THE KING OF THE GO-SLOW WILL BE F1’S FASTEST
The beauty and wonder of watching Lewis Hamilton express his talent in a Formula 1 car never fades. And it takes multiple forms. In qualifying, Hamilton sets off on a lap. He might already be fastest. He might not. Sometimes the scale of the unfolding achievement dawns immediately, as it did when he demonstrated his awe-inspiring turn-in speed at the first corner of Albert Park this year. Sometimes, though, it has to wait: a sector time suddenly resetting the boundaries of the possible; perhaps one corner where somehow he makes up chunks of time on his rivals.
Then there are the wet races. The track tricky. Conditions changing. Rain falling. And Hamilton does something that shouldn’t be possible. Just as he did at Silverstone in 2016, gaining three seconds on team-mate Nico Rosberg in second place in the first six corners of the race.
But however it happens, the question remains the same: how does he do it?
Let’s start at the beginning – at Rye House Circuit in Hertfordshire, to be precise, where Hamilton first tried his hand at karting at the age of eight. For Sam Michael, who worked with Hamilton at Mclaren in 2011 and 2012 as sporting director, starting young and practising a lot is a “first-order explanation” for the skills Lewis displays in a Formula 1 car now.
“A lot of things that differentiate one F1 driver from another are in the subconscious, not the conscious,” Michael notes. “Their reaction times, their feeling of the throttle. There is so much going on that you enter a state where people term it ‘not thinking’. If you asked Lewis: ‘Are you thinking about your hand-eye co-ordination when you’re oversteering?’ The answer would be: ‘No way.’ You can’t think of that. It is all happening in milliseconds in the subconscious. It is all down to training and habits.”
What Michael is referring to is what might be called the ‘10,000 hours rule’, expounded by writer Malcolm Gladwell, which states that for an individual to become world-class at any activity, 10,000 hours’ practice are required. There is great debate on this subject, however, especially as to the degree of natural talent – inherent physical and mental ability – required to excel.
For former F1 driver Pedro de la Rosa, Mclaren’s test and reserve driver in 2007,
hence someone who gained a unique insight into the talent of both Hamilton and his team-mate and fierce rival Fernando Alonso, lots of practice at a young age is “necessary but not sufficient” to attain skills at this level.
“You need to dedicate 10,000 hours, yes,” de la Rosa agrees, “but nowadays all drivers started when they were five or six years old. So you also need an underlying extreme talent. You won’t know if it’s there until the guy is 15 or 16, but you have to work on it during those ten critical years, from five to 15, because I think this is when all the talent develops.
“I always say driving is like speaking a language. Some of my friends in Spain moved here when they were 15 or 16. They are German. Now they are 50-year olds and they still speak Spanish with a terrible German accent. That’s exactly what happens when you are driving. You have to drive a lot as a kid, or there will always be some things that are not perfect, no matter how much talent you have. At the end of the day, it is pure, natural talent in both Fernando and Lewis. They are actually very similar.”
So how does that talent manifest itself in Hamilton? According to Sam Michael: “If you look at slow drivers versus fast drivers – which is another way of saying, ‘why is Lewis so fast?’ – you look at extremes, and whenever you look at a driver who is a second quicker than his team-mate, it is almost all in the braking and entry. It is when they are trying to cope with the limit of grip and the car is moving a lot. Once you get to the apex, a lot of drivers could probably go full throttle. There is a bit in high speed, of course, but that is not on every track.”
The observation is echoed by Hamilton’s former Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg: “Lewis is extremely good at braking,” he says. “He’s a very good instinctive driver, who has an abundance of natural talent. Braking is one of those places where you need to have the most reactive speed because it is such a short and extreme moment where split seconds count. Whether you have understeer or oversteer, it’s all quite slow and easy to correct. But to brake and be on the limit and to control your front locking – if you have the speed of reaction in your brain to adapt and make changes along the way, it’s a big advantage over a rival. And Lewis’s instinct is amazing.”
De la Rosa adds: “Lewis’s braking is fantastic, yes. But it is actually his entry speed that is different. He can carry a lot more speed than any other driver into the corner. It is not necessarily braking, it is where you back off the brake and throw the car into the corner that he is able to slide the car on entry with incredible control. That’s what makes him special.
“It is not the fact that he brakes later, because that would be too simplistic. Anyone can brake late, but then they might go straight or not make the apex. Hamilton is different because he is able to brake as late as anyone but he’s still able to make the corner, and that’s because he has the ability to slide the car on entry, which is the most difficult thing in any single-seater, to slide the car front and rear, just drift it in. And he’s very special on the corners where you have to brake and turn – more so, in fact, than on the pure high-speed turns where you back off a bit on entry without brakes.
