Hamilton behind the helmet: A study of an F1 icon

James Allison, technical director at Hamilton’s Mercedes team, is in a unique position to judge his qualities. Allison has worked closely with not only Hamilton but also Schumacher, Alonso and four-time champion Sebastian Vettel.

“If they all had to be in a super-team fighting it out every year,” Allison says, “my guess is that Lewis would end up on top. Maybe not every season, but if they kept coming back every year to do battle in some sort of Valhalla-type confrontation, more often than not it would be Lewis wearing the crown at the end of the year.

“Of that cluster, I think he is the quickest, at his best, and he shows us his best extremely frequently. It’s not by accident that he is the all-time pole record holder. He just has a better turn of speed than the others.”

Work ethic

Hamilton’s lifestyle outside F1 – the fashion line, the constant trips to the US, the backing vocals on R&B singles, the Hollywood friends – gives some the impression that he does not work that hard. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Mercedes’ record-breaking run of six drivers’ and constructors’ championship doubles is founded on a relentless quest for better, and constant, reinvention. Hamilton is at the heart of it.

Back in August, Hamilton ended the first part of the season with possibly his best win of the year, a brilliant fightback to pass Red Bull’s Max Verstappen for victory at the Hungarian Grand Prix.

It was Hamilton’s eighth win in 12 races and it gave him a 62-point championship lead. The sixth title was in effect already in the bag. But in the post-race debrief with his engineers, Hamilton asked everyone to send him an email, in which he wanted them to “be completely straight with me if they think there is anything we can improve on”.

Mercedes F1 boss Toto Wolff says: “He never stops pushing for performance. He is very self-critical. He is the only driver I have ever seen coming into a debrief saying: ‘Don’t look at my data because my driving was not good enough.’ And that from a six-time world champion.

“This relentless pursuit of being a better you tomorrow than you have been today and brutal honesty to yourself, transparency within the organisation to overcome mistakes and shortcomings, is something that is a very big part of Lewis’s character.”

Competitive attitude

Like all great sports people, Hamilton hates to lose. It’s what enables him to produce some of his greatest victories.

Take that race in Hungary. When Mercedes called him in for a second pit stop, while Verstappen stayed out in the lead, Hamilton was 20 seconds behind with 22 laps to go. “I was definitely not thinking: ‘Genius’,” Hamilton said afterwards. Nineteen laps later, he was in the lead.

Or Bahrain earlier in the year. While Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc raced off into the distance out front, Hamilton took the race to his team-mate Vettel on a day the Ferraris were demonstrably faster. Hamilton passed Vettel and pressured him into the latest of a series of mistakes. Had he not done that, it would have been Vettel, not Hamilton, who inherited the win when Leclerc’s engine hit trouble in the closing laps.

It’s this competitiveness that can come across to some as a kind of sulkiness on the team radio during races. But asking how he has lost so much time, what has gone wrong with the strategy, demanding the team get him into a position to win the race, isn’t Hamilton being spoilt. It’s a refusal to accept second best.

Sporting intelligence

F1 cars take drivers to their physical limits, having to deal with forces of six times gravity in every braking zone and 5g in fast corners for 90 minutes or more at a time.

But F1 is a mental exercise, too. Drivers have to control the world’s most demanding cars on the limit of adhesion and make them lap faster than anyone while competing for the same piece of track as everyone else. This is the racing bit of race-car driving, and Hamilton is unsurpassed at it.

As Allison puts it: “He has a record of finding clean but improbable overtakes that surpasses the others.

“Something I have come to appreciate more is just how cleverly and cleanly he races a car. He makes other people make mistakes by placing his car on the road where they have no choice but to hit him, back down or make a mistake, while he doesn’t.”

Quite often in the past two or three seasons, the victim in these circumstances has been Vettel. Take Monza last year, when Hamilton got alongside the Ferrari driver on the outside into the second chicane on the first lap and Vettel slid into him and spun. The German lost the race – and control of the championship – there and then.

“Lewis just put his car on the road,” Allison says, “not in a way that was easy to do, but where it left Sebastian with nowhere to go. That was magnificent and utterly clean. It wasn’t like he didn’t leave room or anything like that, just brilliant driving.”

It's just the car, right?

Wrong. Those who undervalue Hamilton’s achievements point to the dominance of Mercedes since turbo-hybrid engines were introduced in 2014. But it’s an over-simplification to say Hamilton is winning only because he has the best car.

For one thing, in 2007, and when he won his first title in 2008, he didn’t – the Ferrari was a better car than the McLaren in both those seasons. That’s obvious from the subsequent careers of Hamilton and Alonso and the Ferrari drivers Kimi Räikkönen and Felipe Massa, both of whom Alonso wiped the floor with as team-mates.

For the remainder of Hamilton’s McLaren career, until the end of 2012, the car was rarely the best either. And yet Hamilton left the team with 21 victories under his belt.

When he joined Mercedes in 2013, they were a long way from the dominance they would soon show. Hamilton won a race; team-mate Nico Rosberg did not.

From 2014 to 2016, as Mercedes dominated, Hamilton out-scored Rosberg at a rate of two victories to one. And he lost the title in 2016 only because of much worse reliability than his team-mate.

In 2017 and 2018, Ferrari had the best car for the first two-thirds of each season, and yet through the quality and consistency of his performances Hamilton kept himself in the game, until Ferrari and Vettel imploded under the pressure.

And, of course, there is not only one Mercedes. Since he joined the team in 2013, Hamilton has won 62 grands prix; his team-mates have won 30. Out of the 30 wins he has had since Valtteri Bottas joined the team in 2017, the Finn has not been second in 16 of those races, only three of which were because of reliability issues.

“In terms of performance, there is a lot put on the car and less concerned with the driver,” Hamilton says. “Some of the races we come to, there are two of my cars and sometimes there is a car in between us, or maybe more than one. So it is not necessarily who has the fastest car.

“Some races in the past, I have been able to do more with the car than it has particularly wanted to and that’s what I enjoy. So I just approach it the same, trying to out-drive the car if and when I can and put it in close range of the car that is fastest.”

The likeability question

Does the way Hamilton sometimes comes across affect the way people view his abilities as an athlete? It would appear to.

He has developed a reputation as a divisive character: people either love him or they hate him.

In recent times, Hamilton has gone vegan and taken to talking about the threat of the climate crisis. But to his detractors, being lectured on green issues is a bit rich from a guy who drives an F1 car and flies around the world for a living.

Some resent the fact that he lives as a tax exile in Monaco (although for some reason seem less bothered about all the other sports stars who do the same). Some feel he seems like he doesn’t know who he is – coming across one moment like a perfectly normal person brought up in the home counties, and the next like a globetrotting superstar. (The fact he is both might have something to do with this.)