Why Hamilton isn't finished with F1 just yet

Partisanship is fundamental to all sport, for there is such an enormous thrill to be had in supporting a team through its highs and lows. The acrimony that’s hung over Formula 1 since the 2021 title decider in Abu Dhabi has also typified how draining and toxic these allegiances can be.

Eleven months after that event, Red Bull finally learning of its fate for exceeding the cost cap last season and, rightly or wrongly, boycotting Sky Sports during the recent Mexican Grand Prix after declaring the broadcaster to be ‘sensationalist’, ensures that the controversy has not dissipated. But for the good of the entire motorsport community and its audience, at some point the time must surely come to definitively move on. One person at the very centre of the saga, someone who has a right to feel particularly aggrieved, is adamant he’s done just that.

Lewis Hamilton’s mentality has shifted since pre-season testing. On the eve of the second ground-effects era, he was emphatic that, with enough time away from F1 over the winter break, he had switched his focus on coming back stronger to be “the best you’ve ever seen”.

But the seven-time champion also talked of a need to see accountability and regain trust in the powers that be. For instance, although Hamilton reckons he didn’t feel specifically targeted in the closing laps of last season when he was unseated by Max Verstappen, he does allude to ‘people speaking into his ear’, which is almost certainly in relation to FIA race director Michael Masi, ousted from his post ahead of this season.

Hamilton’s approach at the start of this term seemed to be more one of putting a lid on what had happened on 12 December 2021 rather than fully making peace with the handling of that late safety car. Whether any elite sportsperson dedicating three decades of their life to a particular cause could ever truly come to terms with such a scenario is known only to them. But in public at least, Hamilton is now crystal clear.

Despite Mercedes boss Toto Wolff saying he still thinks about Abu Dhabi “every day”, and those rumours emerging in early 2022 that a then-silent Hamilton was weighing up quitting F1, it seems enough time has now passed.

“Feels like years ago,” the Brit begins a candid and considered interview with select media at the recent United States GP. “It was definitely spirit-breaking, or soul-crushing, whatever you want to call it. Was I ever truly not going to come back? I am not one to give up like that.”

Hamilton has "moved on" from 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix controversy

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

He goes on: “I’ve moved on from it. I refuse to live in the past. When you hold on to some negativity, when you hold on to hate or whatever it is, it’s just holding you back.”

This was a resolve tested once again when speculation of Red Bull’s overspending first broke into the mainstream around the time of the Singapore weekend a few weeks ago. 

“I’m going up and I am going forwards, regardless of what’s happened in the past,” he continues. “I chose not to dwell on it. There is nothing I can do about back then. I gave everything. Like, I gave everything, and I sacrificed. But I am willing to do it again. That’s what I’m trying to work towards.”

Nevertheless, he had to get away.

"I don’t want to be less hungry than I was when I started. If I can’t find that [hunger], then I don’t feel there’s any reason to continue" Lewis Hamilton

“I spent time with my family and that was the best part of the healing,” he adds. “I just gave all of my time to the kids [his niece and nephew], building snowmen and just being present with them. That enabled me to really recover, really bounce back. If I wasn’t with them, I would have been stuck in a hole.”

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While that’s a more low-key getaway compared to Hamilton’s past forays into the world of fashion or a session in the recording studio, it still tallies with what we’ve known about his methods for some time. He can get the best out of himself by focusing on ventures away from F1 rather than solely burning the midnight oil in the Brackley factory or pounding around unrelentingly in the simulator for the sake of a tenth of a second.

None of that downtime means his preparation for 2022 was easy, though. While 23-time Olympic gold medallist Michael Phelps and Formula E champion Antonio Felix da Costa, among many other high-profile sports stars, have discussed the pitfalls of success – how they struggled to gee themselves up for the next season after achieving a long-held ambition – Hamilton faced a similar mental hurdle when readying himself for the first campaign in five years when he wasn’t about to defend the crown.

“I would say getting back into training was not easy,” he explains. “It’s not like you can just say, ‘OK, right, motivation’s there’. It definitely took a minute for me to build back in.

