How Hamilton took his sixth crown
What had first promised to be a battle for supremacy between Mercedes and Ferrari turned into another Hamilton steamroller enlivened by twists and subplots aplenty
The facts of the 2019 Formula 1 season were substantially the same as the previous five in the V6-turbo-hybrid era. Mercedes won both championships with Lewis Hamilton its star, Ferrari flattered to deceive, and
Red Bull sniped for victories without ever threatening to fight for the title. Despite the new front-wing regulations, designed to make it easier for cars to follow each other, the naysayers moaned that grand prix racing needed to change the record.
But this wasn’t the same old story, not by a long shot. It was a profoundly different tale, with performance swings, surprises and purple patches for all three of Formula 1’s big teams – not to mention whispered accusations about the legitimacy of
Ferrari’s engine supremacy.
Even though there was no title fight to speak of, despite
Valtteri Bottas gamely hanging on to Hamilton’s coat tails and showing admirable fortitude in recovering after his 2018 slump, this was a season that will live long in the memory. Full of unexpected twists, engaging subplots and welcome revivals – not least Honda putting its Mclaren nightmare behind it with a trio of victories in the back of Max Verstappen’s Red Bull RB15 – you couldn’t look away from the 2019 season. Even if the outcome was the same old.
Prologue: first blood to Ferrari in testing
Ferrari won the testing war. Those inside the team knew it, those inside rival teams knew it and Mercedes itself knew it – and fully expected it even before turning a wheel in Spain. While Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton set fastest laps that were separated by just three thousandths of a second, the Ferrari had a margin on adjusted single-lap and long-run pace. The Ferrari revival seemed on.
Mercedes opted to run the first test with a far earlier version of its 2019 car, signed off in November so that could be built while work on the ‘real’ car could be pushed as late as possible. Then, it brought a massive upgrade to the second Barcelona test confident of a big step in performance. But it didn’t quite work out like that.
“We knew the week-one car would not be competitive, so we were not too worried about that,” says Mercedes technical director James Allison. “We knew the week-two car would have a lot more performance because of the steepness of the development gradient at the time. So in week one, we were
looking at Ferrari effortlessly battering us but sitting there thinking if we deliver everything we think we’re going to deliver, then we should be somewhere in the fight.
“Then week two rolled around and days one to three we were thinking, ‘Where’s all this enormous performance that we thought we’d just bolted on the car?’. Luckily, we got it together on day four. We went to the first race expecting to be beaten, but expecting to be better than everyone felt we were because we felt everyone would assume that our pace on the last day of testing was because we’d taken the fuel out – the improvement was quite dramatic. And we assumed that not just the commentators, but Ferrari as well, would be confused by it – because we were confused by it!
“So we felt we would be somewhere behind Ferrari, but not embarrassingly slow. Then we would have a strong year because we knew we had a huge amount of development potential. So a strong early part of the year [in terms of development] to catch up on pace and then maybe from the middle third, second half of the year, catch up on points before a brilliant final part.”
Formula 1 packed up to put the chill of Barcelona in winter behind it to jet out to Melbourne and Ferrari’s inevitably triumphant start to the year…
Chapter 1: Mercedes surprises itself
Plot twist! Mercedes dominated the Australian Grand Prix, with Bottas jumping polesitter Hamilton at the start, then pulling away from his team-mate. No matter that Hamilton’s challenge was stymied by floor damage sustained in a kerb-strike early on, Bottas’s win wiped out any hangover from his dismal end to 2018 and proved he was going to be a formidable force – one of the feel-good stories of the year for the likeable Finn.
Ferrari was not only behind, but nowhere. Sebastian Vettel was a massive 0.704s adrift in qualifying and finished almost a minute down, having been passed for third at a track where overtaking is not easy by Verstappen. In what would become a familiar theme of the first half of the season, Mercedes got everything right while Ferrari couldn’t get it together. There was also a hint of trouble to come when Charles Leclerc was ordered to hold position behind Vettel, having closed in during the second stint.
“Australia was a disappointment,” says Ferrari sporting director Laurent Mekies. “We did not totally trust the pre-season results but we were far from Mercedes and unhappy with the way the car was behaving. It was a bit of a shock.”
