LEWIS: DON’T MAKE IT TOO EASY FOR ME
Hamilton hoping for a tough challenge and a season of real racing
LEWIS HAMILTON is relishing the prospect of a gruelling eight-month season after admitting he has found previous campaigns easy.
The Brit will start tomorrow’s curtain-raiser in Melbourne as favourite to win a fourth drivers’ title after missing out to Nico Rosberg last year.
And the 32-year-old has welcomed the introduction of faster cars, which he expects will push him to his physical limit.
Hamilton said: “As racing drivers you want to drive the quickest cars in the world and you always want to go faster.
“The cars are faster than they were last year and the challenge of exploiting that speed with your car on track is a great challenge.
“It’s more in the direction of how Formula One should be, in the sense of the physicality side of it. We are athletes, and Formula One should be the most physically demanding sport in terms of all the driving series.
“In the previous years that’s not been the case. To the level we train to it’s relatively easy for us, but now you are going to have to push the boundaries, which I like.”
Hamilton’s boss at Mercedes Toto Wolff has described the new cars as “violent” and his leading driver regularly incorporates Muay Thai and boxing into his training.
And the three-time world champion’s new team-mate Valtteri Bottas has also felt the impact of the new technology.
The Finn said: “It doesn’t matter how much training you do and if you’re the fittest you’ve ever been starting the year, it’s so unnatural driving a Formula One car that the first reactions are always a bit strange, but very quickly you get used to it. “Obviously, if you have a new seat as I do for this year, it’s tuning those kind of things and you might get some bruises and stuff, but that’s part of winter testing. “With the new cars there’s more G-forces and more load going through your body, which increases fatigue and means you need to be fitter than before to be able to maintain the same level of focus and alertness.”
Twenty-year-old rookie Esteban Ocon (left) took his preparations to a whole new level.
The Force India debutant said: “I was up in the mountains at almost 2,000m for almost two months.
“When you get high in altitude, and you get down again, it’s easy to breathe so I was training there a lot.
“It was about nine hours of cardio per week, 10 hours of gym per week and all the rest was reaction work, co-ordination work and visual perception work.
“It was complete training and it was very tough, for sure the toughest of my career. But I’m happy that I’ve achieved it now, looking at how tough the cars are to drive.”