“I’m here to race,” Lewis Hamilton said after losing the Brazilian Grand Prix to teammate Nico Rosberg.
“So for sure I’m like, ‘If there are any other strategies, let’s do it, let’s take a risk, let’s do whatever’.
“I think that’s what people want to see.”
The controversy was that Hamilton complained Mercedes’ long-standing agreement to give the leading car strategic preference meant the trailing driver only has the option to pass his teammate in a straight fight, rather than with an advantageous strategy.
It was quietly ignored that Hamilton had been, rightly, the beneficiary of this agreement for much of the season.
Similarly brushed aside was Toto Wolff’s strident defence of his team’s central strategy policy, the Mercedes boss declaring that Hamilton would “lose every single race” if he was given control of his own race plan.
Indeed, this column outlined the reasons Mercedes had declined to give its drivers more than minor wriggle room to create different strategies almost from the beginning of the pair’s fiery championship duel, keeping the potentially destructive relationship cool in the process.
But with sections of the British press very much onside with Hamilton’s argument, the tone was set for the intervening fortnight between Brazil and last weekend’s season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. So much so that Mercedes, having secured the constructors title and first and second in the drivers standings, quietly decided to give whichever driver found himself second on the road more strategic latitude to navigate his own way to victory.
The inevitable result of the 55-lap Grand Prix dealt justice swiftly.
Hamilton was strategically trounced and was shown to be out of his depth.
His insistence that his side of the garage run a counter strategy, despite him closing the gap to Rosberg to just one second when the German made his final pit stop while on the same strategy, proved fatal. When he took his tyre change 10 laps later, he had more than 12 seconds to recover in 14 laps.
Despite a handful of blistering laps, Rosberg’s advantage was unassailable.
“Honestly I don’t really understand it,” Hamilton candidly admitted after the race.
So overwhelmed was he with the decision before him, spawned from his own strategic error, that he reportedly refused to make a call on whether he adopt the fast but delicate supersoft tyre or stick with the reliable soft rubber at his final pit stop.
Left on their own to make the call, the Mercedes engineers noted that graining had set in quickly as the driver approached 10 laps on the supersoft tyre, and thus put the Briton on the slower compound to ensure that he made it to the end of the race in second place.
“I left the team to make the call because I didn’t know what was the right one,” Hamilton confessed. “I don’t know the big picture, and ultimately you have to rely on the engineers to give you the optimum strategy at that point.”
That all said, do not mistake this for a column berating Hamilton – his strategic mistakes in the race reveal nothing more than the simple fact that Hamilton is a driver, and drivers are completely out of their depth when it comes to what is a dynamic number-driven game.
The argument put forward so frequently after Brazil was that the driver has all the information first hand – he can feel whether the tyres are working as expected or degrading too quickly – and can incisively influence strategy.
But this is true only up to a point. Consider Hamilton’s thought process when faced with the prospect of making a final pit stop that ultimately left him insurmountably adrift.
Hamilton told his pit wall that his tyres “still felt good” and asked to complete the race without stopping again, but the numbers, obviously unknown to Hamilton, showed that no other driver could complete more than 30 laps on a set of tyres, never mind the proposed 44-lap stint.
“It’s not even worth working the numbers,” his engineer Peter Bonnington said. “It would be a real gamble and it wouldn’t pay off.”
It remains nonetheless difficult for the sport to let go of the issue, with some refusing to accept Hamilton’s culpability for the strategic failure, largely because of the Formula One’s current obsession with elevating its drivers to the level of demigods, so bereft is it for better ideas to improve the Formula One spectacle.
“Drivers need to be the heroes,” is the catch-cry of too many for my liking. It is an argument not without merit – the drivers are the indispensable human element that give the sport personality. But the tools they need to become the icons we want them to be are not strategy or team management roles, as Mercedes proved with Hamilton in Abu Dhabi.
The drivers just need to be enabled to drive. Continue to be pulled away from this task by these ongoing distractions and the drivers will continue to look downright mortal, but give them the cars to race wheel-to-wheel and they will lionise themselves.
Follow @MichaelLamonato on Twitter – though he has no idea what he’ll be talking about during the off-season.
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