Autosport 2021 Top 50: #1 Lewis Hamilton

Well, he finally got what he said he wanted.

Many times during his run to becoming statistically Formula 1’s greatest driver, Lewis Hamilton claimed he’d welcome all challengers to Mercedes’ domination. It had long looked like Max Verstappen and Red Bull would be the combination most likely to threaten the Hamilton/Mercedes twin thrones. Ferrari was too inconsistent in the years it won races before 2020, where Charles Leclerc’s potential challenge was blunted by the team losing its controversial power prowess.

In 2021, Hamilton and Mercedes and Verstappen and Red Bull went head-to-head in a thrilling title battle that went down to the wire. It was a championship for the Netflix era, but still had plenty for traditional motorsport fans to enjoy. The championship outcome was different – at least at the time of writing. But for the fifth year in a row, Hamilton tops this list.

PLUS: How the 2021 F1 title was won in Abu Dhabi

However, the 2021 Hamilton was different. This time around there were errors – and big ones, too – while occasionally he was absent in shockingly unexpected fashion, losing out to team-mate Valtteri Bottas in the critical areas of tyre warm-up and management.

But the all-conquering, brilliant Hamilton was there too – with peaks higher than those even the brilliant Verstappen could reach. These peaks were surrounded by the impressive ones the Dutchman was scaling around him, and they rose very late in the year.

The 2021 season did not start well for Mercedes. For the first time since 2013, it was behind from the off, with Red Bull possessing the year’s best package – confirmed by its season-opening pole in Bahrain and 10 poles across the year to Mercedes’ nine. But Hamilton – although he won the first race with a brilliant display of tyre management and guile, one that still needed Verstappen to err – was also far from his usual form early on.

Hamilton fended off Verstappen for a surprise victory in the Bahrain season opener

Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images

At Imola, he made his first major mistake, slipping off the road in the damp conditions at the Tosa hairpin while lapping George Russell and getting stuck in the gravel on the outside for a minute. Verstappen – in control of the race after edging his rival’s outside attack at the Tamburello chicane on the opening lap across the kerbs – lapped him. Only the red flag resulting from the crash involving the two drivers vying to be his 2022 team-mate got Hamilton out of that predicament, as he was gifted the lap back by the red flag and then put in another famous charge from the rear to rescue second ahead of Lando Norris and Leclerc.

“I knew I couldn’t afford to lose another seven points,” says Hamilton, speaking in a media roundtable that included Motorsport.com’s Jonathan Noble. “Looking back, you could say, ‘Was I too hasty, too aggressive?’ Maybe. And I’ll tell you, it hurt a lot going into that gravel.

“If I’d just been a tiny bit more patient and waited until after that corner to lap the backmarkers… but all I could think of was catching Max in the moment, right? So that wasn’t great. That was a real mistake.”

Monaco would be better described as an overall underperformance, where Hamilton struggled badly with Mercedes’ tyre warm-up issues, worse than Bottas, who chased Verstappen up front after Leclerc failed to start. The Finn would retire in the pits due to a machined wheelnut, while Hamilton came home seventh, frustrated by his team’s strategy call behind Pierre Gasly, but at least bagged the fastest-lap point.

Hamilton called his 2021 car "a monster of a diva" that was "harder to get in the right window" compared to any previous Mercedes. This, he felt, meant he was "just not able to maximise my ability through the set-up not being in the right place"

That weekend was followed immediately by Baku, where Mercedes was again in trouble getting the softer tyres to heat up. This time, Hamilton led the way for the Black Arrows, butRed Bull was in complete control until Verstappen’s tyre blew out with five laps remaining. That gave Hamilton the chance to attack the hydraulic-pressure problem-hobbled Sergio Perez, but he locked up at the restart’s first corner and went from likely race winner to last in an instant and cloud of tyre torture after accidentally activating his car’s ‘magic’ brake bias alteration system. But Hamilton doesn’t view this “as a driver’s mistake”.

“It was more a mechanical problem,” he adds. “It literally was a mistake waiting to happen.”

That is a logical explanation now the button has been shrouded, but still must go down as Hamilton’s own error given that he had not done it before. It extended his fallow run through the late spring and early summer – where he didn’t win again after his Portugal and Spain back-to-back triumphs, with the latter a classic Hamilton/Mercedes victory by outfoxing Red Bull on strategy and the Briton delivering the charge as needed, and as Verstappen failed to do in Bahrain.

Lock-up on the restart in Baku cost a likely win chance after Verstappen's tyre blowout, amid a fallow spell for the Mercedes man

Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images

Verstappen did win in such bold, attacking-strategy circumstances at Paul Ricard, shattering Mercedes’ success stranglehold at the French Grand Prix. Then he dominated both races in Austria, with Hamilton not conclusively absolved of picking up the rear brake damage that meant he came home fourth in the second race there – given he wasn’t noticeably offline when the damage became apparent, but with the track’s fearsome kerbs always a danger.

But plenty of what made 2021 different to 2020 stemmed from the technical rule changes that straddled the two seasons. Mercedes and Aston Martin, the two teams running low-rake aerodynamic profiles, were hit hardest by the mandated cuts to the rear of the floors, among other minor changes at the back.

When these changes were allied with the carryover car requirements and the unique clampdown on development as per F1 and the FIA’s move to cut costs for the teams during the pandemic, Mercedes did not have a lot of room to develop its way out of trouble. Its last upgrade package arrived at Silverstone, after Hamilton had called on his squad to “find some performance” through aerodynamic development, and from then on things were much closer with Red Bull. Mercedes also worked to overcome the W12’s limitations through set-up experiments aimed at getting it back to the “sweet spot” Hamilton highlights it enjoyed with the W11.

