COVER STORY
The battle to topple Hamilton
MAX VERSTAPPEN
AGE 21 STARTS 85 WINS 5 POINTS 721
GEORGE RUSSELL
AGE 21 STARTS 4 BEST FINISH 15TH POINTS 0
LANDO NORRIS
AGE 19 STARTS 4 BEST FINISH 6TH POINTS 12
CHARLES LECLERC
AGE 21 STARTS 25 BEST FINISH 3RD POINTS 86
ALEXANDER ALBON
AGE 23 STARTS 4 BEST FINISH 9TH POINTS 3
ESTEBAN OCON
AGE 22 STARTS 50 BEST FINISH 5TH POINTS 136
“I SEE MUCH OF MYSELF IN CHARLES. HE’S DOING A GREAT JOB ALREADY SO FAR. IT WILL COME TO HIM”
One of the eternal truths of elite sport is that there’s always someone pushing to usurp you. Every empire falls eventually, and throughout the history of grand prix racing the established top guns have faced down the challenge of the thrusting young superstars bidding to oust them. The aim: to delay the inevitable and stay on top for as long as possible. They will lose the fight eventually, age will always see to that, but the true greats dig in and continue to raise their game – for a while at least – before ceding. In Formula 1 today, Lewis Hamilton is the established star. At 34, he is better than ever and has showed no signs of decline – meaning he could stay on top for years yet and rack up who knows how many wins and championships. His arch rival, in recent years, has been Sebastian Vettel, a four-time world champion who, at 31, apparently has a shakier grip on his place at F1’s top table. But, like Hamilton, Vettel has been there, done that and commands leadership of one of grand prix racing’s greatest teams. Both are there to be shot at. For several years already, they have been under pressure from Max Verstappen. An F1 racer at 17, he’s a freak of nature who already has five grand prix wins to his name at the age of 21 and should bring up his century of starts later in 2019. Verstappen is in a curious position, an outstanding performer who has proved his ability time and time again to the point where perhaps no driver in history can be so confidently predicted as a future world champion – given the right car (or should that be engine). A Verstappen versus Hamilton title fight would be something to savour. There has also been the challenge of what might be termed the ‘in-between generation’, perhaps exemplified by Daniel Ricciardo and Valtteri Bottas – both race winners but neither champions. These are among the drivers who Hamilton has successfully faced a sustained challenge from over the past few seasons. But this year is different. The arrival of 21-year-old Charles Leclerc at Ferrari means there is a new-generation wave building. The Monegasque’s unrewarded‘victory drive’in Bahrain is proof of that, as was Hamilton’s exchange with him in the podium antechamber after the race:
Hamilton: You drove great this weekend man. Leclerc: Yeah. Hamilton: You really drove fantastic man. Leclerc: Until the problem. Hamilton: Hey man, you’ve got a long old future ahead of you so… Leclerc: I hope so. Hamilton: I know it sucks in this moment, but you’ve got a long, long way to go. Leclerc: Thank you so much. Hamilton knows exactly what it’s like to be a young man in a hurry in F1. He was 22 when he got his big break with Mclaren, ostensibly as a support act to reigning double champion Fernando Alonso. He passed his team-mate at the first corner on his debut, forced a team orders row in his fifth start, won on the sixth and played the key role in Alonso’s eventual departure from the team. “He’s a little younger than I was, by a year or so, but absolutely yes,” says Hamilton when asked about the similarities between Leclerc’s situation and his own 12 years ago.“i remember wanting to get to F1 as quickly as possible and then when I got there I wanted to win as soon as possible and I wanted to beat the champion that I was racing against. So very similar. “I see much of myself in Charles. He’s doing a great job already so far. With really high expectations at a huge team like Ferrari he’s driving very well, so he just has to keep doing what he’s doing and it will come to him.” Hamilton has achieved enough in F1 not to be threatened by the rise
of drivers like Leclerc, and appears to thrive with the challenge that they present. It’s an invitation to keep pushing, continue improving, test yourself against drivers who had a more focused motorsport education and access to techniques and methodologies Hamilton could not have dreamed of when he was making his way up the ranks. It’s the circle of life, the young eventually usurp the old, and while Hamilton has plenty of years ahead of him he’s certainly in the thick of middle age as a grand prix driver. And yet, at a time when others might have backed off, he continues to get better. The desire is still there to keep challenging himself to take on the upstarts. But does he see that as a motivational force? “I’m game for new drivers to come through,”says Hamilton. “They come through with new techniques, new driving styles, new aggression, so it definitely is refreshing and it’s great to see. Each year I just focus on trying to improve myself as a driver and welcome the new ones that come through.