The Mercedes W13 immediately suffered from problems in pre-season testing

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

“I stayed training through the phase. I generally try to keep my fitness up. I didn’t take a week off or two weeks off and not do any training. I tried to keep in rhythm. So, it wasn’t actually that I was unfit and had to climb a mountain. But still, just having that drive to keep on pushing each day and dig deeper and push your body and mind further…

“When you have won seven world titles and more races [103] than anyone, just tapping into what keeps you hungry… because I don’t want to be less hungry than I was when I started. If I can’t find that, then I don’t feel there’s any reason to continue. I wanted to come back stronger and that’s why I came back [with a] fighting mentality. But then we had all the dramas with the car.”

When the first iteration of the Mercedes W13 was unveiled to the world on 18 February in a presentation streamed from Silverstone, many quite understandably thought they were clapping eyes on a creation that would be at the heart of the forthcoming championship fight. And why wouldn’t they, since this was an operation that had not long won its eighth consecutive constructors’ title, having already maintained its dominance across one major regulation change in 2017?

Ahead of the car hitting the track for the first time in a shakedown that afternoon, everyone at the team believed they too were looking at a potential world-beater. Then the realisation soon struck that, after picking themselves up from the events of Abu Dhabi, the whole crew would all immediately need to dig deep once again.

“We sat in February, and we were all upbeat,” Hamilton recalls. “They were all telling us we were going to have a massively quick car, and I’m sure everyone who was working on it was so hyped with all the hard work they put in through the winter. It’s such a gruelling time for everyone in the team. That’s when they really crunch and put in the crazy hours.

"In normal life, you expect that period to be a more relaxed time for people. To then find out the damn thing doesn’t work, and we’ve got bouncing, that was hard for everybody. Everyone was really struggling. We all went through our own process of how to deal with it. But I think, surprisingly, it’s been a really powerful, transformational time for us all. We’ve got stronger and tighter as a team.”

As the new generation of cars rolled out for the first pre-season test at Barcelona, and Red Bull had finally taken the covers off its dramatic RB18, the litany of issues that would come to hobble the W13 soon made themselves apparent. Even though an already heavily evolved racer with its size-zero sidepods was in development and would soon be unleashed when running commenced in Bahrain a fortnight later, it was still clear from day one in Spain that Mercedes was among the worst afflicted by the return of this strange porpoising sensation.

Hamilton finished on the podium in the opening race in Bahrain, but was adrift on pace

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

Although the data on the computer screen indicated to the Brackley design office that it had crafted another possible standard-bearer, you didn’t need a degree in engineering to realise that something had gone badly amiss in the transition to the circuit.

Just watching trackside, you could see the car violently pogo all the way down the main straight before respite finally came with the braking zone into Turn 1. That bouncing hogged the headlines, but the W13 has been further blighted by excessive drag and persistent tyre warm-up headaches. Hamilton soon knew he wasn’t driving a machine that would require him to extend his trophy cabinet.

“I had a feeling when I first drove the car,” he says. “But you can never say never. Maybe we would have fixed it by the first race. Who knows? It’s sometimes difficult to know how long it’s going to take to fix those things. Plus, I’d never had bouncing like that. The guys didn’t expect it to take as long as it’s taken them to understand what’s causing the bouncing. They’ve had to create new tools, all these things we didn’t have before.”

Hamilton headed the Silver Arrows charge when he qualified fifth for the Bahrain curtain-raiser. But the more revealing metric was lapping 0.68 seconds slower than the Ferrari F1-75 of polesitter Charles Leclerc. A retirement for both Red Bulls salvaged a podium.

"I will sacrifice this session or all the sessions to be able to find more data and information so that when we go back to the factory, they’ve got a better understanding of what’s going on" Lewis Hamilton

The following round in Saudi Arabia was worse still. Hamilton was eliminated in Q1 for the first time since a crash in Brazil in 2017. A point was mustered with 10th in the race. Hamilton then wouldn’t beat his new stablemate George Russell until round nine in Canada. And as a legacy, ahead of a return to Interlagos this weekend, he sits 15 points in arrears of the former Williams racer down in fifth overall.

