MPH: Can Hamilton write his F1 comeback story before it's too late?

Talking with Lewis Hamilton during the Abu Dhabi season finale a few weeks ago, about the hopes raised and dashed by the Mercedes of the last two years, it was clearly sometimes difficult for him to retain full positivity. Swinging between affirmative and cynical, one moment he’d talk about how, “I do have faith that we will get there, we have been [at the top] before as a team, and while we have more and more new people, we still have great values and I see great focus within everyone.” A few moments later he’d rue, “If I win a race it’s, ‘Oh he’s a seven-time world champion, with 103 wins, so what?’ If I don’t do well it’s [a big deal]. I can only lose at this point in life.”

But it’s almost as if he’s using that to set up the drama, as if telling himself that people have written him off as a spent force, a once-great driver no longer equipped to take on the energy and intensity of a younger generation. So that when he does eventually get to prove them all wrong, it will be a glorious ‘Still I Rise’ moment. Yesterday’s man coming back to conquer the world, turning back the clock like an F1 Muhammad Ali. It’s easy to imagine something like that as his internal dialogue, something to keep him going through the wilderness, already two winless seasons in succession. All he can do is hope Mercedes discovers the secrets of these regulations while he still has the stuff of greatness within him. It can take a long time for a team to find its way back from the wilderness and it’s difficult to envisage him staying, like Fernando Alonso did, through year after year of toil.

So what are the chances of Mercedes giving him a car with which to take on Red Bull while he remains a force to contend with? The team’s technical director, James Allison, believes he can see a pathway to that. “Our understanding of these cars is quite a lot different now,” he says. “We’ve got a much better handle on how you get the aero platform and spring platform to be happier bedfellows. That is the main challenge.”