Lewis Hamilton – 7 Times World Champion!!!

A lot has changed over the past year or so globally, but through all the significant challenges that covid has brought to us all, one or two things haven’t changed. Lewis Hamilton is World F1 Champion, in a different looking championship taking in a few new circuits, and one or two we haven’t seen for a while.

However the Turkish Grand Prix illustrated that Lewis is clearly the lead driver of this generation, lapping his team mate and making other very talented drivers look very ordinary in very challenging wet racing conditions.

In the build up to this weekends racing a video was shared on social media of the highlights of the 2006 GP2 sprint race in which Lewis managed to race through a field of identical cars from 18th to 2nd place, and there have been a number of notable races over the course of his career which make him stand out as being an exceptional talent. For me the British Grand Prix in 2008 stands out, but the sheer consistency across his time in the sport is as significant.

Of course it will be argued that he has benefited from the best machinery (mostly) but any F1 team would look to chose the best drivers at the time (see Senna, Schumacher and many more) and as with many teams Mercedes does appear to have supported Lewis more than his team mates at times, but again many teams have focused on their strongest contender for the title……Senna , Schumacher and many more!

7 World Titles, a record number of race wins…….statistically Lewis is raising the bar for future generations to try and beat, but points for the top ten (instead of the top 5 or 6 as was the case in the past) and mechanical reliability significantly better than even drivers could enjoy 20 years ago plays a part in these records being broken.

Back in the early 1990’s there are a number of examples of drivers who scored points in part by their cars surviving a race, where other cars fell by the wayside. As Murray Walker is often quoted as saying in commentary “to finish first, first you have to finish” and looking at the 1990 season where Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost were team mates at Ferrari both drivers suffered a number of mechanical race ending failures which massively impacted their season.

Mansell in particular announced to the world at the 1990 British Grand Prix that he was going to retire after yet another race ended by the troublesome semi-automatic Ferrari gearbox. When the car allowed Nigel was very quick in the first half of the 1990 season, not necessarily in qualifying, but there were a number of races where he battled back to the sharp end of the race only for a number of gearbox failures.

Several weeks after announcing his retirement he was re-signed by Williams, and only two seasons later he was World Champion……maybe this is something that one or two drivers who are currently not signed for 2021 should consider, that no one really knows what is around the corner (no pun intended!). Mansell moving to Williams also created an opportunity for Jean Alesi who had made a stellar impact in 1 ½ seasons at Tyrrell, but Jean had no idea of knowing that the Ferrari team would enter free fall over the course of his first season, and take another decade to get anywhere near challenging for the title.

Lewis may well be on the grid for next season, but how much longer will he want to be racing? Whatever he decides the Mercedes team will want at some point to replace Lewis with the best available driver, who would they pick from the current crop of drivers either on the grid or making their way through the motor sport ladder ? As is also the case the chance of a driver moving always creates opportunities for other drivers to take their seat.

Whilst I do hark back to a time in Formula One that I really enjoyed, even in the current format of the sport drivers putting in race performances as we saw in Turkey by Lewis, and the revolving doors of drivers leaving and joining teams still has me interested (even if I did fall asleep for a good ten laps of the race yesterday!)

Sorry Lewis 😊