Lewis Hamilton made the extraordinary announcement prior to the start of this season that he was leaving for Ferrari next year, despite having declared months earlier a new two year contract with Mercedes. With such a long lead time before his departure it was always going to be the case that the team transitioned to functioning without the seven times champions input.

Though it may be the team are breathing a collective sigh of relief given Hamilton’s threats of last season where he publicly called for “accountability” and questioned why the design team had “not listened” to his comments on the problems with their 2022 W13.

 

 

 

Hamilton getting hammered by his team mate

The former world champion is 7-1 down to his team mate this year in Grand Prix qualifying and the same score is true for the number of times George has finished ahead of Lewis in the Sunday races this year. Following his latest qualifying debacle, Hamilton revealed: “I anticipated it would be difficult to out-qualify George because he has the upgraded component, but it’s just great to see that we are bringing upgrades. But once we got to qualifying… I don’t understand.”

Yet Hamilton then dropped a PR bombshell for Mercedes stating that he doe not expect to finish ahead of George in qualifying for the rest of the year. “I don’t anticipate being ahead of George in qualifying particularly this year, but we’ve just got to keep pushing, and the races are strong,” claimed Lewis to Sky F1.

When pressed by Natalie Pinkham on why he wold say such a thing, Hamilton was coy, pausing before his simple response of “We’ll see.”

When senior team members leave their current F1 squad for another, its natural they are either put out on garden leave or have restricted access to sensitive intellectual property information about the future cars in the pipeline. Red Bull have let it be known Newey is now absent from planning decisions moving forwards and at some point Lewis Hamilton will find himself in a similar situation.

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Lewis implies Mercedes now favour George

Sky F1’s Naomi Schiff co-presenting with Jenson Button mused how a driver would be feeling as the team exudes them from more and more information. “Lewis has been the number one driver at that team for many, many years,” she observed. “He’s the most successful driver in Formula 1 at the moment. The psychology behind becoming the driver who is not favoured must be new territory for Lewis that he’s probably not used to.

“I think that’s probably a tough pill to swallow, although I am sure he is understanding of the situation. But we have to say George, hats off, not just because he has that component on the car but he didn’t have a smooth run through practice, issues with the car, he didn’t get quite as many laps as the others so to bounce back is a great job done,” concluded Schiff.

During the race Lewis complained to the team about a sub-optimal strategy call which again feeds into the narrative they are less concerned about his results than George’s. Lewis stopped for fresh rubber on lap 51 and given he was around 45 seconds ahead of the next car down the road, he retuned to the circuit still in P7.

The goal was to undercut Max Verstappen who stopped a lap later and to Lewis dismay he came out again behind the Red Bull driver. Immediately Lewis asked why the team had not told him to push harder to get the jump on the Dutchman: “Why didn’t you tell me out-lap was critical?” asked Hamilton of his engineer.

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Sub-optimum strategy for Lewis

Toto Wolff subsequently explained, “That was a miscommunication first between us on the pit-wall that we got that wrong. It should have been an ‘out-lap critical’, trying to undercut.”

Mercedes have been suffering a brain drain since Hamilton’s call to leave for Ferrari with Wolff’s number two and other big hitters deciding its time to move on. This begs the question does Hamilton’s radio message suggest all is not well internally given Mercedes history of strong strategy calls.

Toto Wolff turned to Hamilton’s comments implying there may be favouritism within the team. “Aren’t all drivers a bit sceptical at times?” said Wolff, when asked about Hamilton’s cryptic comment. “I think as a team, we’ve demonstrated even in the most tense competitions between team-mates that we are trying to always balance the drive and be transparent and fair.

“I think there was not a moment apart from 2016 Abu Dhabi where we tried to manage these areas,” he added, referring to the call to Hamilton to stop backing up his then teammate Nico Rosberg into the chasing pack. Nico needed to just finish behind Hamilton to take the title, something he duly did then promptly retired from the sport. 

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We’re trying to “maximise results” says Wolff

“We haven’t done since then, but I can understand that as a driver, you want the best out of yourself and the team. Sometimes when it’s going against you, you can question.

“As a team, we are 100% on a mission of giving the two drivers two great cars, the best possible cars and the best possible strategies and support.

“We’re trying to do the best out of the relationship, trying to maximise the results for what is the final season,” he said of Hamilton. “And that, you know, always between drivers and teams can be tense at times because everybody wants to do their best.”

Jenson Button observed with their current troubles Mercedes need every point they can so should they nobble Lewis Hamilton its counter productive to their need for championship points.

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Horner’s latest accusation levelled at Wolf

Theres no love lost between Toto Wolff and Christian Horner with the latter thinking of himself as a true racing man while the Mercedes boss’ background is that of a financier. Mercedes had acquired the Brawn team for the 2010 season and under the guide of Ross Brawn the team was making progress.

The recruitment of Lewis Hamilton from his McLaren home for the 2013 title race, demonstrated the team meant business – with Toto Wolff airing on the scene around the same time as Lewis. Niki Lauda completed the top team and was credited in part with persuading Hamilton to leave his boyhood racing family.  READ MORE