‘Nobody knows anything’. We all have heard this celebrated phrase, uttered originally by the Hollywood screenwriter (among other things) William Goldman. ‘Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work’ he went on. ‘Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.’
But don’t let anyone tell you that F1 futures can be plotted with all that much more confidence than the movie business. And if you need proof then you only need to look back over the last two-and-a-bit years in the existence of Lewis Hamilton. That which concluded with him once again champion of the world, and a champion with his reputation stronger than probably at any time before.
Go to the start of this journey in the autumn of 2012, then the consensus view was that Lewis Hamilton had committed career suicide in turning his back on McLaren for the (then) perennial underachiever Mercedes. That he’d sacrificed the possibility of future titles for the sake of his bank balance and his ‘brand’.
Joe Saward for one opined when the Merc move was rumoured as sealed that ‘if it has happened, it will be a reflection of Lewis’s state of mind, as this is not a logical thing to do.’ But that’s not particularly to single out Saward. He was far from the only one. Nor was he close to being the most vitriolic on the subject.
Yet two years on the egg that Lewis laid in his Singapore hotel room – in the almost mythologised last-ditch meeting with Niki Lauda – hatched. And turned out to be a golden one. Lewis is indeed now in possession of his long-awaited second title, while McLaren…well you know that one.
Lewis admitted in 2013 that the immediate switch in competiveness between his former and current employers – McLaren falling off a cliff – was unforeseen, but there was much less luck about his being in the plumb seat for this 2014 season. Mercedes long had the radical change of regs for this campaign circled on its calendar. When it gave up on the 2012 season early and at roughly the same moment as it bagged Lewis, it was not to focus resource on 2013’s preparations but on 2014’s. It started on its power unit way back in 2010.
The squad also knew it was way ahead in the energy recovery game; that having the power unit development in-house, being able to develop the unit and chassis in tandem, was a conspicuous advantage. Crucially too Merc knew that it was about to finally loosen the purse strings, now convinced that Ferrari’s and Red Bull’s spending never was going to come into line in the spirit of resource restriction. Lewis may have been fleeing the nest, but he gave thought to where he was going. He admits that while he did not foresee then that it would have happened this quickly necessarily, he could foresee a project there, a legacy. And ultimately more titles.
Indeed Lewis during the Abu Dhabi weekend just passed, where his second title was clinched, explained that contrary to assumption Lauda’s hotel room visit wasn’t in fact vital, it was an earlier and more detailed meeting with Ross Brawn that was. ‘(Brawn) explaining to me in depth what the team had planned, the long term plan of the team, what steps they were taking, that was where I was sold’, he said.
Career calls nevertheless hardly get more audacious. But Lewis’s numbers came up. It also in large part was the making of him.
Even so, Lewis’s first campaign in his new abode was rather one of peaks and valleys. Brilliant on occasion (see Silverstone and Hungary as well as in a mid-year run of poles), but not always. Lewis furthermore displayed often baffling emotional swings out of the car too, with a tendency to beat himself up as well as to treat media microphones as something of a confessional. Some who have worked with Lewis closely – such as Marc Priestley – said that such negative moods have a similarly negative impact on his driving.
Yet witnessing Lewis this year I’ve been put in mind of something noted more than once before, that Lewis Hamilton like a lot of F1 drivers hadn’t experienced normal teenage years with the various character-building experiences the rest of us went through. Instead at that point he was being groomed intensely as a racing driver. Perhaps therefore Lewis that did his ‘growing up’ much later than the rest of us, and did it in the severe public gaze that comes with being a top line F1 driver.
The theory fits rather neatly. When Lewis arrived in F1 in 2007 there was something a little child-like about him (a comment not a criticism as Murray Walker would say – a lot of the traits were helpful): eager to please; keen to say the right thing; obedient; disciplined; wide-eyed; happy go lucky.
Possibly though in the years after we witnessed Lewis go through something of a late adolescence.
