Lewis Hamilton terms the F1 2024 start as worst than 2009, while adding that experience of seeing the big picture helps him to remain calm.
It hasn’t been the start of the year that Hamilton would have hoped for in his final season with Mercedes. In the three rounds, he has scored eight points to be 10th in the standings. In fact, he terms this as his worst start of his career, even worse than 2009.
“I mean, this is the worst season start of the season I’ve ever had,” said Hamilton to media. “Oh yeah, for sure. And it’s worse than 2009, I think. It’s tough on the spirit, for everyone in the team when, so much work has gone on throughout the winter for everybody. And we come in excited, motivated and driven.
“And then you’re… [we come in] with the mindset that you’re going to be fighting for wins – and obviously that’s not the case. And then you’re like, ‘Okay, maybe second, third?’ No, it’s not the case. And it cascades a bit further down. And you just go through the motions. It’s challenging, but I continue to be inspired by the people I work with.
“They continue to, to put in the effort and show up and that’s the most important thing,” summed up Hamilton reflecting on the hardships, but the Brit has managed to maintain his calm – all thanks to the experience and also somewhere the fact that he is counting down races when his move to Ferrari will happen.
“I think that’s exactly it [the long haul picture],” said Hamilton. “I think it’s easy to get caught up in the moment and be focused on this one thing. But the bigger picture is definitely… the focus on the moment.
“And also just realizing that you can’t control everything. You know, like you get frustrated because you don’t have control. You can just let go and just be in the moment and that’s really what… it’s not great. I’m not happy. But I’m gonna have a great day tomorrow,” summed up Hamilton.
The F1 Australian GP was a retirement for Hamilton after a power unit failure. The analysis is yet to be completed with the power unit still in transit to Brixworth. At that moment, there was a rapid loss of oil pressure which kicked the system to shut off.
In the grand prix, Mercedes used a different strategy where they used the soft tyre for the first stint but despite an alternate strategy, they didn’t think the Brit would have finished much higher in the order seeing how others were placed.
“We do not, the Power Units will return to the safe hands of the guys at Brixworth, who
will be able to figure out what let go,” said James Allison. “All we know is the symptoms at the time, which was a rapid loss of oil pressure followed by a shutdown of the engine to protect it because when you know you’ve got catastrophic loss like that, the best thing you can do for the future is kill it there and then.
“And then you have not just got like a load of molten metal. You have normally got a fairly clear evidence chain of what caused it. And then that lets you work better for the future. So, we do not know yet, Brixworth and HPP will do in short order. And no doubt as soon as we know then they will jump to with their characteristic energy to make sure that any risk that happens on any other engine is mitigated as best we can.
“Regarding the race, we know from his first stint that he was going along okay on those Soft tyres, it was never going to be a long stint, but the car hung onto them adequately well compared with the estimates we had made beforehand.
“He was not really on the Medium tyre for long enough before retiring for us to have much intelligent things to say about that. But if you just take George’s pace as a guide and say Lewis could have matched that then my guess is he would have been on for something like four points.”
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