Lewis Hamilton doesn’t ordinarily get much satisfaction from finishing second, but his runner-up placing at the United States Grand Prix was different.
He’d taken the lead for a considerable portion of the race after pressuring Max Verstappen with an astute undercut at the second pit stop. The strategy had worked because Hamilton had been genuinely on the pace on the hard tyre in the middle of the race, for a moment allowing Mercedes to forget about its 2022 tribulations and take on the grand prix as though its winning ways of the last eight years had never been interrupted.
Reality came crashing down in the final stint of course. Verstappen had lost two places, but on the medium tyre his pace was restored, and Hamilton was helpless to resist the Red Bull Racing machine’s straight-line speed.
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But defeat wasn’t enough to deflate Hamilton on what had been his best weekend of the year. Indeed it seemed to only spur him on.
“What I’ll take from today is that we had good pace,” Hamilton told Sky Sports. “I am still here, and I know that when they build the car, I will take it to the top. We’ve just to keep on working.”
This was Hamilton how we used to know him: getting the maximum from the car, fully executing strategy and looking to the future.
It felt light-years away from early-season chatter about the Briton being washed up — when, after a couple of off-pace qualifying sessions, some questioned whether he had it in him to continue racing in cars that didn’t roll out of the garage with winning potential.
Some uncharitable among the crowd even used teammate George Russell’s strong start to the year as evidence that the seven-time champion’s success was all down to his machinery and that Russell had finally unmasked him.
Things sure change quickly in Formula 1.
THE NUMBERS THAT LED TO HAMILTON’S AUSTIN PODIUM
It’s true to say that Hamilton’s early races lacked the energy of his previous seasons, even if he has a reputation for low-key starts to seasons. Much of his 20-point deficit to teammate Russell stems from those early rounds.
But the Hamilton of the season half of the year bears little resemblance to the driver who forlornly asked whether he’d scored points for finishing 10th at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
The numbers bear out his improvement.
In the first eight races of the season Hamilton was beaten by Russell on all counts. He was outqualified 3-5 and outraced 1-7. The margins were small but decisive too, with an average qualifying gap of 0.045 seconds, an average grid difference of 0.88 places and an average finishing position difference of 2.63 places, all in Russell’s favour.
Over the next five races Hamilton pulled back some of the deficit to go into the mid-season break close to level, albeit still down in almost every major metric.
Hamilton versus Russell, rounds 1 to 13
Qualifying record: 6-7
Qualifying pace: 0.002 seconds (Hamilton’s favour)
Average grid spot: 7.3-6.6
Race record: 5-7
Average finishing position: 5.1-3.8
There was no doubt Russell made the most of his chances in the first half of the season, firmly establishing himself in the Mercedes set-up and taking a comfortable lead on the championship table, even if Hamilton’s struggles were overstated by the time the summer break arrived.
But the second half of the season has been a dramatically different story.
Hamilton versus Russell, after round 13
Qualifying record: 6-0 (12-7 overall)
Qualifying pace: 0.380 seconds (Hamilton’s favour)
Average grid spot: 5.0-7.5
Race record: 3-2 (8-9 overall)
Average finishing position: 5-6
It’s an incontrovertibly one-sided tale for a driver who some still insist is washed up.
And such a resounding turnaround could have been more emphatic still had a strategy gamble not backfired on Hamilton in the Netherlands, where he ended up fourth to Russell’s second, and had he not had to start at the back of the grid in Italy, from which he recovered fifth behind Russell in third.
Those results alone cost him 11 points, which would’ve reduced his current 20-point deficit to Russell down to just nine points. It had been a considerable 37 points after those difficult first eight rounds.
Alonso goes airborne in chaotic crash | 01:12
WHAT’S BEHIND THE TURNAROUND?
It’s important to note here that Hamilton’s start to the season wasn’t quite as dire as the raw figures suggest. Buried in the data was that at some of his worst races — Saudi Arabia and Emilia-Romagna, for example — he was experimenting with set-up to try to diagnose the car’s confounding problems.
The numbers also don’t illustrate that he was outperforming Russell in Australia and Miami before strategy reversed their finishing positions, while a blameless first-lap crash potentially cost him a victory in Spain, where Russell stood on the podium.
