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The bleak reality for those trying to topple Hamilton inside Mercedes

Beating your team-mate is the number one goal in motorsport. In his time at Mercedes, only once has Lewis Hamilton been defeated by his team-mate across a season. According to the person who engineered Nico Rosberg and Valtteri Bottas, that task is the toughest it has ever been

Matt Kew May 22, 2020, 3:15 PM

The stopwatch is the most decisive measure of performance in motorsport. That comes with a condition, however, because in isolation a single lap time means little. There needs to be context - a comparison to a simulator run or a theoretical perfect lap.

These are strong reference points for a team, but the indicator transfixing everybody else is whether or not a driver can beat their nearest rival, the one running in equal machinery. Have they have gone faster than their team-mate?

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Author Matt Kew

Matt Kew is Autosport’s F1 Editor, a role he has held since March 2022 following stints covering Formula E, Extreme E and the British Touring Car Championship.

Matt joined Autosport in 2018 to work predominantly on the magazine, but his relentless quoting of Alan Partridge meant office colleagues soon thought he would be better-suited to increased field work.

Needless to say, Matt had the last laugh when he won the Motorsport UK Young Journalist of the Year Award in 2019.

His interest in motorsport was sparked by regular trips to watch ASCAR crash around Rockingham’s banked oval.

Matt read politics and philosophy at the University of Sheffield - receiving first-class honours for his dissertation assessing the lack of female participation in top-tier motor racing.

He covered a wide variety of national race and rally meetings for Autosport as a freelancer before joining full-time. His best efforts to argue the merits of historic racing are undone by a questionable taste in music and James Bond actors.