But this was hard, with Hamilton calling his 2021 car “a monster of a diva” that was “harder to get in the right window” compared to any previous Mercedes. This, he felt, meant he was “just not able to maximise my ability through the set-up not being in the right place”.

The pandemic continued to hang over the F1 world just as much as the rest of society. But where last year’s championship was squeezed into six months, the much-altered 2021 calendar occupied the same nine-month stretch as before the global health crisis unfolded. For Hamilton and the rest, this has meant isolating for longer and undertaking fewer or more restricted social interactions.

PLUS: The invisible enemy that’s made Hamilton’s title charge tougher

He knew the importance of this discipline better than the majority of the grid after his absence from the 2020 Sakhir GP, which led to him be wary to keep a distance and even “hold your breath around everyone”. Such demands, he says, made 2021 “much harder” as it was “harder to find a balance in normal life, in and around your work life”.

100th win came in Russia after late rain shower swung the race away from long-time leader Norris

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

The long-term effects of his COVID bout – and sources suggest Hamilton’s illness 12 months ago was deeply unpleasant for the world champion – are well known. After finishing second in the wild Hungarian GP he had started bizarrely solo on the grid, held at bay for so long in a thrilling contest with former team-mate and fierce rival Fernando Alonso, Hamilton had to check in with Mercedes’ doctor and was visibly uncomfortable on the podium. He suggested at the time he may have been suffering from lingering effects of the virus, but stopped short of outright saying he had long-COVID. But as the season’s end approached, he felt “like it’s gone”.

For the first time since 2016, Hamilton headed out of the Abu Dhabi paddock contemplating defeat to a bitter rival. But he heads our list once again. And there are two key reasons why – both of which we witnessed in the Brazilian GP weekend.

Hamilton had stayed in the hunt throughout the late summer and early autumn – beginning with his controversial victory on home soil at Silverstone. Verstappen then lost further big ground thanks to Bottas’s shocking gaffe at the start in Hungary, but was gifted five points on Hamilton in the Spa farce. Then came their second big crash at Monza and Hamilton’s win in Russia even after taking an engine-change grid penalty, a factor that also limited his potential in Turkey. Austin was a surprise defeat to Verstappen, who dominated as expected in Mexico, with Hamilton ruing getting such a good start that he and Bottas were unable to block the Red Bull as they’d planned on the long run to Turn 1.

"I want to be the purest of drivers – through speed, through sheer hard work and determination"Lewis Hamilton

But Brazil brought out his best. In reaction to being disqualified from Friday qualifying ‘pole’ for his DRS screws being loose and his rear wing therefore failing scrutineering, Hamilton found his top form. He charged from last to fifth in 2021’s final sprint race, then took his final fresh internal combustion engine from 10th to grand prix victory – Toto Wolff saying after he’d carried this exceptional form to a dominant Qatar victory: “He’s absolutely on it – brutal – and cold-blooded.”

PLUS: How Hamilton won out in Interlagos masterclass 

To win in Brazil he had to pass Verstappen, who defended up to and past the point of acceptability at Turn 4 – where F1 race director Michael Masi should have clamped down on his driving, as it led Verstappen to believe he could act as he did again, unacceptably, in Jeddah.

After Verstappen’s off-track actions at Turn 4, Hamilton “chose a different line” but “still managed to get him to dart to the inside, which really put him off”. Then he “managed to have a different line to hold on to him” in a move that was “pre-planned” and brilliant.

Comeback win at Brazil after qualifying disqualification and engine penalty was Hamilton at his best

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Silverstone was on Hamilton – but it was the move of a driver not backing down in the face of repeated uber-aggression, and knowing there was “a need to gain points and you have to get a little bit less willing to give up too much” fearing car damage in such circumstances, as he wisely did in Spain and the second Jeddah start. He was rightly penalised at Silverstone, but it was a close call.

“I want to be the purest of drivers – through speed, through sheer hard work and determination,” Hamilton says of his approach to racing. And that is, ultimately, why he tops this list. He so nearly won in a slower car and produced the highest peaks of his F1 game late in the year. That, allied to his cleaner racecraft, means he is, once again, the year’s best.

How off-track activities keep Hamilton motivated

In 2020, Lewis Hamilton’s voice as a champion away from the race track got louder, as he brought the push for racial equality in the wake of the murder of George Floyd into Formula 1.

It altered the shape of the championship’s pre-race proceedings, with the ‘We Race as One’ moment now a chance for drivers to highlight particular causes, such as Sebastian Vettel standing in solidarity with the Hungarian LGBTQ+ community at the Budapest race in July.

Hamilton used other tools available to him to get messages across in 2021. He continued to be one of the few drivers to regularly offer thoughts on important topics in his press appearances, but the rainbow helmet livery – which he ran in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi to close out the season – that he used to make his own stand with the LGBTQ+ communities in those countries with poor human rights records overall was a new gesture for him.

Hamilton's drive to enact purposeful change in society was underlined by wearing a rainbow helmet livery in the final trio of races

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

In a year when Hamilton admits he struggled to get his work/life balance right thanks to the requirement to isolate so much to stay safe from COVID, it was some of his off-track work that he says helped him considerably.

Last year he founded the Hamilton Commission, which is committed to improving representation of black people in UK motorsport, and in July it published its report, ‘Accelerating Change’, after 10 months of research in conjunction with the Royal Academy of Engineering. The report established 10 key recommendations for improving diversity in motorsport.

“When you have time separate from the races, when you’re trying to figure out what to apply your time and effort towards, sometimes you’re putting time and effort into something that doesn’t give anything back or it doesn’t have any long-lasting impact,” Hamilton says.

“So, to finally find something that has real purpose and real potential change and shift for the industry and for people – that feels super rewarding. So, yeah, to be able to focus on something other than racing, it’s great. It takes the pressure right off.”