THE £40MILLION QUESTION

The value of Lewis Hamilton’s new Mercedes contract has set envious tongues wagging, but a driver of his ability is priceless – if only to a top team

Nobody can objectively be worth £40million, not in a world where so many have next to nothing.

But the widely reported figure for the potential value, including bonuses, of Lewis Hamilton’s new Mercedes contract raises the question of whether a racing driver can really be worth what many would call an obscene sum of money?

The world is clearly not objective, so this is always going to be a largely subjective debate. But once we accept that we live in a global society of enormous inequality and set aside the ethical arguments on the rights and wrongs of that, the question then moves on to what the driver can contribute to a team for that spend.

The driver’s primary purpose is, axiomatically, to drive. Yes, they have an impact when it comes to development direction and feedback, but item one on the driver’s task list is to extract as close as possible to 100% of the car’s potential.

There are often criticisms that the car does all the work in Formula 1. But it’s always been this way in motor racing, and even in sports where technology is less obvious, resources tend to dictate your overall potential.

But the driver is an important part of the equation. Because it’s not a two-part equation of driver plus car, instead it’s about driver plus the myriad departments and technical groups that work towards designing and building a car. On top of that, you have the operational personnel who run it.

What the driver represents is the connection point where everything meets. For all the criticisms about the pitwall figures controlling the drivers, they aren’t.

In the middle of the car is its organic centre. The driver feels every signal from the car, controls it, provokes it, balances it, dictates what it can and cannot do. Nothing is simple about this operation. Consider the brake pedal – it’s to slow the car down, right? Well, partly, but it’s also about controlling the weight distribution and setting it up for the corner. That’s just one thing the driver must control.

Next you have the differences between the best and worst drivers on the grid. To clarify, I use this as a comparative term because in objective terms every single driver racing in Formula 1 today is extraordinarily able. The difference in a peak lap time between the best and the worst on the grid is not large. In terms of qualifying pace, a gap of six tenths of a second is considered a chasm. We talk about tenths as if they were minutes in F1, but in real terms that’s a tiny difference.

But it’s not just lap time that separates the great from the merely very good. It’s about stringing those laps together, attacking, defending, unleashing pace at key moments, managing tyres, managing engines, making the millions of calculations that are needed to complete a grand prix distance in the least possible time.

The German Grand Prix again showcased the importance of that ability. When the rain hit, Hamilton drove superbly. While he had the advantage of fresh, hot ultrasofts compared with the cars ahead, he used that grip and his judgement to good effect and for a sustained period of time was 1.5s per lap faster than anyone.

Add to that the way the driver interacts with the team, an important part of their game, and there are countless ways a driver can have a big impact on the overall success of their teams.

When it comes to the money, it’s well spent for a squad such as Mercedes. This is a world championship-contending team that spends hundreds of millions of pounds (with heavy investment from the parent company for marketing reasons) to win races.

Hamilton, the driver, is a huge contributor to that. It’s seen as a virtuous circle: the better the results, the more positive PR you get, the more cash you get both in terms of constructors’ championship money and sponsorship, the more your technical team can spend, the more performance you get, the better the results. And the driver is critical to that process.

Hamilton is a global sporting star, albeit not quite in the megastar bracket among the most famous few athletes in the world that it once seemed inevitable he would join. And the value of that in terms of return on investment cannot be underestimated.

But Hamilton is not worth £40million to every team on the grid. There’s no point in engaging a superstar driver if you haven’t got your house in order, and while the driver is a big contributor to the competitive equation they will not be able to drag more than 100% out of the car.

So to Force India, Haas, Renault, Mclaren, Williams? No, he would not be worth that money, which would be better invested elsewhere. There are plenty of very good drivers out there who can do a good job, and the equation for what you spend where changes depending on where you sit on the economic scale. But for a championship winning team, a title-winning driver is priceless.

Hamilton is a brilliant driver, one of the all-time greats. That gives him a high market value and means he’s worth every penny to a top team – no matter how outrageous the amount.

“IT’S NOT JUST LAP TIME THAT SEPARATES THE GREAT DRIVERS FROM THE MERELY VERY GOOD”