We’re in the passenger seat when Lewis lets his hair down
F1 drivers strive to eliminate mistakes because when they slide their car they lose time. But Lewis Hamilton needn’t worry: for today’s Mercedes passenger rides he can drift sideways to his heart’s content
“I JUST LIKE DRIFTING,”
says Lewis Hamilton with a grin as the tyres beneath his Mercedes C63 squeal and throw up vast plumes of sky-blue rubber smoke. He makes it look so effortless. Through a right-hander in a beautifully balanced four-wheel drift, Lewis spins the steering wheel with his fingertips to shift the weight of the car in the opposite direction and slides around a left-hander. “I push the car to the limit,” he adds. “And I try to get the drift to go on as long as possible…”
It was 110 years ago, on the very spot where Lewis has just left rubber marks on the asphalt, that the world’s first motor racing circuit opened to great fanfare. Situated to the south-west of London, Brooklands was a 2.75-mile oval with banking almost nine metres high in places. Car manufacturers such as Fiat, Mercedes and Benz were beginning to understand how racing could be a shopfront for their newly created products, and Brooklands was built with the aim of kickstarting a British car industry that was already beginning to be left behind by continental developments. During construction, excavators uncovered the remains of ancient furnaces on the Brooklands site, enabling historians to divine that the Iron Age in Britain had begun much earlier than previously thought. A positive augury for a new era of industry?
It’s perhaps apt that today one of Britain’s highest paid and most commercially astute sportsmen is driving a Mercedes-benz on the site of the original Brooklands circuit on a sponsorship day for Monster Energy drinks. The marketing of products through sporting talent is still going strong. And for F1 Racing, this is a rare chance to observe the skills of the fourtime world champion close-up. As he throws the 4-litre V8 bi-turbo saloon around the little track built on the Brooklands estate, overlooking Mercedes-benz World, Lewis reveals that drifting does take a bit of practice, even for a 62-time grand prix winner.
“I remember when I was young, I went to an event organised by a car magazine,” recalls Lewis as he dances on the pedals. “It was on an oval and we had to drift a BMW Z3 M Roadster. There was a rally driver who was doing it perfectly and I was 16 and had never driven a car before. Trying to drift it was impossible. So, doing it now… it’s just years of practice.”
We leave the brakes smouldering on the C63 and head into Mercedes-benz World to discuss the here-and-now. Lewis has built a career to be proud of: breaking Ayrton Senna’s pole record and matching Alain Prost’s tally of four titles. But despite the experience of 209 starts, he admits he approaches every race with trepidation.
“Every single race I do I have the same thought process,” he says. “How is it going to go? You prepare yourself the same way, so you have the same anxiousness and it doesn’t mean that you’re always relaxed. Every single race you want to win, you want to perform at your best, you want to make the right moves. You never want to lose time, so you always have those same challenges, regardless of whether you’re fighting for the championship or not.”
After falling behind Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel during the opening stretch of last season, Lewis took advantage of the Scuderia’s poor reliability and dug deep within himself – unleashing a level of performance that left even his own team-mate stunned – to ensure the world championship was his before the season’s end. Early form suggests that Lewis will be pitched against Vettel again this season, but as the contact between them in Baku proved, he’s not easily thrown by controversial flashpoints.
“Ultimately I think there’s different ways you can handle things,” he says, reflecting on ‘biffgate’, the moment Vettel retaliated after feeling Lewis had brake-tested him behind the Safety Car. “I knew what I was there to do and I didn’t want anything to distract me. I wasn’t going to let myself say something or react in a way that would create some negative swirl that would steer me off course from my ultimate goal.
“I remember when I was young, trying to drift it was impossible. So, doing it now… IT’S JUST YEARS OF PRACTICE”
“You learn to compartmentalise these things – honestly, in the race I was not fazed when he did it. But I did think: ‘What the hell is he doing?’ and when I spoke to him later I said, ‘That’s a sign of disrespect, don’t disrespect me like that again.’ I wouldn’t do that to someone, I’ve never done that and I don’t know what he was thinking to have done it.”
Along with his razor-sharp pace, one of Hamilton’s strengths last year was his calm and measured approach, and that will continue to make him a formidable opponent for the new season. There’s little in the way of unsettling change this year, regulation-wise, save for a reshuffling of the tyre compounds and the introduction of a new hypersoft option.
When Lewis was styling it up sideways in the C63 earlier he was giving no thought to its effects on the tyres, in marked contrast to his skill in finessing the life and performance of his rubber in an F1 car. In the Pirelli era, managing tyres, their temperatures and ultimately their wear rate has been critical in unlocking performance.
“There’s a window where the tyre is at its best and you try to keep the rear temperatures as low as possible – that’s easy,” he says. “The fronts always take a lot longer to come in. The key is working the fronts without letting the rears come up at the same time. And traction is really important, so you try not to break traction throughout the lap. If you do, the temperatures start to rise and that’s what you’re fighting. You’re always on the edge of the grip level.
“I’ve always been able to make the tyres last, notably in GP2, but it’s a quest to try to do it in F1, particularly if you haven’t got the balance of the car quite right. Last year I was able to hone into understanding the tools you need and we had a really strong front tyre as a result.”
More tyre torture awaits as Lewis is called away to wow the queue of Monster Energy guests with a handful of laps on the edge of adhesion. The sight of the British world champion in a beautifully controlled, flat-to-the-floor sideways drift would have brought a smile to the face of Hugh Fortescue Locke King, the entrepreneur who paid £150,000 to have Brooklands built on his Surrey estate. His mission to raise the profile of British motor racing is continuing apace.