'Lewis, listen, delete that Tweet!' - when Hamilton posted secret McLaren data

As ever after such sessions, the stopwatch told the story. Jenson had been second-fastest in Q1, and fastest of all in Q2, and had taken the pole in Q3, two-tenths quicker than anyone else. Lewis had been 13th-fastest in Q1, seventh-fastest in Q2, and eighth-fastest in Q3, ending up more than eight-tenths slower than his team-mate. Having been nervy and unhappy that morning, and grumpy during qualifying, afterwards Lewis retired to his room in the McLaren Brand Centre, as our paddock unit was then called, alone with his thoughts.

Over the past 12 years he has matured, as we all do with the passing of time, and now, faced with the kind of setback I have described above, he would knuckle down with his engineers and come up with a race strategy designed to turn a negative into a positive, which he would describe along the following lines: “Clearly, I haven’t got the best out of the car so far, but my team-mate has, which is encouraging because it shows that the pace is there, so we’ll work hard this evening to see if we can unlock some of that pace, with a view to trying our best to score points tomorrow, or perhaps even nick a podium.” And, lo and behold, those points, or even that podium, might well thereby eventuate. Indeed, something very like the scenario that I have outlined above transpired for him at Monza just two days ago. But, feverishly talented though he was in 2012 and still is in 2024, he was less mentally robust then than he is now.

But, even so, let’s go back to 2012, and to the afternoon of September 1, because I remember what happened after qualifying at Spa that Saturday as though it were yesterday. I was in my office in the McLaren Brand Centre, writing our post-quali press release, composing quotes for not only Button and Hamilton but also for our team principal Martin Whitmarsh, when I received a mobile phone call from Martin Turner, the then head honcho of Sky Sports’ F1 operation, who has since become a dear friend.

“Have you seen Lewis’s tweet?” he asked me.

“No, why?” I replied.

“You need to check it out right now, buddy. I won’t delay you. Go do it.”

I duly did – immediately – and what I found was not good. Hamilton had screen-grabbed and tweeted what he described as Button’s telemetry traces from qualifying, with the following comment: “Jenson has the new rear wing on, I have the old, we voted to change, didn’t work out, I lost 0.4sec just on the straight.” To be fair to Lewis, our engineers had already privately informed me that the consensus among them was that Hamilton’s higher-downforce set-up was probably not quite as quick over the whole lap as was Button’s lower-downforce aero configuration — which discrepancy was already becoming a sore point on Lewis’s side of the garage – but dirty linen of that nature is not uncommon within F1 teams, and the only appropriate solution is quietly, collaboratively, and above all privately to clean it. What you do not do is wash it in public. Worse still, Hamilton’s tweet had revealed confidential technical details about our cars’ acceleration, braking, and ride height.

I hurried to Lewis’s room and knocked on the door. No answer. I left it a couple of seconds, then opened it. He was sitting on his day-bed, his iPhone in his hands.

“You’ve got to delete that tweet,” I said.

“Which tweet?” he replied.

“You know which one, the one showing JB’s telemetry. Delete it right now please.”

“Why?”

“Lewis, listen, just delete it. Delete it right now. It reveals tech stuff that you know perfectly well shouldn’t be made public, and you’re therefore in breach of the terms of your contract in revealing it. It makes you look rather churlish, too. Also, in a minute I bet our engineers are going to come storming in here, screaming at you to delete it. Wouldn’t you prefer it if I were able to stop them as they arrive, telling them, ‘Don’t worry, he’s deleted it.’”

Lewis sighed, pressed ‘delete’, then turned the screen of his iPhone towards me to show that he had done so.

“Good,” I replied, and walked out of his room, ready to tackle what I already knew was going to be a tricky media storm, for, although the tweet had now been deleted, it was inconceivable that no-one had screen-grabbed it before its deletion.

On the way out I encountered Sam Michael, our sporting director, red in the face and breathing hard. He had sprinted from our garage to our paddock unit, which is quite a long way at Spa, and he was clearly not happy. “Don’t worry Sam, I’ve told him to delete it and he’s done so,” I said.

“Thanks, good, but I’m still going to go in there and give him a proper bollocking,” came the reply, and by all accounts he did exactly that.

As I had expected, by the time I returned to my office and fired up Twitter, Lewis’s deleted tweet had not only been screen-grabbed by all and sundry but had also launched a growing avalanche of follow-up tweets from journalists and fans that eventually went viral, and not in a good way. Whitmarsh came to see me, visibly furious, and I told him the only thing that I could honestly tell him: “It’s a f**k-up, of course it is, but I’ve got him to delete it and now we’ll try our best to downplay its significance.”

“I wish our drivers didn’t f***ing do Twitter,” he barked. “Why do you encourage it? All it does is cause trouble.”

“I’m not angry with Lewis… I was eight-tenths quicker than him in qualifying anyway”

I figured that now was not the moment to perorate a lengthy paean of advocacy for the comms, PR, marketing, sponsor-activation, and fan-engagement benefits of F1 drivers being active on social media, so all I said was, “As I say, we’ll try our best to mitigate the comms/PR damage and embarrassment.”

As you would expect, at the first available opportunity both our drivers were asked by a rapidly gathering posse of journalists to comment on the episode. Lewis said little, as per my advice: sometimes, in such circumstances, less is more; or, to put it another way, if you are in a hole, stop digging. Jenson did what any shrewd F1 driver would do when his greatest rival, which is always his team-mate, is in a vulnerable position: he turned the screw, albeit subtly. “Yes, I’m disappointed,” he began. “We work so hard to improve the car and keep things like that private, but what’s done is done. I’m not angry with Lewis because it wasn’t a personal thing.” Then he added a bit of tactical oneupmanship: “Oh and the bit [in Hamilton’s tweet] about him losing four-tenths on the straights isn’t the bit that’s important to me because, if that’s the case, he should be gaining it back in the corners he’s got more downforce on; and I was eight-tenths quicker than him in qualifying anyway.”

What happened the next day? Button won the race easily. And Hamilton? He was involved in a lap-one five-car shunt and DNF’d on the spot. Oh and this may make you laugh. In the departure lounge at Brussels Airport that evening I sat down among a group of our engineers, took a sip of beer, smiled, and sighed. “Shall we tell him?” one of them asked the others, chuckling.

“Tell me what?” I ventured.

There was a pause, then one of them said: “That wasn’t even Jenson’s telemetry anyway. Lewis made a mistake. We’ve now checked it. He tweeted the telemetry from Oliver’s [Turvey, our then test driver] simulator session last week.”

You couldn’t make it up, could you?

 

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