What next for Lewis Hamilton?

Juan Pablo Montoya has always had an interesting take on things Formula 1 and he clearly follows it closely even though he left it mid-season 19 years ago. His views are often contrary, going against the mainstream. But that doesn’t necessarily make them wrong.

One of the mysteries of his own career was how, after four years of often superlative performances for Williams, he struggled at McLaren. So his observations about Lewis Hamilton’s early Ferrari career are noteworthy, drawing parallels with himself.

“He’s beating himself up because he’s not performing,” said Montoya, “but he’s not comfortable. I think everybody’s working hard to make him comfortable… As they develop the car for Lewis all those things are going to compromise the performance of Charles [Leclerc]. So that’s going to be interesting to see how far Ferrari is going to go out of its way to make Lewis comfortable. Charles does a really good job already, but I think he could learn from Lewis a lot. And I think if he is smart about it, he can end up with a Ferrari that can actually win championships.

“Lewis is miserable in that car. It happened to me when I went to McLaren. At the beginning I couldn’t drive it. I was so miserable driving that car and you look like an idiot, you look slow. Everybody thinks you’ve forgotten how to drive. I just couldn’t freaking drive the car. It was so difficult. But Kimi Räikkönen was happy with it.

“At the end of the day Lewis has been with teams that win championships. He knows what the car needs to win championships. So Ferrari does need to listen to Lewis and make the car better for what he wants.”

Hamilton has described the Ferrari as “aggressively oversteery” on corner entry only then to suffer mid-corner understeer. Leclerc says he has adopted a “really extreme” set-up to get around this, but that it’s one which makes the car very demanding to drive. Back in the pre-ground effect age when Mercedes was winning one championship after another, Hamilton was constantly pushing the engineers to move the centre of aerodynamic pressure further back. He wanted to be able to brake super-late and turn in very aggressively and have the rear end support him. Into slow corners he was using the steering more than weight transference to get that initial rotation. He was super-skilled at feeling where the grip was and how much steering he could demand of the front of the car, but he was always pushing against that.

“Ferrari must listen to Lewis and make the car better for what he wants”

Leclerc’s superpower is to get that slow corner rotation by overlapping braking, cornering and throttle use in the entry phase. In terms of qualifying pace, this generation of ground effect cars tend to respond better to Leclerc’s natural technique than Hamilton’s. With this car in particular, Charles’s overlapping technique tames the wild initial oversteer which facilitates a set-up giving less mid-corner understeer.

Interestingly, Montoya drove in much the same way as Hamilton. Räikkönen, by contrast, was masterful at that time in how he could get the initial direction change into slow corners with minimal steering input, using weight transference under braking to load the outer-front up, then releasing it at the perfect moment to boost the lateral grip of the fronts just enough to rotate the rear, but without inducing a time-consuming slide. If necessary, he’d even make a couple of steering inputs, one at high speed, the next bigger one at a lower speed which wouldn’t upset the rear. Räikkönen was balancing between the front and rear axles far more intricately than Montoya. The contrast was visible when seen trackside at somewhere like Monza’s Lesmo 1, where the skinny wings made the cars particularly skittery. With this car and these tyres, his more sophisticated style was simply more effective than Montoya’s extrovert technique of a big single steering input and resultant oversteer. While not exactly the same, Leclerc’s technique is more like Räikkönen’s than is Hamilton’s.

With the switch to harder, stiffer control tyres from 2007, Räikkönen’s style was never as effective as in his McLaren/Michelin years. He simply couldn’t – or wouldn’t – adapt to using more steering which to him seemed a less-refined way of driving. By contrast his team-mate Felipe Massa, driving with more of a Montoya style, was much happier.

By this time, of course, Montoya was gone, having reached an agreement with McLaren boss Ron Dennis that it just wasn’t working. He departed Formula 1 mid-season in 2006. With Fernando Alonso already recruited by Dennis a year in advance to replace the departing Räikkönen, the irony is that ultimately Montoya’s replacement at McLaren was Lewis Hamilton.

Montoya couldn’t tolerate – as he puts it – “looking like an idiot” compared to his team-mate. So he simply walked. The current Ferrari is not blitzing the field but would it be a better car if the team followed Hamilton’s lead? Even if that meant Leclerc’s advantage over Hamilton dissolved? Or will Ferrari just be guided by following the lead of the faster driver? Either way, Hamilton’s hopes of Ferrari providing him with a career Indian summer look a long way distant right now. Will he stick with it, as Montoya is advocating? Or will he, at some point, do what Montoya actually did?

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