With Mercedes still trailing Red Bull by a significant margin in their second year, Lewis Hamilton wants a completely new direction with his car
Lewis Hamilton has called for a complete concept change at Mercedes in order to attack Red Bull again next year. The Silver Arrows had experienced a difficult start to the new Formula One era, suddenly unable to win after years of dominance. For the first time in his career, Hamilton did not take a Grand Prix victory in 2022.
But the Briton faces the same threat this year. Although Mercedes is now second, it is currently threatening to fall behind Ferrari again. The Scuderia is only 20 points behind Mercedes (to the World Championship standings) and has scored more points than them in each of the races after the summer break.
But what worries Hamilton most is the gap to Red Bull, which was also enormous in Suzuka and just doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller. “A second gap is massive,” he laments. “The fact that we’re still a second behind Red Bull now in our second year shows that we really need to do a good job in the winter to at least halve the gap.”
He even gets more explicit to Sky: “The next six months have to be the best six months in terms of development we’ve ever had so that we close the gap,” he says.
And to do that, the seven-time world champion is suggesting a complete change of approach, which currently doesn’t seem to be working the way he would like it to: “We are so far away, and for me that is definitely down to the concept,” Hamilton said. “It’s 100 per cent clear that it’s the concept and we need to change that for next year, which hopefully we will.”
At least, he said, he had also asked his team to do some things for next year – and Mercedes would have listened to him and teammate George Russell as well.
For him, the fact that there are the problems with the car was especially evident in Suzuka. “It was just like last year,” he says. “It was bouncing and sliding, and that’s tough considering how much work we put in without being closer to the front.”
But Hamilton believes his team will turn things around. He said Aston Martin has shown this year what a leap can be made in the winter, and McLaren has also pushed towards the top with an update. “By going the Red Bull way, they are now ahead of us on a track like this,” he said in Japan.
“We can’t close our eyes to that,” he stresses.
“We have to look at what they have done and then go in that direction. That’s the direction,” says Hamilton.
“But I believe my team can do it. We’ve always been good at putting downforce on the car. It’s just that with the way our car works at the moment, adding downforce doesn’t work. It just makes it jump more.”
That’s why he hopes a concept change will get Mercedes back to “where it deserves to be”. Because for Hamilton, Mercedes is a world champion team. “I have absolute faith in everyone, but the decisions that are being made now are important for our direction. “