After appearing to dominate Formula One for two consecutive seasons, defending champion Lewis Hamilton finds himself down on his luck and behind his main rival in the championship, and his fans have been anything but shy in voicing their displeasure.
Teams like Mercedes have the manpower and financial resources to support their drivers in extraordinary ways, like flying a spare engine to Russia overnight to help Hamilton avoid pre-race penalties. In the aftermath of Nico Rosberg’s fourth victory in succession, they wasted no time getting the word out, with their PR department fleshing out the story for the major news outlets hoping that it would settle the rumours of foul play on their part.
Sadly, it wasn’t enough for Mercedes to avoid the full force of Hamilton’s disgruntled supporters online. Their fury was so incessant that Mercedes felt that they had no choice but to respond.
In an open letter to fans, the team wrote:
“To those who stand with us, we thank you. And to the rest – the haters, the naysayers, the conspirators… if we can convince even half of you of what we really stand for, we’ll consider that a battle well won.”
If you’re thinking to yourself that the claims are nothing more than hyperbole, let’s consider some comments on just one of their Instagram posts:
“Mercedes made it too obvious that they’ve turned their attention to Nico, we all know Nico is not capable otherwise.”
Haters – check.
“You don’t actually expect us to believe you any more… do you? You couldn’t be that silly.” Naysayers – check.
Conspirators? “Mercedes swapped the mechanics around and now Lewis has got “problems”.” To the question, does this qualify as a conspirator – I vote in the affirmative.
These days anyone can say anything they please online, and most do. And even more message me directly on Twitter.
In isolation a single voice doesn’t usually carry very far. I’m mindful of the fact that Formula One has a global reach, but the accusations that Hamilton was being sabotaged by the team have snowballed so quickly that more than the echo-chamber of an internet forums is behind them.
Curiously, when Lewis was interviewed by Sky Sports Formula One after the Russian Grand Prix, he was confronted with the following question:
“We get a lot of tweets from your fans who say, ‘The team have decided it’s Nico’s turn to win a title this year’ and all the conspiracy theories come out. What do you say to your fans, you’re working hard the team’s working hard, everyone’s trying to get you back to a position where you’re fighting in straight fight on track?”
In a similar vein, during his race recap Sky Formula One boffin Ted Kravitz crossed paths with Mercedes braintrust Niki Lauda and asked this:
“You’re a straight-talking guy, just assure our viewers that this isn’t the team saying, ‘Ahh well, Lewis has had his two championships. Let’s give Nico one this year.’”
And this, from the BBC’s Jennie Gow:
“Can you believe the luck you’re having this year? Certainly plenty of people around who say it’s not just bad luck, there’s more going on than that.”
If one journalist had asked such a question it would seem out of place. For this to be a repeated line of questioning from multiple media outlets is something else entirely.
It’s worth remembering that the answer all these questions was exactly the same; a forceful “no”, punctuated with some particularly pointed phrases in Lauda’s case.
Still, there’s some underhanded tactics at play here. In the absence of any evidence of wrong-doing, the British media is propagating the Hamilton conspiracy through allusion. Simply bringing up the topic in their interviews is enough to plant the seed of doubt in the minds of the faithful.
Best still, they are able to hold their hands up in protest should their motives be called into question and claim they are simply representing the voluminous (albeit unjustified) opinions of their viewers.
In many ways, Hamilton himself has fed the media by spinning his own narratives throughout his career.
Despite assurances from the team that they were treating both drivers equally when Hamilton made his debut in 2007, when Alonso beat Hamilton at the Monaco Grand Prix Lewis more than hinted at favouritism by venting to the media saying, “Well, I have the number two on my car, so I guess that makes me a number two driver.”
Of-course it was only two years ago when Rosberg, Hamilton and Mercedes held a meeting behind closed doors to diffuse the tension of the 2014 Belgium Grand Prix. Afterwards Lewis only worsened the tensions by feeding the press lines like, “he basically said he did it on purpose,” which not only misrepresented the reality of the conversation, but left the team with no choice but to force him to apologise for his comments.
You can argue that the media is simply exercising due diligence, and investigating the claims of a vocal cross-section of their primary demographic. Surely by asking the question they are putting to rest any doubs that the public might hold?
Unfortunately that’s not even close to how conspiracy theorists tick. Their ire is raised the moment the question is asked, and before it’s answered they’ve already made up their minds.
Hamilton’s poor results so far this year have come at his own hand (with lacklustre starts in Australia and Bahrain) or understandable engine failures. Indeed the fact that Hamilton’s car suffered the same issue in both China and Russia strengthens the case that these are genuine technical gremlins that the team is struggling to resolve.
Unreliability has visited both drivers at various points throughout the last three years, and yet when it goes against Rosberg’s car there was no similar suggestion of foul play.
Reporting anything but the facts in the face of a tsunami on online abuse isn’t anything close to due diligence. Time to stop feeding the trolls, it never pays off.
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