Lewis Hamilton can claim many records in Formula 1, but none are as remarkable as the one he may lose this year. The Englishman is the only driver in Formula 1 history to win at least one GP in every season he has competed.
Lewis Hamilton can claim many records in Formula 1, but none are as remarkable as the one he may lose this year. The Englishman is the only driver in Formula 1 history to win at least one GP in every season he has competed.
His career has spanned almost the entire range of annual successes, from his impressive 11 wins from 17 races in 2020 to his solitary victory in 2013, his first for Mercedes.
Combined with the fact that he has only been beaten twice by a teammate over the course of a season in 15 years, it's the kind of record that should silence some of his most vocal critics who still claim that Hamilton's successive records are due solely to his car. although some habits die hard, or, for some, not at all.
But that enviable record is facing its sternest test this season, and this weekend's British GP may be his best chance to keep that impressive streak alive.
And it will come down to two questions: is he ready to win, and is the car ready to win?
Is Hamilton ready now?
That's the question everyone wants to know, and few people think they have the answer.
The championship numbers paint an unflattering div Hamilton is sixth in the standings and 98 points off Max Verstappen's lead. Worse, he is 34 points behind new teammate George Russell, who has so far scored one more podium than the seven-time champion.
Some F1 personalities, such as Jackie Stewart and former boss Bernie Ecclestone, think Hamilton is on a downhill slide and say he should have retired at the end of last year.
Strong words, even if coming from people who don't like him.
But does the claim that Hamilton is on an inexorable decline towards retirement stack up?
Not exactly, because the points scored are far from the full story.
Start with the argument that Russell has been the fastest driver so far this year, the numbers simply don't back up the argument.
On average, Hamilton's best qualifying times - calculated in the corresponding segment when one driver or another didn't make it to Q3 - were 0.02% faster than Russell's. Marginal, yes, but definitely faster.
On average, Russell is starting 0.4 places ahead of Hamilton, but if we exclude the 11-place disparity in Saudi Arabia, that swings to 0.9 places in Hamilton's favor.
It is at worst very similar between the two.
Qualifying averages, nine races
Difference on a hypothetical 90-second lap.
Russell: 1:30.000 (100 percent)
Hamilton: 1:29.982 (98.98 percent)
Grid averages in nine races
Russell: 7.33 (excluding Canada: 7.25
)Hamilton: 7.77 (excluding Saudi Arabia: 6.75)
So what is the basis for the considerable difference in points between the two?
Let's start with the car.
Mercedes' struggles this season are well understood. In the beginning, the car was aerodynamically unstable - the 'aerodynamic ticking' we saw up until the Spanish GP was the main symptom - and now it struggles with a difficult mechanical ticking when it is lowered to its ideal height.
It's clear that Hamilton and Russell have been driving the same bad car all year, but what the results alone don't tell you is that Hamilton has been testing almost everything from on-track troubleshooting to the team to find the sweet spot in the car. And this was confirmed by Mercedes on video and by himself. Russell also acknowledged:
"Obviously, I'm in a privileged position being Lewis' teammate and learning a lot from him - how he works, how he handles car problems with the engineers, how he manages to motivate the whole team," Russell said after the Canadian GP. "It's very inspiring to see all that."
"Also on the technical side, he's very impressive, which a lot of people probably don't recognize or appreciate."
In fact, his record of seven losses within the team - which ended with his podium finish in Canada - began in Saudi Arabia in one of the most high-profile cases of experimentation this season. He and the team gambled on a setup that ended up totally backfiring, taking him out of qualifying in P16 and condemning him to a long way back to P10 without being able to take advantage of a safety-car that would have made him gain at least 4 positions.
"Maybe in the second half of the season George can do the experiments!" Hamilton joked at the end of the Canadian GP. "Moving forward, I think we will be a little more cautious about doing too many experiments, because it really messes you up a lot on the weekend."
In Australia, he overtook Russell, but the timing of the safety-car relegated Hamilton behind his teammate.
In Emilia-Romagna, his extremely rare non-points race on a day when Russell was P4, was largely to the side of the grid they started on and to a DRS train, as explained at the time.
In Miami, he finished one position behind Russell, thanks to a safety-car timed perfectly for Russell's one-stop strategy to recover from his Q2 knockout on Saturday.
In Spain he was driven off the track on the first lap by Kevin Magnussen, but managed to recover to P5 by being the fastest on track for virtually the entire race.
In Monaco he finished eighth, where he qualified after the red flag caused by Sergio Perez prevented him from setting his last lap.
Yes, that sounds like a list of classic racing driver excuses, and the nature of motorsports is that sometimes a race unravels against you. It also takes nothing away from Russell's strong and consistent performances, with the newcomer clearly operating at a very high level, commensurate with the expectation with which his arrival was met.
But to say that Hamilton has passed this or being introduced by his younger teammate is a serious misreading of the season so far.
Is the car ready now?
So, knowing that Hamilton is ready to win again, what about the car?
Contrary to some early season optimism, taming the W13 was not a matter of just curing the aerodynamic quibble and unleashing the car's full pace. It is a problematic machine that asks more questions for every answer provided.
So-called porpoising was the first problem the team had to deal with, with the aerodynamics under the floor of the car preventing the passage of air under load, causing the entire chassis to rise until the air passed and the car came down repeating the problem over and over again.
But this is no longer the main problem since the team's major upgrade in Barcelona last month.
"The porpoising - which is the aerodynamic movement of the car - I think is solved and we solved that in Barcelona," said team boss Toto Wolff."
"It's more that the height of the car is really what is causing the comments from the drivers that the cars are simply too stiff. Passing over the zebras is very bad, passing on undulations of the track is very bad, but I would say that now that we have dissected the problem you can solve it better."
Wolff's reference now is i mechanical ticking (boucing). Having solved the aerodynamic quique, 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 enough for performance to be consistent and predictable. Soften the car too much and the floor becomes less effective.
This problem has been worse on street tracks, which are bumpy and aggressive compared to their permanent circuit counterparts.
With Formula 1 running exclusively on streets, plus the "hybrid" track in Canada since the Spanish GP, it is hard to know how much progress has been made with its upgrades in Barcelona in the meantime.
That's why this weekend's British GP - and the upcoming ones in Austria and France - are so important. As permanent circuits, they are much less bumpy than the tracks F1 has become accustomed to in recent races, which should allow the W13 to regain its best form that it displayed during the Spanish GP.
"One swallow alone doesn't make a summer," Wolff said. "We saw that swallow in Barcelona, but somehow it flew away somewhere else, so we need to be careful."
"Silverstone has always been good for us in the past and the circuit with less undulations than the last three, but it's not Barcelona, so let's see what we get there and then onwards. We want to tidy up the car to get the maximum performance out of it on all tracks."
A strong performance at Silverstone, Austria and Paul Ricard does not mean that the team's problems are necessarily over. The Hungarian GP circuit - fourth in the next sequence - is more aggressive, and a good portion of the tracks after the F1 break will not be as gentle as the next three.
In addition, the team will still be months behind in development compared to Bulls and Reds, having lost the first few months of the year to diagnosis rather than development. In that sense, it's been fascinating to see some cars find more downforce through upgrades that allow the cars to be a bit high, eliminating the difficult trade-off between reliability and performance that has been bothering the pylons for the past month.
But none of that will be on Lewis Hamilton's mind this weekend. If Mercedes is in with even the slightest chance of a stealth victory, extending his incredible winning streak will be his main goal, lest the chance slip away from him for the first time in his Formula One career.
And with an enthusiastic crowd cheering him on, helping him to reach a supreme level of touch, as he has always done, he would not let that chance slip away.