HAMILTON MUST SHOW HIS WORTH
YOU know things have got serious when Lewis Hamilton forgoes the fleshpots of Los Angeles for the sanctuary of his Monaco home.
For now the James Hunt part of the world champion’s character has yielded to a pressing concern: how can he stop Nico Rosberg from beating him to the title?
So since Rosberg produced the weekend of his life in Singapore a fortnight ago to win his third race in succession and open up an eightpoint lead, Hamilton has been going about his preparations quietly and (largely) off social media.
He heads into the steam room known as the Malaysian Grand Prix this morning knowing that he is in a six-race shoot-out that will shape his status at the very pinnacle of his sport. See off Rosberg and he will stand alone among Brits as a fourtime world champion. Lose to him and one small coating of sheen will rub off his glittering career.
The signs from Kuala Lumpur before today’s race appeared to be positive for Hamilton, whose pole position should come as no great surprise given his recurring knack of producing resounding form when his luck appears to be down.
He has been beset this season by sundry technical gremlins, including engine penalties, outside his control. But the sheer dominance of Rosberg in Singapore suggested the difference between the two men went beyond the reliability of their respective Mercedes. For the British racer to be out-qualified by his team-mate by seven-tenths of a second was unprecedented.
What went wrong? One answer is that Rosberg is in the form of his life. His confidence is high, bolstered by the evidence that after 16 years of striving he can finally beat his boyhood rival on pace alone.
That he can do so is the culmination of hard work; the gluten-free, sugarfree meals at Grands Prix; the mask he wears on flights to guard against infection; the long time he spends chatting to engineers at the Mercedes HQ in Brackley.
Anecdotally, Rosberg is at the factory more frequently and for longer than Hamilton, though Mercedes say their two drivers turn up as often as each other. But Hamilton gets through his meetings faster. That is his style of working. Rosberg, who turned down a place at Imperial College to study engineering, is more methodical by nature.
Perhaps that difference has played a part in prolonging the championship fight much longer than most observers expected. Whether Rosberg’s apparently more diligent application is relevant or not, he certainly seems happier with the machinery he is driving. As for Hamilton, when asked in Malaysia if he believed he had the car to win the title this year, he let out a long ‘umm’. ‘Time will tell,’ he added, less than enthusiastically. One of his beefs is that Mercedes switched five mechanics from his side of the garage with five from Rosberg’s at the start of the season. He talked of it as being a change that did not need to happen and which had ‘all sorts of effects’, the biggest of which is ‘psychological’. This has led conspiracy enthusiasts to accelerate away with the idea that Hamilton has been nobbled by Mercedes. They are a German company and they want a German champ, the theories run.
That seems far-fetched, not least given that senior managers at the team have always struck me as treating their most successful driver with full consideration, occasionally bordering on indulgence.
Hamilton’s problems are more do with his flunked starts, which cost him in Australia, Bahrain and Italy, and the slow creep of a few minor errors: crashing in qualifying in Azerbaijan, a smash in practice in Hungary, losing a place by running wide in Singapore. Drip, drip, drip.
Why? Sir Jackie Stewart, the only other Briton to win three world championships, wondered aloud after Singapore if Hamilton’s success might have bred complacency. If so, the rise of Rosberg may have arrived just in time.