This gave rise to a narrative that Hamilton might have had his day, that he should retire, that the student had already become the master. But it wasn’t quite so straightforward, since the elder statesman was taking a hit by deploying his 16 seasons of top-flight experience to lead the troubleshooting.

“George and his team, they don’t experiment the same obviously,” explains Hamilton. “But that’s because I’ve been here for a long time. I have the big, deep conversations with people I’ve been with for 10 years, so me and [Andrew Shovlin, trackside engineering director] can have constructive arguments.

“George, 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 back and forwards, here and there, different wings. All these different things, and I like that anyway.

Excessive porpoising during Azerbaijan Grand Prix caused back problems for Hamilton

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

“I have tried everything. I’ve tried every setting you can possibly do. That’s what I was doing at the beginning of the year. The whole idea of performing at your best and getting the best result from each weekend would be nice, but I was really about problem solving. I will sacrifice this session or all the sessions to be able to find more data and information so that when we go back to the factory, they’ve got a better understanding of what’s going on. But it ultimately hindered a lot of the weekends.”

Despite Hamilton bearing the brunt of radical set-ups that had the car’s rear axle raised as high as it would go in one practice and slammed into the ground the next, conventional methods of playing around with springs and dampers to better control the W13’s ride and stalling airflow had been exhausted. That left it to updates to refine the car’s aerodynamics to provide a fix, which they didn’t.

“You just hold on to hope,” Hamilton continues. “The next upgrade comes, and it doesn’t work, and the next one comes and doesn’t work. Imagine the people that are building those things and they are seeing performance in the windtunnel, but not seeing it on the track. Ah, Jesus. You just keep getting knocked back down.

“But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and we’re still standing tall. It’s not going to be easy to change the car into a leading car for next year, but I think we have a much better understanding of why the car is the way it is.”

Yet again, Hamilton and his colleagues would have their mental resilience put to the test as the season wore on, and updates to the W13 didn’t break its bad habits. His and Russell’s brains and bodies were also suffering physically. The images of 37-year-old Hamilton gingerly twisting himself out of the cockpit after 51 laps around the bumpy streets of Baku at 208mph will live long in the memory. Four days later, the FIA announced plans to begin measuring the vertical oscillations exerted on drivers amid concerns over the long-term health impacts.

PLUS: The concerning human cost of porpoising that F1 overlooked

Little wonder Hamilton describes the W13’s mannerisms as like a bucking bronco: “The car kicks. I described it to my engineers the best I could. It’s like you are creeping up behind a horse and you’re trying to get as close as possible. What’s the breaking point before it kicks you in the face? You know it’s going to hurt when it hits your face! That’s one of the best ways I can say when you’re trying to lean on the car and it’s snapping and unrecoverable. This car, it’s random… the most unpredictable that I’ve ever driven.”

Austria was a prime example, when both Mercedes drivers were spat off into the barriers in Q3 without a moment’s notice. Russell chalked top-five finishes in all but his home race (he was involved in Zhou Guanyu’s terrifying first-lap Silverstone shunt) until he got to Singapore in October. Hamilton, meanwhile, enjoyed a run of five straight podiums between the Canadian and Hungarian GPs. Regardless, the W13 remained largely immune to set-up changes, and no one upgrade package yielded a silver bullet. All told, heads began to drop.

Both Russell and Hamilton have struggled to get on top of the W13 this year, which has resulted in crashes

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

“From the initial phase, at the beginning, it didn’t feel too difficult,” says Hamilton. “But definitely, it starts to wear down on you. Then all of a sudden, we start having those races where we get into second and then the next race. The car one weekend is good. Then it’s one, two, three, four not good, then it pops up. So, you don’t know. It’s just a confusing overall year of emotions.

"The engineers say, ‘OK, we’ve got an upgrade that’s worth three tenths’. You get there and it’s a tenth slower. You’re, ‘Oh shoot’. I think I’ve learned just not to get my hopes up on anything. It’s better to kind of under-expect.”

Of course, there is value to be found in adversity. It provides an opportunity to learn and, through the frustration, can galvanise a team. In response to not challenging for race wins every weekend, Hamilton has found himself needing to adopt a slightly revised role to better handle the hardship than he might have done in the past. He reckons he has been “a better team-mate to my colleagues than I have ever before”, something that has come through spending more time at Brackley to boost morale. Being on site has also “magnified” his appreciation for how hard the team is working.

