Lewis Hamilton can lay claim to a great many records in Formula 1, but none is quite as remarkable as the one he could be set to lose this year.
The Briton is the only driver in Formula 1 history to win at least one grand prix in every season he competed in.
His career has ranged just about the full gamut of annual successes, from his staggering 11 from 17 in 2020 to his solitary victory in 2013, his first for Mercedes.
Combined with the fact he’s only ever twice been beaten by a teammate over the course of a season, it’s the sort of record that ought to silence some of his most vocal critics who still contend Hamilton’s record-breaking successes are down to his car alone — although some habits die very hard.
But that enviable record is facing its sternest test this season, and this weekend’s British Grand Prix might be his best shot at keeping the streak alive.
Whether he does will come down to two questions: is he up for it, and is the car up to it?
IS HAMILTON UP FOR IT?
It’s the question everyone wants to know and a fair few people think they have the answer to.
The championship table paints an unflattering picture. Hamilton is sixth in the standings and 98 points off Max Verstappen’s lead. Worse, he’s 34 points down on new teammate George Russell, who’s so far scored one more podium than the seven-time champion.
Jackie Stewart, one of F1’s greatest of all time, thinks it’s all downhill from here.
“He’s now struggling a little bit because he’s had a new teammate who’s been quicker than him in qualifying so far this year, which is going to be difficult for him to handle,” he told the Convex Conversation podcast last week. “I think it’s time for him to resign.”
“It’s a pity he wasn’t resigning at the top, but I don’t think that’s going to happen now. But nevertheless it’s wiser to stop than go through all the pain of not being able to do what you did before.
Strong words indeed, and from a luminary still intimately involved in F1 rather than one of the many content to take pot shots from the sidelines.
But does the claim that Hamilton’s on the inexorable decline to retirement stack up?
Not quite, because the points are far from the full story.
Start with the argument that Russell has been the quicker driver so far this year, the numbers simply don’t bear out the argument.
On average Hamilton’s best qualifying times — calculated in the corresponding segment when one driver or the other hasn’t made it to Q3 — have been 0.02 per cent quicker than Russell’s It’s marginal, yes, but undoubtedly faster.
On average Russell is starting 0.4 places ahead of Hamilton, but if we exclude the 11-place disparity from Saudi Arabia, that swings to 0.9 places in Hamilton’s favour.
It is at worst equal between the two drivers.
Qualifying averages, nine rounds
Difference over a hypothetical 90-second lap.
Russell: 1:30.000 (100 per cent)
Hamilton: 1:29.982 (98.98 per cent)
Grid averages, nine rounds
Russell: 7.33 (excluding Canada: 7.25)
Hamilton: 7.77 (excluding Saudi Arabia: 6.75)
So what’s the foundation of the considerable points difference between the two?
Let’s start with the car.
Mercedes’s struggles this season are well understood. At first the car was aerodynamically unstable — the ‘porpoising’ we saw up until the Spanish Grand Prix was the chief symptom — and now it struggles with a rough ride quality when it’s lowered to its optimum ride height.
Of course both Hamilton and Russell have been driving the same bad car all year, but what the results alone won’t tell you is that Hamilton has been doing the bulk of the on-track troubleshooting with the team to find the car’s elusive sweet spot.
“Obviously I’m in a really privileged position being teammates with Lewis and learning so much from him — how he works, how he goes about his business with his engineers, how he gets sort of the whole team motivated,” Russell said after the Canadian Grand Prix. “It’s quite inspiring to see.
“Also on the technical side he’s pretty impressive, which a lot of people probably won’t recognise or appreciate.”
In fact his record-equalling seven intrateam defeats — which ended with his Canada podium — started in Saudi Arabia in one of the highest profile cases of experimentation gone wrong this season. He and the team gambled on a set-up that ultimately backfired, dumping him out of qualifying 16th and condemning him to a long road back to 10th.
“Maybe in the second half of the season George can do the experiments!” Hamilton joked at the end of the Canadian Grand Prix. “Moving forward, I think we’ll be a little bit more cautious on doing too many experiments, as it really does hinder you through the weekend”
Jeddah also happened to be the first of many races this season during which luck swung against him, having just missed the opportunity to pit during a virtual safety car via a miscommunication with his team that would have had him recover more positions.
