PARTY’S OVER!
Lewis is blowing his title bid, warns Stewart
SIR Jackie Stewart has suggested that Lewis Hamilton’s playboy persona could be behind the world champion’s strangely poor form.
While Nico Rosberg returned home to Monaco to celebrate with his family after winning the Singapore Grand Prix, the inquest began into what has gone wrong with Hamilton.
Like most people, Stewart was shaking his head at the dip that condemned the fastest driver of his generation to finish a distant third to Rosberg, who showed the pace of his life to take an eight-point lead going into the sixthlast race in Malaysia a week on Sunday.
‘Maybe you can bottom out,’ said Stewart, Britain’s only other triple world champion. ‘That can happen through consistent success because when you have consistent success everything can seem so easy.
‘Suddenly things can go less well — you overdrive, you are not on the ball, or you live a life that distracts you.
‘If you are at the top in any line of work, you can get carried away with success. You think you can get away with things. Then someone else comes along and drives better or more consistently.
‘I was always frightened of being beaten. I always thought there could be someone out there better than me or who might have a better car. So I always worked on that basis. I could never sit back and relax.’
The trend of Rosberg’s dominance extends to the last three races and raises questions about Hamilton flying in and out of race venues after a parade of parties in America that he shares with his social media followers. He has always maintained he gets the balance right, but many observers believe he may be well-advised to review that in light of this most recent showing around the Marina Bay Circuit.
As for Rosberg, he is confident he can go better than in the last two seasons, in which he has finished second in the table to Hamilton. Rosberg’s devastating allweekend performance attracted glowing tributes from Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff.
‘I’ve known him since 2013 and that is the best Nico Rosberg I have seen throughout a weekend,’ said Wolff. ‘We have the tendency of saying Lewis has awesome pace, and this is what we have seen here with Nico. He was just blindingly fast.
‘On the contrary, Lewis didn’t have a clean weekend. He was lacking laps in order to find the right set-up, so he couldn’t really choose the right direction, and from then on went backwards.’
Even so, Wolff does not see the result as an augury for the rest of the season. ‘We have the tendency of talking one up and the other one down,’ he said. ‘I remember talking about Lewis’s momentum a few weeks ago and suddenly we have this mega Nico weekend. In two weeks we will see if that changes in Malaysia.’