IT’S TIME FOR HAMILTON TO FINALLY GET THE RESPECT HE DESERVES
Hamilton set to stand alongside F1 legend Fangio
Formula One Special
LEWIS HAMILTON took to social media this weekend to capture his 106th flight of the year. Destination: the United States and a possible appointment with history. A week today at the Circuit of the Americas, 15 miles and a thousand religious billboards south east of downtown Austin, the Briton, 33, will attempt to emulate Juan Manuel Fangio, the Argentine racer of legend, as a five-times world champion.
Only German Michael Schumacher would stand ahead of him in the accountancy of motor-racing greatness.
The further maths is that Hamilton needs to score eight points more than Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel at the US Grand Prix to clinch the championship with three rounds to spare. Or, to put it another way, if Hamilton wins, then the German must finish second, or it is all over.
But leaving aside the permutations of the points, we should record the wider phenomenon of a new serenity about Hamilton in 2018.
His career can be usefully divided into three phases. The first was Lewis as a shiny, neat, word-perfect, highly commercial protege created by two driven perfectionists in Ron Dennis, his backer at McLaren, and Anthony, his father, manager and symbiotic other half. Hamilton’s talent was natural but he was polished within an inch of his sanity.
Then there were the years after he dispensed with his father’s services, in 2010, a necessary but painful fracture. Hamilton who had wanted for nothing but freedom since hitching his future to McLaren as a teenager, had to go in search of the person he wanted to be.
He turned to tattoos, where his father would have forbidden them. He enlisted glitzy management, namely David Beckham’s then agent, Simon Fuller. He moved from Switzerland to Monaco. His friends were rappers. He was wriggling out of the straitjacket of conformity he had worn during his rise.
That second phase, taking in McLaren and Mercedes and encompassing both the zero title wins in six years and then three in the four years just gone, lasted until this season.
Then began the third Hamilton age: a man more at ease with himself. That has meant, for the first time, that he has barely courted controversy in a whole year with some injudicious word or deed.
Perhaps his immediately truculent response to losing to Vettel at Silverstone was the closest we saw to the Hamilton of the second phase.
He goes into the American race among the golden handful of Formula One stars who have ever lived, including Ayrton Senna and Jim Clark, who died before they could assail Schumacher and Fangio’s statistical supremacy.
Anyone who doubts that lofty claim should look at Hamilton’s performance in winning at Monza.
It married patience with verve. Vettel lost his head, tangled with Hamilton and damaged his car. In inferior machinery, Hamilton passed the second Ferrari of Kimi Raikkonen eight laps from the end. It had been a Ferrari front row, at their home track, yet Hamilton had prevailed with Vettel fourth.
‘Ferrari have got a problem,’ said Damon Hill, the 1996 champion, ‘and it is called Lewis Hamilton.’
And when they went to Singapore next, Hamilton produced a pole lap so magical that it sent jaws crashing to the asphalt. The bulb-lit street circuit was meant to be Ferrari’s track, but Hamilton colonised it with silver stardust.
Vettel’s student-on-a-gap-year demeanour evaporated. Ferrari imploded. Vettel has made seven big mistakes this season, but that should not diminish the extraordinary virtuosity Hamilton was unfurling before a bewitched world.
At Mercedes, he has signed a twoyear extension worth £80million until the end of the 2020 season. He has also matured as a team leader, avowedly applying the lessons he has learned over the years. And he is an unforgiving self-critic.
Now the circus is off to the outskirts of Texas and a circuit on which Hamilton’s record is second to none. He goes in search of a seventh victory in the last eight races. However you look at it, the momentum unquestionably lies with a contented sportsman at the peak of his remarkable talents.