But while the pace was clearly still evident in the first half of the year, there’s been an intensity since the mid-season break that had certainly been lacking earlier.
The source of it seems clear: his team.
Hamilton and Mercedes are a tightly bonded unit, and Hamilton’s downcast early races were reflective of the lack of direction inside the team as it flailed around for answers to its car’s lack of performance.
There was also undoubtedly some element of shellshock to the experience of
waking up in the midfield after eight uninterrupted years of collecting victories. It was a process Hamilton had to feel his way back into, whereas Russell, who’d come from the backmarker Williams team, was revelling in what for him was a massive step forward.
But two things have happened since around the middle of the year. The first is that Mercedes has developed a much deeper understanding of this year’s car to the point it no longer needs to experiment and can reliably get the most from it at most races. That’s allowed Hamilton to build some momentum.
More importantly, though, is that in the last month it’s become confident that it understands what it did wrong this year and thinks it can fix the problems for 2023.
Pitt snubs Brundle in awkward exchange | 00:31
The language coming out of the team about its prospects has been markedly more positive in recent rounds, and it’s coincided with Hamilton growing his advantage over Russell. In the last five races he’s been qualifying almost three places ahead with an advantage of more than 0.4 seconds.
Hamilton feeds off the team’s energy as much as the team relies on him to fire it up, and the excitement and optimism inside Mercedes about its potential opportunities in 2023 are already paying dividends with improved form from its championship driver in the final rounds of this season.
“A big thank you to my team,” Hamilton said after the US Grand Prix. “Everyone back at the factory is working so hard and it has been such a trying year for everyone.
“With everything that is going on and everything that has happened in the last race last year, what happened this year in terms of our car performance and what’s happened with all the news and everything … to get a win would have been a huge triumph for us all and hugely rewarding.”
“I am really proud of everybody. Sorry I couldn’t get the win; I gave it absolutely everything.”
WHAT’S HAPPENED TO GEORGE RUSSELL?
The reverse side of the coin is that Russell has come off the boil in the last moth or so in particular, just as his teammate hits his stride. Some technical problems, in particular in Singapore and Japan, also cost him some momentum, with underwhelming qualifying results stemming from a recurring brake problem that left him down on confidence in the car.
Perhaps it was his eagerness to capitalise on a relatively clean qualifying performance in the United States and turn that dud run of form around that led him into his clumsy first-lap crash with Carlos Sainz.
Hamilton had been on his outside at the first turn, and Russell saw a chance to snatch third place from his teammate by taking a tight line, but instead he locked up and careered into Sainz, putting the Ferrari driver out of the race and ruining his own.
“I think you’ve never seen this kind of incident in the top three positions because normally in the top four these drivers don’t do these kinds of mistakes,” Sainz said scathingly afterwards. “It’s very simple.”
It was a pithy punctuation mark to an underwhelming race for Russell, who said on Sunday evening that he hoped the team would discover his car was damaged to explain why he finished a whopping 39 seconds behind his teammate, more than his five-second penalty for the crash can account for.
Sainz spins out on lap one! | 00:32
“We had such a clean run of form [at the start of the year] and there were no issues, no little problems whatsoever with the car,” Russell told Sky Sports. “Definitely I don’t quite feel at the level that I probably was earlier in the season.”
It’s tempting to say the honeymoon is over for Russell, but it would be an exaggeration to say he’s been listless despite the massive swing against him.
His particularly poor race in Singapore counts heavily against him — his qualifying pace deficit would be halved to around 0.2 seconds without it — and he’s actually managed to grow his points advantage over Hamilton to 20 points, up from 12 points at the mid-season break.
And even if that were to evaporate at the next round, he’s still exceeding expectations for his first year at Mercedes. Having arrived in an almost no-lose situation — beating, matching and even losing to seven-time champion Hamilton in his fourth year in Formula 1 could all have been spun as a success — ending the season potentially ahead on points, with the team’s only pole position and with half its podium haul is a mighty return.
But what is clear is that he still hasn’t had to deal with Hamilton at his debilitating, suffocating best.
The true challenge for Russell will be to prepare to take on peak Hamilton. Because as the seven-time champion said this weekend, he’s not gone anywhere this year, and when Mercedes delivers a race-winning car again, he fully intends to be the one to take it back to title glory.