“These guys here are just leaving the race and back in the factory Monday morning, not even taking a morning off,” says Hamilton. “I’m having to remind them, ‘Hey, man, take some time for yourself because you’re going to burn out. I need you strong in the next week.’ [I am] remembering I need to do that also.”

"I’m trying to analyse my year and analyse like my next three to five-year plan. Where do I see myself? What are the things I want to do?" Lewis Hamilton

Objectively, the currently winless W13 is the worst car of Hamilton’s career since the 2009 McLaren MP4-24. But even then, he scored victories in Hungary and Singapore. In that context, it would be understandable for Hamilton to wait until he is a decent chunk into next season to see if sufficient progress has been made before taking stock as the final year of his current Mercedes contract comes to an end. But his stance on his F1 future has softened greatly.

Ahead of the Bahrain test, it was announced that Verstappen had signed a deal with Red Bull until the end of 2028. It was put to Hamilton that he will be 43 when that runs out, to which he responded: “I don’t plan on being here close to that age.” Then, when speculation arose at Monza that Daniel Ricciardo might be in line for a Mercedes reserve driver role in 2023, Hamilton was asked about the prospect of the Australian replacing him the year after. The tone was much lighter. He replied that he felt fitter and healthier than ever, adding that he had no plans to walk away – before apologising to Ricciardo.

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And now, his intentions are firm and on the record. Despite the storm of Abu Dhabi, the noise of a Red Bull cost cap breach, the underperforming W13, even foe-turned-ally Sebastian Vettel showing it can be done by announcing his plans to retire at the end of this season, Hamilton is to race on. When the relative calm of the winter arrives, negotiations with Mercedes will begin.

“At the end of the year, you’re sitting there trying to figure it out,” says Hamilton. “I’m trying to analyse my year and analyse like my next three to five-year plan. Where do I see myself? What are the things I want to do? What are my goals?

Hamilton has other interests outside F1, including fashion and music

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

“I’m adding in lots of business things,” adds the new stakeholder in American football team the Denver Broncos. “I have a lot of successful, really positive things that have lots of opportunity for success outside [of F1]. But I want to keep racing. I love what I do. I’ve been doing it for 30 years, and I don’t feel that I should have to stop. I think I’m currently still earning my keep. I want to do better still. I am planning to be here longer.”

Although it’s not quite the full 180 from his position in Bahrain eight months ago, Hamilton does now say: “Do I imagine myself being here beyond 40? Maybe.” Sporting icons and his friends Serena Williams (41) and Tom Brady (45) have set the precedent there. But precise age aside, he is emphatic. Despite having the enthusiasm, opportunity, money and platform to solely dedicate himself to his off-track pursuits, the grand prix grid is where it’s at. An eighth world title is still the aim.

There is no ‘if’ about extending his stay with Mercedes beyond the end of 2023. It’s only a question of ‘when’. Hamilton says of his future with the Three-Pointed Star: “We are going to do another deal. We’re going to sit down and we’re going to discuss it in these next couple of months.

PLUS: Why Hamilton is still the man to keep driving Mercedes forward

“My goal is to continue to be with Mercedes. I’ve been with Mercedes since I was 13. And it really is my family. They’ve stuck with me through thick and thin. They stuck with me through being expelled at school. They stuck with me through everything that was going on through 2020 [his fierce advocacy of Black Lives Matter in the turbulent wake of the killing of George Floyd]. They’ve stuck with me through my mistakes, and shit that’s been in the press. They’ve stuck with me through the ups and downs.

“And so, I really believe in this brand. I believe in the people that are within the organisation. I want to be the best team-mate I can be to them, because I think we can make the brand even better, more accessible, even stronger than it is. I think I can be an integral part of that.

“I could stop now. I have lots of other things in the pipeline that I will be super-focused on and super-busy. So, I’m here for the sheer love of working in the organisation that I’m in. You’re stuck with me for quite a bit longer!”

When will Hamilton finally decide to step away from F1?

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images