Again there were parallels in his behaviour: the apparent keenness to ‘make it on his own’, first from his father, then from the McLaren team; the moods; the often uncommunicative persona; the restlessness (Mark Hughes noted around this time that ‘he’s about as predictable and settled as a cat in the bath’); the occasional incoherence (to the point that he often would contradict himself in the space of a sentence); the girl troubles; the hanging around with people who weren’t necessary a good influence; the already-mentioned strange tendency to beat himself up. Heck, even if we missed all of the other evidence he spoke last year of his desire to become a rapper…
And if we are to follow this train of thought to its logical conclusion perhaps we are now witnessing Lewis Hamilton the adult. Certainly this year we have seen the most rounded, content Lewis out of the car in a while. Many of the hangers-on of 2011 seem shorn, so too the conspicuous showbiz management. His family – for a time in some sort of exile it seemed – now more commonly are at his side.
And for Lewis even before his title was clinched perhaps for the first time ever in his F1 time his guard – in whatever form – dropped. We were getting the real him. A genuine, responsible, guy from Stevenage with a passion for racing and competing and who just so happens to be exceptionally good at it. And one driving better than he has in a while also.
‘Today I feel a lot more whole as a person’ Lewis noted indeed after the Abu Dhabi race cemented his latest title.
Perhaps it’s a matter of environment. We’ve discussed Lewis’s reasons for leaving McLaren, but there was a key one in addition. That he felt a strong urge to ‘flee the nest’; to prove himself ‘on his own’ as it were. And it’s a fairly natural urge – one since repeated by Sebastian Vettel apparently. Just as no matter how much we grow and age our parents always at some level view us a child, it appeared that at McLaren – where Lewis had been since the age of 13 – the driver-team relationship with Lewis always had a dash of parent and kid. He rarely there seemed to command his surroundings like many of the greats do as standard, nor did he regularly display the authority to override the team on strategy calls and the like (see for one glaring example the race in Hungary in 2011, when in changing conditions his team mate Jenson Button did override the pit wall when they called him in for a tyre change and Lewis didn’t, resulting in very different outcomes).
Perhaps too McLaren’s peculiar ways made it particularly hard for a driver to seize the reins. As Ron Dennis asserted pointedly of his charge after the 2012 Canadian race, in full fatherly mode, ‘last time I checked, we employed him, not the other way around’.
Whatever is the case too, Lewis also appears this year to have developed an ability to maintain a positive outlook, and it looks to have had a benign impact all the way through his driving. As intimated it wasn’t always the case. Time was that chin drops were a reasonably frequent feature.
We got our first clue of the new him in the season-opener in Melbourne. Lewis appeared to have the place to himself and took a commanding pole position. But then his race was over with mechanical failure almost as soon as it had begun. Yet afterwards there was no sign of sulks or recrimination. He remained positive and focussed for the year that stretched ahead.
Indeed he won the next four races, and we got more of a glimpse of Lewis’s new approach in his words and demeanour after his Chinese Grand Prix triumph. Paying homage to the team and making clear he’s only a small part of the results they’re enjoying. Speaking of the squad and his fans as a source of ‘energy’, of his fans as his ‘angels’. Reflecting with perspective on his upbringing in Stevenage; the work of those around him to get him where he is; how he’d never then have thought he’d make it as far as he had. And when Johnny Herbert in response asked him if there has been a conscious effort to improve this part of his repertoire, to establish more positivity, Lewis agreed absolutely.
Such themes – whether in good or bad – remained regular from him in front of media microphones throughout this season.
There was though a touch of the bad old Lewis mid-year, following Monaco and all that. Short of a grand confessional from Nico Rosberg we’ll never know exactly what happened at the last of that qualifying session, though it was quickly clear what Lewis thought. And while we’ll also never know the precise cause and effect we can say with certainty that it preceded a difficult run for him, that manifested itself in a series of errors in the vital part of each of the following three qualifying sessions, then supplemented by the two subsequent ones being ruined by mechanical failure.
But still, and in another display that wasn’t always so, he didn’t this year linger on his misfortune. In each of the five races after difficult Saturdays indeed he was scintillating, in four of them coming through the field in four almost in the blink of an eye. His opening lap in Spielberg I will take to my grave with me.