“WE HAVE SOME REALLY GREAT KIDS. I’VE GOT MY WORK CUT OUT TO TRY TO STAY AHEAD OF THEM”
“We have some really great kids that have come through. I don’t look at any of them and think that any of them have looked at me and said they want to be me – I’ve heard some of them talk about other drivers like [Ayrton] Senna and Michael [Schumacher], but obviously I’ve been where they are and I can empathise with the experience that they are going through and the challenges they will face in their own way as they race throughout the year. “In the following years I’ve got my work cut out to try to stay ahead of them, which gets harder and harder every year.” Vettel is in a more difficult position. While Hamilton is the undisputed king of the castle, Vettel won the last of his four world championships in 2013 and is directly in Leclerc’s crosshairs. Before Leclerc can take on Hamilton, he has to establish primacy within Ferrari and he has made an encouraging start. The results might not quite be there, but he should have won in Bahrain and has been quicker than Vettel on two race weekends out of four. It’s a very positive start and, as Hamilton says, he’ll be determined to break his duck as soon as possible. “It’s not an obsession,”says Leclerc when asked if he’s impatient to get the victory monkey off his back.“my obsession at the moment is to do the best job in the car and to extract the full potential of it. Then I’m sure the results will come. But I’m impatient for this moment to happen – if it will ever happen. I’ll work for that, but I’m not obsessed with it. I don’t think it would be a good way to approach the weekends, only thinking about the winning. The only thing I’m obsessed with is getting the best out of the car.” So far, that obsession has paid off. During his rookie campaign with Sauber, Leclerc emerged as an outstanding performer in a congested part of the field. While this year hasn’t gone perfectly – notably the crash in Azerbaijan Grand Prix qualifying on a weekend when he looked to have the pace to get that breakthrough win – it has been eyecatching. Vettel clearly has a fight on his hands to assert himself decisively over Leclerc – although it would be premature to count him out yet. Vettel is an adaptable and seriously fast racing driver who didn’t win four titles by chance and won’t want to fade out of F1 without taking a title with Ferrari. Vettel also knows full well how determined Leclerc will be. After all, Vettel himself has been there, having made his grand prix debut in 2007 as Robert Kubica’s BMW Sauber stand-in at the United States Grand Prix. His drive to a points finish there, on top of his impressive testing performances, forced Red Bull to flick Scott Speed from its Toro Rosso line-up and give Vettel the rest of the year. The following season, he took that famous victory in the Italian GP before earning promotion to Red Bull and dominating F1 from 2010-2013. “I think it’s pretty much the same as me,”said Vettel of Leclerc earlier this season, after being outpaced by him in Bahrain.“he’s a good kid,
“FORTUNATELY, OCON HAS THE RIGHT BACKER AND IT’S IMPROBABLE HE WON’T RETURN”
he’s fast, so has all the ingredients and the reason obviously is proved many times before entering Formula 1 why he deserved the place. “To work with, he’s pretty straightforward. I don’t know what you guys imagine on the other side, but I haven’t come across a driver that was a pain in the arse. I hope I never will, so that’s clear. Then, I said I think prior to the season, for sure it’s going to be a different challenge, it’s a different person. So it’s going to be a new challenge.” Vettel also showed he remembers that desperation to establish yourself, to show you can cut it, from earlier in his career. In Bahrain, he summed it up well:“if you want to win you always have to justify yourself, to prove that ultimately you can go faster than the others. I think it’s part of competition, part of our lives and what we grew up with. Maybe some more, some less, but all of us have huge ambition to go faster than the other guys around.” But Leclerc isn’t the only one knocking on the door. This season in particular there has been an influx of outstanding young talent. This includes the Brit-pack (including Alex Albon, who describes himself as a London-born Thai), spearheaded by a pair of Mclaren Autosport BRDC Award winners – George Russell and Lando Norris. Russell might appear to be in an invidious position, driving the slowest car in the field and with nobody to beat other than Williams team-mate Robert Kubica. He’d be much happier with a more competitive car but, as he has said right from the start of the season, the pressure is off. He is on the books of Mercedes and therefore a credible medium-term option as a driver for the works team, and knows Toto Wolff will be looking closely at the detail of what he’s doing rather than the superficial results. “I’m enjoying the challenge,”says Russell of the difficulties he faces. “It’s a very different role for me, my sort of task at the moment is to direct the team and point them in the right areas where we need to focus, and I feel quite a lot of responsibility to try to turn the team around and get us back to where Williams belongs. I’m enjoying that aspect of it, but it’s just a shame that it’s not a quick process. These things just always take time.” Russell’s career path means that he’s well-adapted to adversity. While the 21-year-old has always been highly rated, there were times when reaching F1 at all seemed a long shot. “It’s not my first difficult year, also my last year in karting was very difficult,”he says.