Lewis Hamilton fans should remember – even giants grow old

In the new book Inside Mercedes F1: Life in the Fast Lane by Matt Whyman, Toto Wolff says that he liked the situation of Lewis Hamilton informing him at the start of the season that he would be leaving Mercedes at the end of it. This has been immediately seized upon by a core of Hamilton fans as a sign of disrespect towards the seven-time world champion.

Especially when Toto followed that up with: “There’s a reason why we only signed a one-plus-one-year contract. We’re in a sport where cognitive sharpness is extremely important and I believe everyone has a shelf life. So I need to look at the next generation. It’s the same in football. Managers like Sir Alex Ferguson or Pep Guardiola, they anticipated it in the performance of their top stars and brought in junior players that drove the team for the next years.”

The release of the book coincided with an unfortunate drop-off in form for Hamilton, as he failed to clear the Q1 hurdle of qualifying in both Austin and São Paulo. In the latter event he started 16th and finished 10th in a car which team-mate George Russell had placed on the front row.

So, is Wolff vindicated? Some fans have voiced their conspiracy theories about how Hamilton is ‘clearly’ being given a car that’s inferior to Russell’s… We can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that Mercedes is not deliberately sabotaging one of its own cars. We can also begin to explain the apparent discrepancy in behaviour between the two cars at Interlagos. If you can’t get the tyres to the temperature threshold at which they work, you will be whole seconds off the pace. If the car’s behaviour is such that you feel it’s liable to throw you off the road at any point (a feeling he’s had since it did throw him off the road at Austin), you might not be able to get the tyre temperatures to that crucial window.

It becomes a vicious spiral. If your team-mate can get that temperature and you can’t, you’ll have nothing like his level of grip and it’s no surprise that you’re 2sec slower (as Hamilton was in Q1 at Interlagos). That doesn’t mean he is 2sec slower as a driver but it signals that Hamilton is not accessing his best stuff at the moment.

Inevitably this fall-off in form has triggered questions about whether, at almost 40 years old, time is catching up with him. Maybe it is, but what we saw at Interlagos and Austin is not a representation of that. Talent doesn’t evaporate like that in a matter of weeks – this is the driver who won masterfully in changing conditions at Silverstone in July, just plain quicker in the wet than Russell and overtaking him on the way to that ninth British Grand Prix win. It’s the driver who had Russell’s number at Spa, decisively quicker throughout the weekend. Spa was just four months ago. Any deterioration of a driver’s speed will be measured in hundredths of a second. Being the wrong side of a tyre temperature threshold will be measured in whole chunks of seconds. Such as when Nico Rosberg was whole chunks slower than Hamilton in the wet of Monaco in 2016. Rosberg was world champion that year.

“Mercedes is not deliberately sabotaging one of its own cars”

But that still leaves the awkward question of whether Hamilton’s struggle with the car and tyres is part of a general fading of his skills. Would the Hamilton of five years ago struggled to have got to the tyre temperature threshold? That’s a question which will only be answered in the fullness of time. Doubt will creep in, as he acknowledged even in victory at Silverstone when he said, “There’s definitely been days between 2021 and here where I didn’t feel like I was good enough or whether I was going to get back to where I am today.”

Give him a car in which he has confidence and the motivation to ‘rise’ against all the doubters – which has always been a powerful driving force for him – and it really wouldn’t be that much of a surprise if he has a great season with Ferrari next year. But maybe it won’t pan out that way, in which case he will be asking himself some very tough questions.

The point from Wolff’s perspective is that regardless of whether Hamilton has a brilliant 2025 at Ferrari, he’s much closer to the end of his F1 career than the beginning. There will come a day when the motivation and desire will just not be there. This is the awkward period in Hamilton’s career which Wolff has sidestepped. As the team boss, he has to judge the succession plan – and it’s far better he installs it a year early than a year late. He’s been spared that decision.

It really isn’t a question of loyalty. That’s not how F1 – or probably any sport – works. Mercedes and Hamilton have given each other fantastic, unprecedented success. But that doesn’t tie them into each other indefinitely. A team and driver work to different timescales. There is an overlapping period where their aims mesh and we’ve seen the spectacular outcome of that in the case of this partnership. Naturally, feelings may get bruised as the process of untangling that relationship plays out, but to attribute that to disrespect is a long way off the mark.

Wolff, in his open and straightforward way of explaining the end of the Mercedes-Hamilton partnership, has inevitably attracted such accusations in an age where any utterance will be ‘propaganda-ised’ by the tribal elements of F1’s fanbase, a low-IQ game in which all nuance and subtlety gets bled out.

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