Lewis feels home heat
whole racing career,” he said. “I’ve been racing since eight but this is the most intense season in Formula One.
“It’s definitely been difficult, we’ve obviously had a couple of issues that have not really allowed us to show the results of our hard work.
“But I really want to win this Grand Prix – it’s a must-win. I hope we can use that as a springboard and get some better results from then on. There’s a lot of pressure going into it. “I just have to keep driving the way I have been and hope things get better. Right now I’m 20 points behind. I don’t have a crystal ball but it doesn’t look great at the moment. There is still a long way to go. Within one race it could switch. But the bigger the gap gets, the more pressure builds.” Hamilton’s pursuit of a fourth world title is certainly proving trickier than he imagined at the start. He and Vettel have three wins each this season but the difference has been the German’s greater consistency; he has only finished off the podium twice and both times he was fourth. In contrast, Hamilton has finished off the podium four times and has a seventh and a fifth to add to his two fourth places. Of the nine races so far, four have not gone to plan for Hamilton, who admits his campaign so far has been a combination of misfortune and a personal failure to deliver.
He was off-form in Russia and Monaco and a loose head restraint cost him a probable win in Azerbaijan, where matters were made worse by losing two points to Vettel despite his rival’s 10-second penalty for dangerous driving.
Hamilton’s frustration at the FIA decision to allow Vettel to walk away with only a stern warning for that ‘road-rage’ incident was compounded when he suffered a five-place grid penalty for an unauthorised gearbox change in Austria, where Vettel finished second.
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff said: “Lewis had all the bad luck you can have. Now it is about time to fight back and hopefully that is going to happen at Silverstone.”
There seems little between the Ferrari and the Mercedes but on the law of averages Vettel is due a bad race. Hamilton cannot afford another one.