“i went to a team that wasn’t performing at the time, I saw it was a win-win situation. If I performed it’d look great on me and if I didn’t, people would just blame it on the equipment. You can call that character-building seasons, and I also had that in Formula 3. “My two seasons were far from perfect, and that made me sort of into the driver I am today. I learned a huge amount from those moments. Sometimes, if you have just such a perfect career path, when you do have a difficulty, you don’t know how to handle it. I’ve had a number of difficult moments in my career, so I’ve sort of got the experience.” At Mclaren, 19-year-old Lando Norris has better machinery at his disposal and has also made an impressive start to his F1 career. He has twice been in the points, with a best result of sixth in Bahrain, and looks at home at this level. But going into a struggling Mclaren team is no easy gig, especially up against a driver like Carlos Sainz Jr, and by making a good impression early on he has already proved himself capable of performing at the pinnacle, even if he missed out on the F2 title last year. An early impact is always a good sign of a future star, and Norris has certainly ticked that box. “It’s always a bonus to do it,”says Norris of getting a big result on the board already.“it’s not like I had to do it or something, but if there’s an opportunity where it is possible then I’ve got to make the most of it and make sure that I’m there to maximise that opportunity, which is what I did. “I couldn’t have done much better than sixth. Maybe I could’ve done if I hadn’t dropped back as much in the beginning, I could’ve been ahead of Vettel if he’d still had the same incident at the end. But apart from that it’s good that I’ve done well. I guess for the people on the outside, but also for my own confidence in knowing I can do a good enough job, which was mainly from the job I did in Bahrain. It’s important but it wasn’t the end of the world if it didn’t happen.” As for Albon, he has had an unusual path to F1 – dropped by the Red Bull programme in 2012, he was picked up by Toro Rosso for this season after it ran out of other options. This, after excelling in F2 last season. There have been a few mishaps, including a massive accident in practice in China, but he’s also bagged two points finishes and shown a good turn of pace. Perhaps that’s no surprise for a driver who is highly rated by no less than Leclerc himself. And as a contemporary of the Ferrari driver, Albon has the chance this season to force himself into contention for a long-term future in F1. “He’s always been able to do those laps where it’s like,‘whoa, where did that come from?’”said Albon of Leclerc after that sensational pole positon in Bahrain.“and I think today was one of those. “It’s cool to see because it shows how strong this generation is and seeing Charles fighting with Seb so early in the season – I thought it might take him longer. I get on really well with Charles, and even in GP3 it was clear he was seriously quick. Fighting with him in 2016 was a confidence boost and did me a lot of favours. It’s cool to see where he is.” The other member of this young generation is one who has seemingly lost momentum through no fault of his own. Esteban Ocon could have been driving for three teams this year – Racing Point, Renault or Mercedes – and, after two and a half impressive campaigns with Manor and Force India, it’s hugely unlucky that he’s‘only’the Mercedes test driver this year. Racing Point’s change of ownership meant he was ousted in favour of Lance Stroll, which was not a big problem as for a long time he was off to Renault. Then, Ricciardo made his shock decision to abandon Red Bull for the French manufacturer and Ocon was frozen out. It should be a temporary situation, and he’s first in the queue to replace Bottas if Mercedes does not pick up its option to continue with the Finn in 2020. But you are quickly forgotten in F1, even if it would be desperately foolish for grand prix racing to let the prodigiously talented 22-year-old slip its memory. Fortunately, in Mercedes, Ocon has the right backer and it’s improbable that he won’t return to action next year – it’s just a question of where. So Hamilton and Vettel are fighting on multiple fronts, and that’s before you even factor in the drivers who are a little older than this group – Bottas, Ricciardo, Nico Hulkenberg – but still trying to get themselves into the position to challenge for championships. Casting into the future, it’s easy to imagine Ocon, Leclerc, Verstappen and the rest doing battle for world championships having displaced the old guard. And then they, too, will be under pressure from the next generation. As for Hamilton, he doesn’t look likely to run out of steam anytime soon, and by the time his current Mercedes contract is up it’s possible he will be a seven-time world champion. Whether or not Hamilton continues beyond 2020, who knows? Hamilton himself has suggested much will depend on the kind of F1 the 2021 regulations will herald. We can be sure that, provided Hamilton remains motivated enough, he’s capable of holding off the charge of the youngsters as he pushes up to the age of 40. But he will fall eventually. The question is, which of these drivers will be the one or ones to topple him?