First came the shock, then the awe. Australia was the first of
eight consecutive victories for Mercedes. Yes, it was dominant, but it needed assistance from Ferrari to achieve that supremacy – starting off in Bahrain, where Ferrari catapulted back to form on a power-sensitive circuit. With Vettel visibly not confident on turn-in, Leclerc showed exactly why he’d been promoted to one of F1’s highest-pressure seats after just one season with Sauber with a superb drive from pole position. Save for the first 30 seconds of the race, where he slipped to third before passing Bottas and then – having been ordered to hold position for two laps – Vettel, he drove brilliantly. He would have won, but for a short circuit in the control unit for the injection system that cost him a cylinder. As he faded to third, it was Hamilton who came through to win as Vettel had spun and lost time while battling with his old nemesis.
Ferrari was also fast enough to win at Baku, only for Leclerc to crash in Q2 and contribute to a long session during which the temperature dropped and handed the initiative to Mercedes. Having squandered the advantage of pole position in the preceding race in China, where wheelspin at the start allowed Hamilton past, Bottas made up for a slow launch to repass Hamilton into Turn 1 and win the Azerbaijan GP. In Canada, Vettel won on the road but cracked while under pressure from Hamilton. Regardless of where you stood on the contentious issue of Vettel’s penalty for rejoining dangerously in front of the Mercedes at Turn 4, the initial mistake was the trigger.
During this phase of the season, Mercedes pulled even further ahead with its major upgrade for the fifth race of the season in Spain, where it delivered its most significant raw-pace advantage and dominated. Other than Ferrari’s fruitless challenges, the only threat came at Monaco, where Verstappen harried Hamilton. With a five-second penalty for an unsafe release to serve and Hamilton struggling after Mercedes made a mistake by bolting on mediumcompound Pirellis for the second stint rather than hards, the result was in doubt until the moment Verstappen launched an ambitious Hail Mary into the chicane on the penultimate lap. Hamilton turned in and there was contact with Verstappen’s front-right to his rear left – but both lived to tell the tale. Verstappen’s penalty ultimately dropped him to fourth but, had he got past, the Red Bull driver could well have gained enough time to win even with the addition to his race time, thanks to the state of Hamilton’s tyres.
By dominating the French GP at Paul Ricard, Mercedes made it eight wins out of eight – six of them 1-2s. In terms of results, this was unprecedented supremacy even by the standards of Mercedes in a start to the season described by Allison as “freakishly flawless” up
against an error-prone Ferrari and an underperforming Red Bull.
The opening octet of races came to a close to howls of derision about predictability – particularly after a French GP where little happened at the front. Another season of Mercedes obliterating the rest, Ferrari in disarray and Red Bull only a threat once, apparently…
Chapter 2: Honda’s redemption
Red Bull’s start to the season was a little disappointing. Despite Verstappen’s failed Monaco GP victory tilt, Red Bull only scored two podiums – in Australia and Spain thanks to its star driver defeating the Ferraris in battle. While that gave Honda its first podiums of its fourth spell in F1 – and Verstappen would have snatched third from the ailing Leclerc in Bahrain but for the safety car being deployed for the two Renaults grinding to a halt simultaneously – it fell short of what was hoped as it took a little longer than expected to get on top of the simplified front wings with heavily restricted endplate geometry designed to mitigate the outwash effect.
“The large aero shake-up came relatively late,” says Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan. “If we are honest, we weren’t as competitive as we wanted to be. Bahrain was a bit miserable for us and we were not strong there, but were denied a podium by two yellow cars parked at the side of the track. In Spain, we had a reasonable step forward with some reasonably obvious visual changes and quite a few others to go with it. That was the beginning of a large-scale change and gave encouragement to pursue [that approach], because it wasn’t necessarily crystal clear before we went what we needed to do to evolve. With that confidence, the next stage was prepped to go – some bits in Canada, some more in France and smaller updates in Austria. We got a better handle on how to amalgamate it all in Austria and were able to extract more from the parts that had been drip-fed through.”
Minor front-wing tweaks that appeared to improve the channelling of the airflow around the front tyre were an obvious change for June’s Austrian GP, but Monaghan stresses that was only a part of it. The upshot was that the Red Bull was seriously fast.
Aided by the altitude of the Red Bull Ring – it’s no coincidence that the car either won or, in the case of Mexico City, should have won, at the three highest circuits – Verstappen was quick enough for the front row and flying in the race. With Mercedes having to hold back massively because the temperature was around 6C higher than the car’s cooling could deal with – the consequence of an incorrect value being put into the cooling calculations – Leclerc’s
Ferrari led the way from pole position. Verstappen, meanwhile, bogged down because of an anti-stall that kicked in through a combination of the clutch being set too aggressively and higherthan-expected grip in the grid box thanks to some pre-race demo hooning. But he charged through from eighth and passed Leclerc at the Turn 3 hairpin with two and a half laps remaining, shoving the Ferrari off track in the process.
