Lewis hunts F1 revenge over wary rival
Hamilton chases a record-breaking eighth F1 title and is vowing to be more ‘aggressive’ as the Bahrain GP starts the season.
TWO days before the first race of the 2022 season, Lewis Hamilton set out his stall. ‘‘I will be a more aggressive driver this year, you’ll see,’’ the 37-year-old vowed.
His answer, after a brief pause for thought, was given to a question asking if he had considered arch-rival Max Verstappen’s attacking driving style over the break.
In the early part of the 2021 season, Hamilton and champion Verstappen found themselves wheel-to-wheel in almost every race.
Despite winning three of the first four races, Hamilton claimed that he was forced to pull out of challenges and was critical of Verstappen’s driving style. Upon arriving at his home race in Silverstone, he announced that he would no longer concede to his Red Bull rival.
That resulted in a huge crash between the pair, with Verstappen admitted to hospital for checks.
Again in Monza, a couple of months later, Hamilton decided he would not concede, and the Red Bull ended up literally on top of the Mercedes.
In Brazil, with tensions boiling over, they nearly clashed again and then in Saudi Arabia, the penultimate race, they again made contact – not race-ending, but it could have been avoided.
If Hamilton is taking the approach of more aggressive driving, then expect the race directors to be busy this season and there to be plenty of controversy.
However, his aggressive driving is not, he said, part of a bid to avenge the controversy of last season and in the particular how he lost the drivers’ championship in Abu Dhabi as that was ‘‘not my psyche’’.
‘‘That’s not how I’m approaching this season. I’m just approaching the season trying to be the best that I can be,’’ Hamilton said ahead of a Bahrain Grand Priz that starts at 4am tomorrow NZT. ‘‘I want to see if there’s a way I can somehow raise my game – drive at least how I was at the end of last season.
‘‘And just that collaboration with the team, there’s going to be lots and lots of hurdles along the way. But I love that. I don’t have that [revenge] viewpoint.
‘‘I think I’ll just try to be the best driver I can be this year. I think there is still more that I can do, both in and out of the car.
‘‘We still have a lot of work to do on the diversity front here as a sport, so I’ll continue to fight for that too.’’
Hamilton also insisted there was no hangover from last year.
‘‘I don’t hold any grudges. I don’t have any baggage going into the season. It is important to let go. All I can do is try and shape what’s ahead. I can’t change the past.’’ Lewis Hamilton
‘‘I don’t hold any grudges,’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t have any baggage going into the season. It is important to let go,’’ he said. ‘‘All I can do is try and shape what’s ahead. I can’t change the past.’’
While he will be hoping to go to battle again this season with Verstappen at the front, the reality is that the Mercedes does not look like it has the speed to match the Red Bull at the moment and neither Hamilton nor his new team-mate, George Russell, is happy with the car.
‘‘I don’t expect we’ve made a huge amount of progress,’’ Hamilton said.
‘‘The car naturally was fresher coming into the test, you have a new engine, you have new components. But it’s still the car from last week. We have learnt a lot from the week of testing and I hope we’ve taken some sort of step forward in terms of understanding where we position the car, but we will still most likely have some of the problems we had last week.’’
Russell said that while he expected the team to be ‘‘in the mix’’, they were ‘‘a little on the back foot’’ when it comes to ‘‘porpoising’’ – when the car violently bounces up and down on the straights.
‘‘You can see our problem on track. The guys are working day and night to try and find a solution, but it’s difficult,’’ Russell said. ‘‘We will get there but whether [it is] this weekend or the weekend after I don’t know. Red Bull and Ferrari are our main rivals and they do seem pretty stable.
‘‘The Red Bull looked flat as a pancake through the corners and the car looked really well balanced. They are looking really strong at the moment.’’
Verstappen is not buying it, though. ‘‘I think they’ll be dead last, according to their comments,’’ a deadpan Verstappen said. ‘‘I think they have an awful car and they’ve had that already since 2017 in preseason.’’
Speaking more seriously, Verstappen said: ‘‘No, we’ll find out, but for sure they’ll be competitive.’’
Mercedes are a team known for finding quick solutions to problems and they have had poor pre-season tests before and won the first race – including last year – but Russell is right in saying that their problems on track are clear to see.
After the first day of practice it did not seem like Mercedes had yet found a solution, with Hamilton only ninth-quickest, though Russell was fourth. Verstappen was quickest with Ferrari second and third.
Hamilton said in testing that he did not expect to be competing for wins early on in the season but that it was too soon to think about what that would mean for his bid to win a record-breaking eighth championship.
With 23 races, if Mercedes are not competitive at the start, it will not mean the end of the title hunt.