Racer - Winter 2015

FoRmula 1 WoRld champIoNshIp
ch
arl
e
s
co
ate
s
/l
a T

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.