“He is especially quick on circuits where you do not have a lot of downforce, like Monza or Canada, where you brake very late from very high speed. He is able to load the front tyres, slide the rear and rotate the car into the corner. And how he does it? It’s just pure feeling on the front and rear tyres. He knows how to modulate the brakes when the front tyre is just slipping, on the edge of losing grip. I think he doesn’t really know how he does it. It’s just pure feeling of front and rear tyre slip.
“When the tyre is giving up, on the edge of losing grip, he knows how to back off a bit on the brake, just a little, so it grips again, and then when it grips again he knows how to brake again. It’s just micromanagement of the brakes. It’s even difficult to see on the data. It just stands out that he is able to carry more speed into the corner. You don’t really know how he does it because the differences in the brake pressure are minimal. Otherwise, other drivers would copy him, but it’s not possible.”
Sam Michael drills down even further. “Every racing car when it gets to the limit is going to oversteer on entry,” he says. “So to drive that car on the limit, it is an essential requirement for any racing driver to be able to cope with oversteer. The first thing is, ‘I can feel the car moving and it is starting to oversteer and I react to it.’ That process is related to the brain and inner ear. Everyone has a different set of sensors inside their head. Some of those you are born with and I also think they are exercised.
“It all comes back to the amount of time he has spent training and feeling. But his inner ear and brain have an ability to react to that oversteer quicker than anyone else. He is detecting the onset of yaw. If he can do that even two or three milliseconds before anybody else, he has an advantage there. In just a few milliseconds, he has to decide: ‘Is this more oversteer than the tyres can cope with?’ If it is, compared with the last lap, then it’s: ‘Might I be able to get away with it? No, I’d better come back three per cent on the throttle, or maybe a bit more on the brakes, or the steering wheel.’ He’s probably assessing four or five different outputs in the space of a millisecond.”
There is, however, a downside to this way of driving, as de la Rosa explains: “The difficulty he has with the tyres is all related to tyre
temperature. Because of his driving style, being so late on the brakes and carrying so much speed into the corner, he actually generates more temperature than any other driver would do on the surface of the tyres.
“He is suffering thermal degradation because he is quicker on entries. His natural ability tells him to attack as much as he can because he has the ability to do so. Other drivers try that and they spin, or miss the apex, or they just would not be as consistent. But he does it naturally.”
This appears to have particular relevance to this season, and the struggles Hamilton was experiencing in some of the early races.
“The Pirelli compounds are generally very sensitive in terms of thermal degradation,” de la Rosa explains, “so the moment you are sliding, you have less grip. This year, even more
so, because they are softer compounds and Pirelli have pushed the working range lower again, which means the peak grip is happening at lower temperatures, which is penalising Lewis just a bit more. He might get away with it in qualifying but then in the race he will have to control his driving style a bit.
“On the other hand, he is normally able to switch on any type of tyre when other drivers cannot. You see him do it sometimes in the wet when the tyres don’t get up to temperature; he is still up there. Or sometimes when the intermediate tyres take two or three laps to get switched on and he is just bang-on coming out of the pitlane. Or when he is always happier with a harder compound than any other driver.
“And that’s exactly because he is generating so much more tyre temperature on entry. Lewis has to control his natural instincts to not degrade the tyres thermally.”
Generally, though, Hamilton’s supreme ability puts him at an advantage that very few of his rivals can overcome.
“Where Lewis is incredibly strong is on learning new tracks, or adapting to new scenarios and changing conditions,” de la Rosa says. “This is incredible.”
He goes on to tell a story about preparations for the first Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in 2009.
“Gary Paffett [fellow Mclaren test driver] and I were preparing the simulator for a couple of days, one day each. We set some lap times, which were pretty much evenly matched. It took us, like, half a day to set those lap times.
“I remember Lewis arriving. He sat in the car in the simulator and he said to me, first question: ‘Is the first corner left or right?’ He didn’t even know the track. He hadn’t looked at the track map, I don’t think. He just arrived and wanted to learn it in the simulator.
“After just three laps, he matched our lap times. After three laps. It had taken us lots of runs and fiddling with setups and stuff to get to a competitive lap time and in just three laps he was right there, without even knowing which way the first corner went.”
He concludes: “Lewis is massively talented – but he has had to work at it. So it’s not fair to say he has an incredible talent and he is just lucky. No, he has worked very hard since he was a kid with his father, travelling and racing. He obviously has been deeply inside himself looking for more performance.
“But if he didn’t have this natural talent, he wouldn’t have been Lewis Hamilton. It is a mixture. But as a driver, I always think, ‘I wish I had this natural talent.’ Sometimes these guys don’t realise how fortunate they are.”