Why Hamilton is still the man to keep driving Mercedes forward

Lewis Hamilton says coming back to Formula 1 this year – after losing a record eighth title in such controversial circumstances in Abu Dhabi last year, after setting out determined to avenge what he saw as an injustice and finding Mercedes had produced their worst car for a decade – has been “a tough wave of emotions”.

Most people in F1, whether they believe Max Verstappen or Hamilton were the rightful champion last year, accept that race director Michael Masi failed to implement the rules correctly during that fateful final safety car period. But hardly any believe it was deliberate.

For Hamilton, though, this was more than an injustice caused by a referee making a mistake. For him, it was manipulation, constructed to stop him winning the title.

To some, that will sound paranoid, even delusional. But Hamilton saw Abu Dhabi as the cumulation of a series of obstacles put in his way – as he perceived it, the consistent failure of officials to hold Verstappen to account for his aggressive driving tactics; the unfair disqualification for what Mercedes insists was a legal rear wing, in Brazil. And then those final five laps at Yas Marina.

“You see things start to unfold,” Hamilton told Vanity Fair in an interview this summer, reflecting on the climax to the season, “and my worst fears came alive. I was like, ‘There’s no way they’re going to cheat me out of this. There’s no way. That won’t happen. Surely not.’”

When he disappeared from view over last winter – to America, to wherever, to spend time with friends and family and “unplug, switch off” – he genuinely did not know whether he could summon the strength to return, whether it was even something he wanted to do. He had to rationalise what had happened, what he felt about it, and how to move forward.

Lewis is a man whose world-view is one of perpetual struggle. It’s what he feeds off, what motivates him. It’s the mindset that leads to remarkable achievements – such as the fightback he mounted in the final part of last year which looked for so long like delivering him that title, and which included that remarkable race in Brazil, where he made up an effective 25-place grid penalty to score probably his greatest-ever win.
Perhaps, too, it is the place from which he drew the strength to come back, when for a time there was a genuine chance he would not.

“I took time to digest what happened, which is still difficult to fully understand everything, but to come back stronger,” he said at the beginning of the season. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, so I put my focus into training and getting healthy and enjoying the time off.

“The sport I loved, there was a moment when I lost a little bit of faith in the system. But I am generally a very determined person and I like to think to myself that while moments like this might define careers, I refuse to let this define mine.”

Hamilton wasn't sure if he would return to F1 after the fallout from the controversial end to the 2021 Abu Dhabi GP

Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images

The ambition was to right the perceived wrong – “if you think what you saw at the end of last year was my best, wait ’til you see this year,” he said. So to then discover that the Mercedes car in which he hoped to do that had a serious aerodynamic flaw was, to say the least, far from ideal.

His season started well enough with a podium in Bahrain, but after that things started to fall apart a little. By the fourth race in Imola, he was trailing new team-mate George Russell in the championship by quite a margin, and had been beaten by him in three of the grands prix.

To some, this was indication of the beginning of the end of Hamilton. Was he on the way out, they wondered? Had he lost his mojo, whether as a result of Abu Dhabi or just through the passage of time and the inevitable dimming effects of age?

As usual, though, people were not looking closely enough at what was happening. Yes, he qualified badly in Saudi Arabia because of an ill-advised extreme set-up choice hoping that it would turn his pig of a car into something better. And yes, he lined up behind Russell on the grid at Imola, too.

But having beaten George convincingly in Bahrain, Lewis would also have finished ahead in Australia, but for the timing of a Safety Car to give Russell a free stop and vault him ahead. The same thing happened in Miami two races later.

Lewis is a man whose world-view is one of perpetual struggle. It’s what he feeds off, what motivates him

Imola was probably Hamilton’s worst weekend – qualifying behind Russell and then going nowhere in the sprint or the grand prix.

But qualifying wasn’t really qualifying at all for the Mercedes drivers. The team was in all sorts of trouble with tyre temperature. The laps that both men set in Q2 were not on the limit, they were tyre-preparation laps; Russell’s just happened to be slightly quicker than Hamilton’s. But in a fractured qualifying session, interrupted by a red flag and then rain, they never got to do a proper lap, and both were out in Q2.

In the sprint race, Russell finished where he started in 11th, while Hamilton dropped a place at the start to 14th. That meant that for the wet start of the grand prix, Russell was on the dry side of the grid and Hamilton the wet.

