a bitter disappointment, and he doesn’t know which way is forward or back anymore. Not immediately, of course, but something like this can always happen.”

Perhaps of more significance to Hamilton’s career than the musings of the on-air ‘talent’, Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna was a high-profile visitor to the Hungarian GP weekend. On the face of it, this was to put a public arm around the shoulder of embattled team principal Fred Vasseur in the form of a new contract, confounding those who were speculating that he was shortly to be fired.

"When you have a feeling, you have a feeling. There's a lot going on in the background that's not great" Lewis Hamilton

Hamilton’s performance in the previous weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix showed he’s still capable of executing a race brilliantly, but stringing a qualifying lap together has been a persistent issue in F1’s new ground-effect era. That has had a deleterious effect on his morale – perhaps he needs an arm around the shoulder from Vigna, too? He isn’t getting one from former F1 ‘ringmaster’ Bernie Ecclestone.

“I think he [Hamilton] should move over,” Bernie told Sky Sport’s Craig Slater in Budapest. “It’d be terrible if something happened to him.”

In temps perdu, if ‘The Bolt’ sent that latter comment in your direction then you would be looking over your shoulder nervously every time a white van pulled up nearby. But I digress.

Hamilton's reaction to his Hungarian GP displays generated buzz as his start at Ferrari came under even greater scrutiny

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli

It’s a factor of Hamilton’s enduring star power that so many people hang on his every word, and yet it remains challenging to unpick the significance of his pronouncements. You can find him on monosyllabic autopilot, clearly not applying any great significance to the words sallying forth, while at other times an agenda comes tumbling out.

Often these states can coexist within the same session, as in the pre-Belgium FIA conference where, at the beginning, host Tom Clarkson struggled to get a sentence out of him, and yet 20 minutes later he spilled – almost unprompted – details of the barrage of documentation he’s been firing at Ferrari bigwigs.

The fact is that Lewis very much lives in the present moment and seldom pays heed to the past. Ask him about what he had for breakfast last Thursday, or a race he won 15, 10, five or even two years ago, and he’ll tell you he can’t really remember. Whoever ghost-writes his autobiography is very much going to earn their coin.

So, while that “useless, absolutely useless” quote was incendiary, from his perspective those words are but dust on the wind. Indeed, there was a widespread feeling during the Hungarian GP weekend that to some extent Hamilton had mentally checked out in advance of the summer break.

Aside from trying – unsuccessfully – to make his car perform, he has been very much going through the motions. He even declined to attend the stewards’ meeting to preside over whether Max Verstappen’s bold pass on him at Turn 4 during the race merited punishment.

Why bother, when he was a “sitting duck” (in his words), trapped in a DRS train behind midfielders at the time, en route to a miserable placing outside the top 10? Winning races is what gets him out of bed in the morning, not just turning up.

This comes after Hamilton finished outside of the points at the Hungaroring, a track where he holds the record for most all-time wins

Photo by: Rudy Carezzevoli / Getty Images

Asked after the race to elucidate on what he’d meant about changing drivers, Lewis was positively gnomic.

"Not particularly, when you have a feeling, you have a feeling," he replied. "There's a lot going on in the background that's not great..."

Whatever is happening behind the gates of Maranello, in public the team boss is standing by his man.

"He's demanding with the team, with the car, with the engineers, with the mechanics, with myself also. But first of all, he's very demanding with himself" Fred Vasseur

"He's demanding," said Vasseur after the race in Budapest. "But I think that’s also why he's seven-times world champion, that he's demanding with the team, with the car, with the engineers, with the mechanics, with myself also. But first of all, he's very demanding with himself.