“It’s not the first time we’ve been here,” says Lewis Hamilton about the ongoing form crisis at Mercedes, for which he is not only looking for the causes in the car
For Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes, the third Formula 1 weekend also ended in disappointment. The Briton suffered an engine failure on lap 16 while running in eleventh place. But the result would probably not have been famous otherwise either
The problems with the W15 continue – even worse: team boss Toto Wolff admits that they don’t know where the fault lies. The team is working hard behind the scenes to find a solution, while the drivers are trying to make the best of what is available to them on the track.
Hamilton emphasized shortly before the debacle in Melbourne: “I’m trying to do everything I can to improve the performance of the car. I think we need to improve the performance of the car, but I also need to be very self-critical about the last few races. Because there are areas that I need to improve.”
“Synergy with the car is something you’re always looking for,” says the Briton. However, he has not yet found it with the W15. And his team-mate George Russell is also still searching. Although Hamilton attests to him doing “a great job”, he adds: “He also has problems with this synergy.”
But even if Mercedes cannot fight for victories at the moment, there is something that Hamilton says he loves: the teamwork. “The work that goes on in the background, the conversations we have and the unity we have.”
“For me, it’s a real pleasure to work with these people who are focused and all rowing in the same direction. It’s still a bit upstream at the moment, but we’ll get there. It’s not the first time we’ve been here,” says the Briton.
Hamilton: Poor start to the season is reminiscent of 2009
When asked whether he had ever experienced a problem in his long Formula 1 career that was so difficult to get to grips with, the seven-time world champion said: “2009 was probably the last time. We knew that the car wasn’t particularly good at the beginning. But we knew what the problem was. “They had simply designed the car with too little downforce and set the targets too low.”
In the meantime, the cars have become much more complex, which sometimes makes troubleshooting more difficult. “But in this era, it was really interesting to see the tools the team had to develop to understand the flow structures under the floor. It’s so much more technical and complex,” says Hamilton.
“When you see these images that they can now create, you can see where the flow structures are going. And then you can make the correlation between the wind tunnel and CFD with the actual track. That’s when you understand why it’s so difficult to get everything to work.”
Hamilton mentions stiffness and vehicle height as further critical points. Finding the perfect balance here to avoid porpoising or bouncing is a “constant battle”. “We are constantly working on this and have a long way to go.”
“Red Bull got the problem under control at the first test in Bahrain,” the Mercedes driver recalls of the first year with the new ground effect cars.
Mercedes has not been on a green branch since 2022
“They just managed to fix it, and once the problem was fixed, you could just carry on working from there. For us, we had to take about 90 points of downforce off the car for the first race in 2022. So we had downforce, but we couldn’t use it because the car was bouncing so much.”
“We lost a lot of power and every time we added more, the car bounced again. Every time we made one or two steps forward, it went back five steps. It was very frustrating for the engineers. But I think what inspired us is that they didn’t give up. They do their best every day. That’s all you can ask for.”
That also applies to Hamilton himself, so to speak. But it remains to be seen whether that will be enough to get him on the podium in his last Formula 1 season with Mercedes or even celebrate a victory. Hamilton’s last victory was a long time ago: he hasn’t won a race since Saudi Arabia 2021
Next year, the Briton will face a new challenge at Ferrari. Then he will be 40 years old. While some believe that the switch could give him new momentum for the final phase of his career, others have their doubts.
In the view of Alan Jones, Formula 1 World Champion in 1980, Hamilton’s best days are behind him. “I really don’t think it was the right move for Ferrari, to be honest,” he told the Herald Sun. “I don’t know if his move to Ferrari is really what Ferrari needs.”
“But at the end of the day, Lewis really needs to start putting his foot down. Because George Russell is starting to take a bit of a back seat to him now, and the more that happens, the more it will rub off on him,” Jones says.