And even in his run of difficult qualifying sessions mentioned each time by the morning of the race he was right back into an optimum frame of mind. So it was at Silverstone for one. Having thrown away what looked a pole his by right through a gross personal miscalculation, and at home, he was bewildered, uncommunicative, almost shell-shocked. Aptly he noted later that his ‘world was crumbling beneath’ him.
But come the next morning Lewis was barely recognisable; absolutely determined again. And he won. Then he took up the subject afterwards. ‘Trying to turn that serious emptiness and negativity (of yesterday) into a positive today was really my priority’ he said. ‘It’s been very, very difficult. I was speaking last night, just comparing it to how difficult it is psychologically, it’s got to be something similar to the tennis players when they’re two sets down. It’s so hard to get your mind in gear, to get yourself back and not lose points from then on. And so the pressure is high but I really feel that now we’re back, kind of close and with the pace that I had today, I really feel that I can…just got to refocus for the next part of the season.’
The theme was continued in his reflections on his year’s other main pressure point, that at Spa (again, and all that). Reminiscing after his title was clinched Hamilton indeed noted that he responded to that in a way that would have once been beyond him. ‘It was a very difficult scenario to be in,’ he said, ‘and going back years ago, I wouldn’t have reacted in the way I did this year. I would have chosen another way which wouldn’t have been positive’.
Andrew Benson reckoned all of this was crucial: ‘Perhaps Lewis Hamilton’s greatest strength this year, a key to the second title that he won…was that he always believed he would do it’. David Coulthard concurred: ‘No matter what happened to him, he always believed he could bounce back’.
No one – or at least no one worth listening to – has ever doubted Lewis Hamilton’s driving talent. Indeed, it would be hard to make the case that his instinctive skills, infinitesimal precision, stunning natural speed and towering bravery are equalled by anyone in contemporary F1.
But us lot judging from the outside can be rather reductive. And due to this perhaps in a strange way such attributes became a hindrance, as many of us – too many – assumed that was all that Lewis offered. That he was an F1 equivalent of a kamikaze pilot; big on speed and bravery but not on analytics.
And rewind to the 2014 season previews and the consensus was that while Lewis’s pace could not be denied, the new cars were complex, the fuel would have to be managed, as would the tyres. Restraint wasn’t his strong suit, neither was using the loaf. Team mate and likely title rival Nico Rosberg therefore had potential to get the whip hand.
Yet in the actuality this campaign when it came to getting your head around the new cars, managing fuel or managing the tyres there was no conspicuous advantage to Nico on any of them. Indeed on at least one, maybe more than one, Lewis seemed to be the one ahead. Certainly the FOM graphics almost always had him using less fuel than his stable mate and I struggle to recall occasions that his tyres ‘hit the cliff’ before Nico’s. This year he skilfully converted many of his race wins using the very minimum from his car in a way that the last British multiple world champion, the cerebral Jackie Stewart, would have been proud.
Indeed when driver assistance over the radio was restricted come the Singapore round the consensus view by then was that it aided Lewis over Nico. Again the cause and effect is near-impossible to unpick, but after radio coaching was quashed Lewis won the next four races, and managed each of them masterfully.
As Will Buxton outlined eloquently when previewing the Abu Dhabi title showdown: ‘the greatest trick that Lewis Hamilton ever pulled, was convincing the world that he wasn’t smart’.
Lewis indeed after his title-clinching final race allowed himself some satisfaction at proving doubters wrong: ‘There was all that talk that Lewis cannot make his tyres last because of his aggressive driving style. But through the races this year I think I have proved time and again that I use less fuel and am able to utilise my tyres as well as anyone.’
But equally perhaps this season was no great departure after all, as to take one example of the 2012 season Lewis that year appeared consistently to master such requirements of conserving the notoriously delicate Pirellis while retaining his pace and flair, such as in Barcelona where he did the longest stint on a single set of tyres of anyone that year and he was still quick. He would have won the title that year with reliability and more even luck. And as Buxton and others who’ve followed Lewis for some time – since prior to his F1 days – know he’s always been a guy who takes a holistic approach to his job; leaves no stone unturned.
Therefore, despite appearances the 2014 year may not have been such a breakthrough after all. This season didn’t build Lewis, it revealed Lewis.