The result was a stewards’ judgement that had wide-reaching impacts in F1, ruling the move a racing incident and redefining what is and is not acceptable on track. It was no coincidence that next time out, at Silverstone, Leclerc shoved Verstappen off the track during their titanic battle for third place. Verstappen won that scrap, only to be wiped out by another Vettel blunder. Mercedes, up front, was back to business as usual in the British
GP, with Hamilton one-stopping his way to win from early leader Bottas, whose two-stop strategy was always going to cost him track position before being completely ruined by an ill-timed safety car.
Verstappen then spun-and-won next time out at Hockenheim in a rain-hit German GP. There, Hamilton somehow grabbed pole position but crashed under the safety car, was hit with a penalty for going the wrong side of a pit-entry bollard while recovering, then spun. But he still salvaged ninth place; Bottas crashed out while running fourth, throwing away what could have been a significant gain on Hamilton in the world championship battle. This was another weekend where Ferrari was kicking itself, with an intercooler problem for Vettel in Q1 and Leclerc’s dramas with a fuel-pump control module in Q3 costing it a shot at victory. Leclerc also crashed out for good measure, with Vettel at least salvaging second place.
The first half of the season ended with Verstappen coming close to taking a third win in four races after leading much of the Hungarian GP. But an inspired strategy call by Mercedes snookered Red Bull, with Hamilton chasing down and passing Verstappen late on. With Bottas drifting into Leclerc on the approach to Turn 4 of the race and only able to recover to eighth after a first-lap stop, this gave Hamilton a 62-point advantage in the championship. Coming on top of Bottas having thrown away another chance to close the gap one week earlier at Hockenheim, it was over this eight-day period that Hamilton made certain the title was his.
Chapter 3: The best… and worst… of Ferrari
Ferrari always knew Spa and Monza were top of its list of circuits on which it could win – and Leclerc made the most of the
opportunity by taking pole position and winning both the Belgian and Italian GPS. That was followed up with a surprise win on the streets of Singapore, albeit for the ‘wrong’ driver after Ferrari underestimated the undercut and allowed Vettel to jump ahead of Leclerc while covering off a threat from behind. An aerodynamic upgrade, rooted in the lessons of parts introduced at the French
GP in June, played a key part in this.
The problem for much of the season was a weak front end, perhaps a result of Ferrari opting for the unloaded outboard front wing that was easier to get working but didn’t offer the peak load of the Mercedes approach of the loaded outboard design. But over the course of the season both concepts had varying levels of success, so it would be incorrect to say one concept or the other was proved to be definitively better than the other. What was clear was that Mercedes, with a relatively evolutionary car, had again made the right decisions to prevail.
Ferrari should have made it four in a row, but for a 1-2 turning to disaster at Sochi. As a result of a pre-race agreement, Leclerc did not defend against Vettel into the first corner. Vettel then declined to let Leclerc back past, saying it could be done later – much to the junior Ferrari driver’s frustration. Ferrari ran Vettel longer to allow Leclerc to jump him to restore what it saw as the natural order, but an electrical failure caused the MGU-K to cut out on Vettel’s car. He parked up, the safety car was deployed, and long-running Hamilton was able to pit and retain the lead.
Ferrari should also have won at Suzuka, with Vettel bouncing back to form by setting a great pole position lap but making a bad start after an initial lurch forward. Bottas surged past both Ferrari drivers to take his first win since the fourth race of the season at Baku.
The Ferrari was ‘only’ handy in the corners, but a rocketship on the straights, with time gains over Mercedes and Red Bull regularly measured at seven or more tenths. Inevitably, this inspired paddock whispers and multiple theories about how it might be achieving this speed. This led to a series of technical directives, some triggered by enquiries from rivals but some issued unilaterally.
Most interestingly, a question came from Red Bull concerning potential ways to ‘game’ the fuel-flow measurements – including by varying the fuel-flow rate in the tiny gaps between the data being sampled. This happened ahead of the United States GP at Austin, where Ferrari was lacklustre, having been a serious pole position threat in Mexico City qualifying before Leclerc inherited the position and Hamilton won the race.