Inevitably, that meant Russell made a better start. And then, as Daniel Ricciardo collided with Carlos Sainz at the first corner, the track opened up for Russell, while it was blocked for Hamilton. So Russell finished the race fourth and Hamilton, stuck in a DRS train, 13th.

It’s worth dwelling on Imola, the nadir of Hamilton’s season, because it was what led to all the questions about Hamilton’s future. What had happened to him, people thought, as they looked at the raw results? How had he done so badly? In reality, yes, it was a bad day for Lewis, but it was the result of a combination of circumstances rather than any lack of performance.

Hamilton's nadir came when he was stuck in a DRS train with events unfolding against him at Imola

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

So how have the Mercedes drivers compared this season? At the time of writing, after the Belgian Grand Prix, Hamilton had out-qualified Russell six times to four in races where it was possible to make a fair comparison, at an average advantage of 0.057 seconds.

In the races, Russell’s consistency has been remarkable – he has failed to finish only once, and has never taken the flag in lower than fifth place. But it is Hamilton who has produced the best – strongest, fastest – three Mercedes race drives of the year, in Spain, Britain and Hungary. His consistent pace in races, and his ability to get the most out of the tyres, continues to set a gold standard.

None of this is to diminish the quality of Russell’s season, or of him in general. Russell is already doing better against Hamilton than any previous team-mate since Fernando Alonso in 2007. That is a huge achievement, and it’s a reflection of his potential as one of brightest stars of the new generation, and a world champion in waiting.

Russell is proving to be every bit as good as it looked he probably was over the previous three seasons, with highlights such as his starring performance on his one-off debut for Mercedes in Bahrain in 2020, or when he put the Williams – the second slowest car in F1 – second on the grid at a wet Spa last year.

Hamilton’s relative ‘struggles’ early in the season, if that is the way one wants to describe it, are as much a reflection of the fact that he was next to a guy who is in the best car he has ever had for a season, is properly fired up, is extremely quick, and had a good winter and had nothing to overcome, as of any drop of performance by Hamilton. If, however briefly, there even was one.

There was always going to be a focus on Hamilton’s performance against Russell – and vice versa – this season, but in some ways Mercedes’ competitive predicament has removed the tension that might have been there.

When drivers are this good, and this ambitious, the sting is taken out of any rivalry when the car is not absolutely competitive, simply because the consequences are so much less significant when the world title is not on the line.

Mercedes’ competitive struggles, therefore, have allowed the two to develop an effective collaboration and working relationship. Doing so would have been infinitely more complicated if they had a winning car. The team is still struggling to get the 2022 car to the place it believes it can be. For every glimmer of light provided by a race such as Hungary – where Russell put his car on pole, and joined Hamilton in the team’s first double podium of the year – there is a Spa, where a lack of tyre temperature in cool conditions left Mercedes the best part of two seconds off the pace in qualifying.

Russell has adapted to life as Hamilton's team-mate impressively

Photo by: Erik Junius

The car started the year badly afflicted by ‘porpoising’, an aerodynamic disruption under the floor that leads to a violent, high-frequency vertical oscillation above a certain speed. That was pretty much tamed by an upgrade introduced in Spain, where a strong showing gave the team a hope that turned out to be false.

At the next race in Monaco it discovered it had solved one problem only to run into another issue – ‘bouncing’, where the low rideheight of the car leads it to violently interact with any bumps on track. So bad was it in Azerbaijan that Hamilton struggled even to get out of the car at the end of the race.

A further upgrade in Silverstone moved the team forward again. But having lost the first three months of the season trying to solve a specific problem rather than improve the car, the main issue now is simply that Mercedes is behind on development.

Through this process, the team says, Hamilton’s remarkable sensitivity to car behaviour has been critical to the Mercedes engineers. Not so much in him being able to explain why the car was doing what it was, but in describing its on-track behaviour with sufficient detail and accuracy to enable them to understand exactly what it was doing. After all, it’s harder to solve a problem if you don’t know what it is.

These difficulties have taken Mercedes into unfamiliar territory. A team so focused on process and data has discovered that under the new rules these have not always applied.

Hamilton’s remarkable sensitivity to car behaviour has been critical to the Mercedes engineers. Not so much in him being able to explain why the car was doing what it was, but in describing its on-track behaviour with sufficient detail and accuracy to enable them to understand exactly what it was doing

“This season we have done unconventional things,” team boss Toto Wolff says. “I remember having a chat with a very clever lady in aerodynamics, and she said: ‘If you would have told me last year that we are putting a floor on the car that we haven’t run in the windtunnel, I would have said we are never
going to do this. And we did and everybody was proud of the results.’