In Australia he outqualified Russell, but the timing of the safety car demoted Hamilton behind his teammate.
In Emilia-Romagna his extremely rare non-points finish on a day Russell took the flag fourth was largely down to the side of the grid on which they started, as explained here at the time.
In Miami he finished a place behind Russell thanks to a safety car timed perfectly for Russell’s longshot one-stop strategy to recover from his Q2 knockout on Saturday.
In Spain he was punted off the track on the first lap by Kevin Magnussen and fought through to fifth from the back, at times as the fastest man on the track.
In Monaco he finished eighth, where he qualified after the red flag caused by Sergio Perez prevented him from setting his final lap.
Yes, this reads like a list of classic racing driver excuses, and the nature of motor racing is that sometimes a grand prix just unfolds against you. It also takes nothing away from Russell’s strong and consistent performances to say that, with the newcomer clearly operating on a very high level commensurate with the hype with which his arrival was greeted.
But to say Hamilton is past it or being shown up by his younger teammate is a serious misreading of the season to date.
IS THE CAR UP TO IT?
So knowing that Hamilton’s up for it, what about the car?
Contrary to some early-season optimism, taming the W13 hasn’t been a matter of curing the porpoising and unleashing the car’s full pace. It’s a problemed machine that asks more questions for every answer provided.
The so-called porpoising was the first problem the team had to come to terms with, with the car’s underfloor aerodynamics stalling under load causing the entire chassis to bounce on its springs.
But this is no longer the principal issue since the team’s major upgrade in Barcelona last month.
“The porpoising — which is the aerodynamic movement of the car — I think that’s solved and we got on top of this around Barcelona,” team principal Toto Wolff said, per Racer.
“It is more that the ride of the car is really what’s causing the comments of the drivers that the cars are simply all too stiff. The kerb-riding is bad, the bump-riding is bad, and I would say that now we’ve dissected the problem you can tackle it better.”
The bouncing Wolff’s referring to is mechanical. Having solved the porpoising, the car can now be run closer to the ground, where it can access its peak performance levels, but it needs to be kept low to for that performance to be consistent and predictable. Soften the ride too much and the floor becomes less effective.
That problem has been at its worst on street tracks, which are bumpy and aggressive compared to their permanent-circuit counterparts.
With Formula 1 having raced exclusively on public roads since the Spanish Grand Prix, it’s difficult to know just how big a stride forward it made with its updates in Barcelona and in the interim.
That’s why this weekend’s British Grand Prix — and the upcoming Austrian and French grands prix — are so important. As permanent circuits they’re far less bumpy than the road tracks F1’s got used to in recent races, which should allow the W13 to recapture some of the field-best form it exhibited during parts of the race in Spain.
“One swallow doesn’t make a summer,” Wolff said. “We saw that swallow also in Barcelona, but somehow it flew somewhere else, so I think we need to be careful.
“Silverstone was good to us in the past and the circuit is more smooth than the last three were, but it’s not Barcelona, so now we should manage our own expectations and just really grind away, look at the data and come up with some sensible solutions, not only for Silverstone but going forward also.”
Will a strong performance mean the team’s troubles are over? Not by a long shot. For one, the Hungarian Grand Prix circuit is more aggressive, and a decent chunk of the tracks on the other side of the break won’t be as kind as the next three.
And what’s more, the team will still be months behind on development compared to the frontrunners, having lost the early months of the year to diagnostics rather than development. On this count it’s been fascinating to see some cars find more downforce via upgrades that allow the cars to be raised a little, eliminating that difficult comfort-performance trade-off that’s been troubling the sport for the last month.
But none of that will be on Lewis Hamilton’s mind this weekend. If Mercedes is in with even the smallest of chances of sneaking a victory, the extension of his incredible win streak will be his principal aim, lest the chance slip through his finger for the first time in his Formula 1 career.
And with an enthusiastic crowd cheering him on, helping him to another level as it always does, you wouldn’t put it past him.
