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imposed – and a perfect time for Rosberg.
When Jenson Button joined Hamilton’s
McLaren team in 2010, he spent a couple
of races looking at the telemetry
comparisons and confided to his father,
John, “If Lewis ever works out how
deeply he needs to work with the
engineers, the rest of us may as well go
home. But he’s never going to, so we’ve
all got a chance against him.”
There are other things working against
Hamilton, too. He’s winning in the Pirelli
era, despite it being the Pirelli era. High
degradation tires that cannot be raced
flat-out the whole way deprive him of
much of his natural advantage. He can
sometimes damage his own chances with
his dominance. At Monaco he pulled out a
massive lead over Rosberg, but that left
him vulnerable in this Pirelli and safety
car era. Sure enough, look what
happened. The safety car came out,
wiping Hamilton’s big lead and leaving
him only with the downside of
significantly more worn tires than
Rosberg. That worry about the state of
his tires played a crucial part in the
team’s fateful decision to pit him, gifting
the win to Rosberg at the 11th hour.
To contain him, as Rosberg has done
recently, you have to be in front of him
from the start, smother his full-attack
irrepressibility - and wait until his tire
energy is spent. Then you pit.
Hamilton’s aware of this weakness, and
he strains against the leash of it –
because it’s instinctual. In the competitive
intensity of the racing moment – the kind
of high-stress scenario when the human
brain is wired to revert to instinct – he can
still rail against it. But as he cools down,
he’s back to being a nice guy.
Hamilton’s combination of visceral
skills, belief and fire isn’t enough on its
own in current F1. What we see in this era
is a Hamilton reined-in, the extravagant
excesses of his talent tightly controlled so
that we rarely get to revel in the full
extent of it. But we also rarely get to see
the downsides of his emotionally-driven
approach, just occasional snippets of
frustration over the radio that in an earlier
era, when drivers were left to their own
devices once the race had started, would
have resulted in more brilliance, more
misjudgements - Ronnie Peterson maybe.
The amplitudes of Hamilton’s waves –
from the crests of his brilliant best to the
relative troughs of his weaknesses – are
smaller in this era of F1 than they would
have been in another. But they are still
bigger than anyone else’s.
(LEFT) Hamilton’s
affinity with rear
instability in fast
corners allows for
setups with less
understeer in slow
corners – and that
means more grip
over the whole lap.
JENSON BUTTON
deeply he needs to work with
the engineers, the rest of
us may as well go home”
Did Lewis Hamilton take his foot off the gas once
he’d secured his third F1 World Championship in
COTA? (LEFT) If he did, it’s debatable as to what
extent. But what wasn’t in doubt was his Mercedes
teammate Nico Rosberg’s determination to “work his
ass off” in the final races. Six consecutive poles and
three straight wins for the German was the result.
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