Why this year could be the last lap for ‘grumpy’ Hamilton
Fractured team, along with interests away from F1 racing, could inspire the seven-time world champion to walk away The champion’s tumultuous close season
Briton’s attention has not just been on defending his title …
There are worse ways to spend your lockdown winter than being knighted, Zooming with Tom Brady to promote your luxury watch brand, and crosscountry skiing on the pristine pistes around your Colorado ranch. And yet Lewis Hamilton heads into tomorrow’s Formula One curtainraiser in Bahrain with his mind far from settled.
Hamilton’s diminished negotiating power at Mercedes has left him with only a one-year contract extension, while the ominous speed of Max Verstappen’s Red Bull makes a record eighth world title anything but a certainty. It all heightens the suspicion that this campaign – his 15th in the sport since his debut season in 2007 – could be his last dance.
The Briton has stopped short of saying as much publicly, arguing this week that he was “fully committed to this sport” and that the next eight months would clarify whether he was ready to retire. But at 36, he gives every impression of a man hedging his bets. Talks with Mercedes about a renewal took so long to bear fruit that for 39 days of the off season Hamilton was technically unemployed. After spending time with him filming for Sky, commentator and former driver Martin Brundle suggested Hamilton was “grumpy” at how negotiations had played out. In addition, his tightknit inner sanctum has been ruptured by the departure of Marc Hynes, the former British touring car driver and for years his closest confidant.
Hamilton was at one time bullish about leading Mercedes beyond 2022 and into an era of radically revamped rules, which will promise far more competitive racing. As such, his halfway-house contract has taken even his closest observers by surprise.
“Certainly, it’s not a ringing endorsement of his faith in Mercedes to come up with a championship-winning car after the rule changes,” fellow world champion Damon Hill says. “At the same time, he’s quite open about how he feels as a driver. If he wins the title, I can see that he might decide that’s a good time to go, given the uncertainty in the new regulations. If he doesn’t win, then he might decide he has had enough.
“From my own point of view, it’s something that you don’t want to admit. Even Nico Rosberg couldn’t admit he was retiring to Toto [Wolff, team principal] until they got off the plane back to Germany. If you’re winning, you like it. But if you’re not, it’s not that appetising to hang around just to score points.”
One major complication is that Hamilton’s devotion to off-track causes has become so intense that he no longer even identifies racing as his primary motivation. Reflecting recently on his Tuscan Grand Prix victory at Mugello, he explained how he had felt inspired to stand atop the podium so that he could wear a T-shirt highlighting the death of Breonna Taylor, the black medical worker shot and killed by police officers in Kentucky last year. “Those stories are so important,” Hamilton said. “Change can’t come soon enough.”
In a sport hardly known for its wholesale embrace of diversity, such actions create a schism. A younger F1 following is inclined to perceive Hamilton as a quasi-messianic figure, whose brilliance behind the wheel is burnished by his proselytising under the banner of Black Lives Matter.
But there are sections of the F1 establishment to whom such protests are anathema. Former Renault driver Vitaly Petrov became persona
non grata after describing Hamilton’s Taylor gesture as “too much”, but his was far from an isolated objection. Bernie Ecclestone, the sport’s deposed kingpin, told The Daily Telegraph how he would never have allowed the champion’s political activism. But Hill adopts a more measured view.
“While Lewis has his position, I think he wants to do something,” Hill says. “It sounds a bit disrespectful sometimes to say that winning a Formula One world title is not
meaningful, because it means a lot to us as drivers. But beyond that, what does it really say?
“He’s impressive; he has wanted to have his say and I think he has done it powerfully. The timing was right. It seems like he has grown, and he is not shying away from taking responsibility for other things.”
Hamilton will not relent in his efforts to call F1 to account, and has pledged to continue taking the knee out of a belief that it sparks an “uncomfortable conversation”.
Beyond racial politics, he is underscoring his environmental credentials by entering his own X44 team into this year’s inaugural Extreme E series, an off-road event designed to raise awareness of climate change by racing everywhere from Greenland to Patagonia. Hamilton is even addressing human rights concerns in Bahrain this weekend, arranging a private meeting with the British ambassador.
In one sense, Hamilton is an outlier among drivers in displaying this level of curiosity for life beyond the bubble. But in another, there is a limit to how much change he can force on his own.
Stefano Domenicali, F1’s chief executive, is unlike his predecessor Chase Carey in that he is steeped in the sport’s traditions, having been Ferrari’s team principal for six years. He is an adherent to the Ecclestone philosophy that F1 should be a strictly non-political realm, this week rejecting calls to look into alleged abuses connected to the Bahrain race by declaring: “We are not a cross-border investigatory organisation.”
The problem for Hamilton is that all his external platforms, whether on diversity in F1 or on ecological destruction, depend on his continued exposure as a driver. Once the racing stops, his relevance will recede. That is a reality he needs to consider as he weighs up his sporting future.
Besides, as Hill indicates, there is a restlessness for glory in all the great champions that can never truly be tamed.
“Jackie Stewart was one who stopped,” Hill says. “He never even drove a car again; he had a chauffeur. But getting the adrenalin out of your system is difficult.
“Fernando Alonso is making a comeback this year because he loves competing.
“A couple of years ago, I saw Carlos Sainz Snr after he had won the Dakar Rally, a seriously gruelling event. He’s about the same age as me and I asked him why he did it. ‘I just love it,’ he said.
“I think Lewis still loves racing, too. It’s just how much you love it, how much you want to keep coming back into the paddock every year, getting fitted for the overalls. These people have been doing it their whole lives. Actually to stop, it’s quite tough.”
That thought will resonate ever more loudly for Hamilton, the further he heads into a marathon 23-race season.
For most of his adult life, Hamilton has been consumed with being the world’s fastest man on four wheels. It is one addiction that, even with his ever-expanding outside interests, could prove impossible to kick.