Patience starting to wear thin for serial winner Hamilton
Struggles as an also-ran and a serious threat from his young team-mate are making this a fraught year for Briton
Russell is fast posing the greatest challenge to the Hamilton supremacy at Mercedes since Nico Rosberg
This is becoming a season of mounting indignity for Lewis Hamilton. As if it were not galling enough that he has found himself eclipsed by his younger team-mate, or that Red Bull adviser Helmut Marko has accused him of being a diminished force, he has spent most of a sun-kissed week in south Florida talking in euphemisms about why one of his body piercings could not physically be removed.
Hamilton, railing against his detractors, is adamant that he will not retire until his masterpiece is complete. But increasingly he looks a picture of agitation in his wildlyporpoising car. For an explanation, look no further than the gangly figure of George Russell, the hardcharging 24-year-old who is fast posing the greatest challenge to the Hamilton supremacy at Mercedes since Nico Rosberg. Only once, ultimately, did Rosberg outlast his archnemesis over an entire season. Russell, though, has just outperformed the most decorated driver in history for the fourth race in a row.
Nowhere was the threat to Hamilton more vividly demonstrated than in the suffocating humidity of Miami. While a lapse in qualifying forced the young pretender to start only 12th, Russell, on hard tyres, gobbled up the ground to Hamilton in sixth at an ominous rate, swarming in his rear-view mirrors come the first round of pit stops.
You could detect the panic in the seven-time world champion’s voice when, in a terse exchange with race engineer Pete Bonnington about tyre strategy, he cried out: “I’m
going to lose the position to George, for sure.” His prophecy was prescient, Russell sweeping past with seven laps to spare.
It is Hamilton’s worst nightmare at a time when, confounded by the pace of Ferrari and Red Bull, he has already given up any chance of seizing a record eighth title this year. The greater the shadow cast by a team-mate, the more fragile his temperament tends to be. When Bonnington asked him whether he wanted to pit under the safety car for fresh tyres, he replied, irritably: “You tell me.” In the aftermath, Hamilton only added to the impression that he blamed Mercedes for a serious tactical miscue. “Make the decision for me,” he lamented.
A once-harmonious picture is fracturing by the day. The theory is that Russell, scrupulously deferential about the elder man so far, represents the perfect team-mate. But Hamilton’s past form suggests there is only so long such a dynamic can last. The only reason he kept matters civil with Valtteri Bottas for five years was because he knew he had him beaten. When Rosberg usurped his alpha-male status in 2016, the atmosphere in the garage was as sour as curdled milk.
It is not just Hamilton’s position at Mercedes that appears precarious, but his relationship with the sport. His attitude towards the FIA over his jewellery offers a compelling illustration. While race directors are insistent that he strips away all his adornments on safety grounds, arguing that piercings and neck chains reduce the protection offered by drivers’ flameproof clothing, Hamilton turned up to his press conference wearing three watches and a ring on every finger. For a figure who often speaks in code, it was as brazen a show of defiance as could be imagined.
He knows he faces a ferocious intra-team duel, as Russell streaks ahead with 59 points to his 36. The issue is how well he copes with such an affront to his pride. Perhaps the greatest worry for Hamilton, aside from Russell’s stellar form, is his dwindling relevance in the championship equation. Even during his relatively fallow years, from 2009 to 2013, he won at least one race every season.
But prospects of extending that remarkable consistency of victories look remote to fanciful. Up the road in Miami, Max Verstappen might as well have been contesting a different race, vaulting into the lead with his impeccably-judged overtake on Charles Leclerc.
Naturally, Hamilton’s worth to his sport remains incalculable. There was nobody better to sell a second F1 race to a ravenous United States audience than the person who has made a home in Malibu and flaunted any number of extravagant selfdesigned creations at the Met Gala. He was at ease appearing on the set of Good Morning America as he was trialling his rusty golf swing in the company of NFL legend Tom Brady. For all that he remains peripheral in the title standings, organisers ensured he was front and centre of every billboard.
So many had come to salute Hamilton, the icon of this generation, only to see him mired in mediocrity once more. It is a question of when, not if, his patience finally snaps.