STILL HE RISES
Lewis Hamilton didn’t always have the best car on the grid this season – so he went to another level
LEWIS FINDING GRIP WHERE OTHERS COULD NOT THAT BECAME THE NORM IN 2018
FOR HALF THE season it was a true heavyweight contest. A rumble in the Formula 1 jungle that saw Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel slug it out, blowfor-blow. The ferocity of the fight was unlike anything we’d previously seen in the turbo-hybrid era. Ferrari hadn’t just upped their game; they’d produced the fastest racing car on the grid.
And they were winning.
Until, that is, Vettel crashed while leading at Hockenheim. It was one of those silly mistakes drivers sometimes make, similar to when Hamilton crashed on the final lap of the ’09 Italian GP, but it couldn’t have come at a worse moment. Hamilton inherited the win, after starting 14th on the grid, and from there he didn’t look back. There was the hint of a Ferrari resurgence at Spa, but Mercedes had them covered. AMG’s performance powertrains department introduced an engine upgrade and Hamilton went on to win eight of the last 11 races, while Ferrari spiralled into a world of pain. A new floor unsettled the scarlet cars in Singapore and Japan, and there were some dubious decisions on the pitwall.
Hamilton and Mercedes had both titles sewn up long before the end of the season. But the fight was closer than the points table would have you believe – Mercedes 655, Ferrari 571 – and that’s what made 2018 so special for Mercedes. They didn’t dominate like they did in 2014-2017; they won ugly. To beat Ferrari they had to take their efforts to the next level.
Pre-season testing didn’t go well for anyone. Snow and rain blighted the first of two weeks in Barcelona and, as a result, none of the teams felt fully prepared when they touched down in Melbourne. But there was no getting away from the pace of Ferrari: Vettel’s best time in Spain was 1.3sec faster than Hamil- ton. Unlike Ferrari, Mercedes hadn’t tested Pirelli’s softest tyre compound, but there were still plenty of reasons for Maranello to feel confident. All of which made Hamilton’s pole lap in Melbourne even more brilliant. He beat Kimi Räikkönen and Vettel by 0.7sec, having driven one of his best ever laps. He found grip where others couldn’t – something that was to become the norm in 2018. He took 11 poles, taking his career total 15 clear of Michael Schumacher in second place.
But one-lap pace doesn’t win championships and Ferrari out-witted Mercedes in the Australian Grand Prix, pitting Vettel during a virtual safety car period. For the first time in years it looked as though the Scuderia had the tactical nous to match the pace of their car.
‘Ferrari have the fastest car,’ said Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff after the Chinese GP. ‘It’s very difficult for us at the moment.’
Fast forward to the British Grand Prix, round 10, and Vettel was sitting pretty at the top of the charts. He left Silverstone with an eight-point advantage over Hamilton and, more importantly, Lewis seemed rattled. He refused to be interviewed immediately after finishing second and he was convinced that Ferrari had intentionally sacrificed Kimi Räikkönen’s race when the Finn4
hit him on the opening lap. Intentional or not, Ferrari were being clinical in their pursuit of the championship.
But rather than build on that momentum, Vettel (pictured below) threw it all away at the next race in Germany. His low-speed crash at Hockenheim’s Sachs Kurve handed Hamilton 25 points, and worse was to come. Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne died suddenly on 25 July, sending shockwaves through every department in Maranello. It had a greater impact than seemed apparent at the time.
While Marchionne didn’t have the charisma of his predecessor Luca di Montezemolo, he was a hard taskmaster and a driving force behind the team. He obsessed about success in F1 and controlled all of the big decisions. His demise left a power vacuum that took crucial momentum away from their F1 campaign.
Victory at Spa, the first race after the summer break, calmed the waters, but that was as high as Ferrari would climb. That race prompted a reaction from Mercedes and Hamilton that would prove decisive.
‘It takes me a while to assess the opposition,’ Hamilton told CAR at the last grand prix of the year. ‘I need to see the scale of the challenge; that is one of the things that motivates me.’
Lewis’s intensity went up a notch after the summer break. The debriefs with his engineers got longer; the trips to the factory became even more frequent; the off-track distractions became less obvious. He even bought a scooter to propel him around the paddock so that he wouldn’t get stopped between the motorhome and the garage. Details, details, details.
From a technical point of view, Mercedes upped the ante, too. ‘Bizarrely, one of the high points of the season for me came the week after Belgium,’ says Wolff. ‘We’d just been comprehensively beaten by Ferrari, yet I felt a real excitement within the factories in Brackley [team HQ] and Brixworth [ditto for powertrains]; everyone was relishing the fight and looking for more performance.’
Find performance they did, from the engine and from some aero tweaks, and they even found a way to control the core temperature of the heat-sensitive Pirelli tyres. All of which allowed Mercedes to deliver the decisive blow in the title fight in the month following the Belgian GP. Hamilton won four races on the bounce and Mercedes displayed a cold, ruthless intent – something that was conspicuously absent in their closest rivals.
When Valtteri Bottas was leading in Russia, his race-winning ambitions were cast aside in favour of Hamilton’s title hopes. The silver cars swapped positions in the belief that the seven extra points for Hamilton could prove crucial come season’s end.
Ferrari refused to prioritise Vettel. In Monza qualifying he should have been given a tow by Räikkönen to ensure pole position, but the opposite occurred. Räikkönen would start first
LEWIS’S INTENSITY WENT UP A NOTCH AFTER THE SUMMER BREAK
and Vettel second, leaving Vettel vulnerable to attack on the opening lap. And the inevitable happened: Vettel clashed with Hamilton, who started on the second row, and found himself at the back.
At Suzuka the Ferraris were running fifth and sixth, behind Mercedes, but the team didn’t swap Vettel into fifth: two points that the German should have been allowed to bank. That mistake followed a poor decision in qualifying in which both cars went out on intermediate tyres at the start of Q3, while the track was still dry enough for slicks. Vettel started eighth, his worst grid position of the season.
In reality none of this made any difference to the end result, but it highlighted the differences between Merc and Ferrari – the difference between a winning mindset and a loser’s. In four races Hamilton earned 100 points to Vettel’s 50. Game over.
‘ABSOLUTELY THIS has been Lewis’s best season,’ says Wolff. ‘He’s been fast, consistent and a real leader for the guys. He seems to reinvent himself every year; he just gets better and better.’
It’s hard to pick out a weakness in Hamilton’s 2018 campaign. There were no poor races, no misjudged qualifying sessions, and he handled the pressure better than Vettel. While Marchionne’s death destabilised Ferrari, it’s worth noting that Mercedes had their own dramas when Niki Lauda, a shareholder and director of the team, had a double lung transplant in August.
What summed up Hamilton’s season perhaps better than anything was the manner in which he continued to dominate after he won the title in Mexico. He won the title early in 2015 and 2017, and didn’t win again in those seasons. Not so in 2018: he won in Brazil and Abu Dhabi.
This post-title success sends an alarming message about Hamilton’s hunger. In the post-race press conferences he loves to be reminded of his win totals. He’s now on 73, just 18 short of Michael Schumacher’s all-time record. At his current win rate, he’ll surpass the German before the end of his Mercedes contract in 2020.
‘I love what I do and I love my team,’ says Lewis. ‘Racing is what I’m best at and I’ll continue to do it until I no longer enjoy it. But I can still get better! The second half of this year has been awesome, but I could have been better, I could have been tighter early on. That’s my goal for 2019.’
One of the all-time greats? Without doubt. The greatest? There’s still time.