“This is a data-based sport but if you can’t rely on the data because they don’t correlate on the virtual world with what is happening on the track, you just have to try things and basically reverse-engineer correlation.”

“The beginning of the year, was – not miserable, it could always be way worse – but from a driver’s perspective, understanding this car was so confusing,” Hamilton said at the French GP. “Now we are in a position where we understand the car more, and that has given us a much more enjoyable drive.

“We still lack performance in some of those areas but we are slowly getting there. It is about constantly chipping away.

“Unfortunately, we can’t take big leaps at the moment, but who knows? Maybe one big leap will come and we will be right there.”

Mercedes sees Hamilton as instrumental with his feedback to help improve the W13

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Meanwhile, Hamilton’s off-track work, particularly his drive to increase diversity within the sport through his Mission 44 campaign, has provided a valuable way to reset in between races, and reminded him that he has important work to do beyond trying to return his team to competitiveness.

Unwelcome disruptions, such as when it emerged that triple world champion Nelson Piquet had used a racist term when referring to Hamilton in an interview last year, merely provide fuel for the fire. As did Jackie Stewart’s suggestion that perhaps it was time for Hamilton to retire.

Both these interventions came in the run-up to the British GP. Hamilton’s response was to call for media outlets to stop publicising such views.

“I’ve always tried to take the high road and I’ve always tried to be respectful to these individuals,” Hamilton said. “Why do we give these guys a platform? They’re not with the times, they’re clearly not willing to change.

“These undertones of discrimination and micro-aggressions in today’s world are just not helpful and just create more divide than not.

“I love how Michelle Obama says, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ So I try to continue to do that. I’m inspired by people like that. I’m still here. It’s not going to deter me from doing what I think is right and doing what I love, which is working in the sport.”

Hamilton still has another year to run on his current Mercedes contract. If he commits to another, from 2024 onwards, he will turn 39 shortly after starting it, and therefore presumably 40 before he finishes it, given the unlikelihood of him doing a single-year deal.

“I dunno if I wanna go to 40 but it’s not that far away,” he says. “I have a contract to the end of next year. I’m definitely still enjoying it.”

In his Vanity Fair interview, conducted around the time of the Spanish GP, he said: “I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t thought about extending. I’m still on the mission, I’m still loving driving, I’m still being challenged by it. So I don’t really feel like I have to give it up anytime soon.”

And speaking to BBC Sport a couple of months later at Silverstone, he gave a similar impression.

“I’m still so committed,” he said. “I feel fitter than ever. I don’t feel the need to stop right now. I still have the ability and still a lot to do.

“It’s not just about winning. There’s a bigger picture. We are living in difficult times in the world. We all need positivity, hope, and I always wondered what my role here was. It can’t just be about winning.

“I’ve discovered it’s about people and how you give opportunities to under-served communities and create pathways into sport and hold people accountable and that’s what I’m about.”

Hamilton has continued to face battles both on and off track in his tough 2022

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

Some hear comments like this, look at his investment into the Denver Broncos NFL team, his dalliance with a group looking to buy Chelsea FC, or his forays into fashion and music, and wonder whether his focus is wandering from F1.

Hamilton’s response to those sorts of questions is to point to the 2018 Singapore Grand Prix, when he was criticised for going to the Met Ball in New York and a fashion launch in Shanghai on his way to the race, and then produced the best qualifying lap of his life, so good it left the Mercedes team open-mouthed in awe.

Preparing this piece, this writer reminded Hamilton of a comment one of his close friends, the fencer Miles Chamley-Watson, had made in the Vanity Fair piece, that he had nothing left to prove, but a lot left to accomplish.

"I am still deeply in love with the sport and particularly like the direction and things that we’re doing" Lewis Hamilton

How much of that, I asked, was in F1, and how did he view his future in the sport?

“There’s still plenty to achieve here personally,” he said. “Maybe not that many records as such, but still a lot of ground to cover with the team.

“I am still deeply in love with the sport and particularly like the direction and things that we’re doing within the sport, the work that conversations that I get to have with Stefano [Domenicali, the F1 president].

“But of course, there’s lots more outside that’s continuing to grow as well. So it’s exciting times. The future’s bright, I like to think.”

Hamilton isn't ready to call time on his F1 career just yet

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images