Ferrari continued to struggle in races particularly, albeit vehemently denying any wrongdoing. Rivals were convinced the technical directives had stopped Ferrari in its tracks, reducing its advantage on the straights and rendering it no longer a victory threat. Ferrari was eventually fined for under-declaring the amount of fuel onboard Leclerc’s car ahead of the Abu Dhabi GP. (Although there was no explicit indication that this was with the intention of trying to burn extra fuel, the Ferraris did spend the majority of the race in a fuel-save mode.) With nobody willing to risk controversy by making a direct protest, the question of whether or not Ferrari was going beyond the limits of the rules with its engine package was never satisfactorily resolved, despite circumstantial evidence suggesting it had.
But Ferrari had other problems. Its run of three victories really should have been a run of five and, having slid back down the order, the collision between Vettel and Leclerc at Interlagos was another blow. Vettel was at fault, moving left on Leclerc shortly after being mugged by his team-mate at the first corner and the red mist descending. Ferrari dealt with this behind closed doors, with
Vettel bearing the brunt of the opprobrium but team principal Mattia Binotto saying the responsibility was shared in public.
Leclerc’s rise – brilliantly quick, but too error-prone in the first half of the season before breaking through as a race winner – and Vettel’s battle to remain the top dog at Ferrari was one of the most engaging subplots of the season. Regularly, there were team-orders controversies and the tide turned mostly in the younger driver’s favour. Vettel’s late-season revival gives him some hope for 2020, but few don’t expect Leclerc to be the lead driver on performance next year. After all, he’ll only get better as his experience builds.
Epilogue: Mercedes signs off in style
With Ferrari out of the picture, Verstappen took a storming third win of the season at Interlagos – a chaotic and dramatic race during which Pierre Gasly bagged a redemptive second place for Toro Rosso, having been dropped by Red Bull after a disappointing first half of the season. But Hamilton dominated in Abu Dhabi, with Bottas, the only threat on pace, starting at the back due to a power-unit penalty.
It’s a reminder of just how much it will take to knock Hamilton and Mercedes off their perch. This was a year during which Mercedes’ excellence arguably flattered a car that was consistently quick but ‘only’ managed 10 pole positions – equally split between Hamilton and Bottas. But it got everything right early on – Hamilton’s only
significant error other than the offs in the German GP came after the title was his (hitting Alexander Albon at Interlagos), and it remains the strongest all-round team. Hamilton, meanwhile, drove brilliantly on race days in particular and showed why he has every chance of a record-equalling seventh world title next year.
Mercedes’ rivals almost existed only to show it in a better light. Red Bull is superb operationally and there’s much to admire about the team – its world-record 1.92s pitstop at Interlagos (ruined by Robert Kubica being released into Verstappen’s path and holding him up) is testament to that. Honda also made massive progress to the point where it’s the market leader at altitude and on a similar level to Renault and Mercedes in normal conditions. But still, the Red Bull-honda combination has yet to deliver the consistent pace needed to be a title threat. What we can be sure of is that, with a quick enough car, both Verstappen and the team are ready to fight for the title.
Ferrari, meanwhile, had a car that was seriously quick on Saturdays – nobody took more pole positions than Leclerc (seven) – but its return of three victories was pitiful given how many it could have won. Yes, the weaker performance on Sunday made it harder, but the questionable management of the driver rivalry didn’t help. Troubles extracting consistent pace and too many reliability problems also held it back. Binotto suggested the title was lost with the design of its 2019 car, and there’s some truth in that.
But the fact is that, even with an equal car to Mercedes, Ferrari is still some way short of the level of the Silver Arrows. A big step must be taken next year if it’s to challenge.
As for the rest, they could do nothing to bother the big three. Mclaren rose to the front of the midfield and was consistently strong in that group, while Renault was desperately erratic in a season where it aimed to kick on. But the star cameos came from Toro Rosso – its podiums at Hockenheim (Daniil Kvyat) and Interlagos, aside from Carlos Sainz’s for Mclaren in Brazil, were the only top-three appearances outside the big three teams.
But this was a year that belonged to Hamilton. While he was a little disappointed with his Saturday struggles, he remained formidable and continues to chip away at what weaknesses he has. With the continued rise of Verstappen and the arrival of Leclerc one of the main themes of this year, Hamilton has proved he’s not going to roll over and hand over to the next generation without a fight.