After clinching his sixth world title, Lewis Hamilton talked in abstract rather than concrete terms about the scale of his achievement.
“I am working on a masterpiece,” he said, “and I haven’t quite finished it yet. I am trying to understand. It takes a long time to master a craft and while I feel like I am mastering it, there is still more to master, still more to add to it, still more pieces of the puzzle to add.
“There will be more ups and downs along the way, but I feel I have the best tools now to be able to deal with those.”
Hamilton’s achievement moves him ever closer to becoming the most successful Formula 1 driver of all time, as Michael Schumacher’s record of seven world titles is within reach next year.
It comes towards the end of arguably Hamilton’s most dominant year, but that in itself raises questions about how to assess where it stands in his career.
Hamilton’s 2019 has lacked the stand-out ‘wow’ moments so often associated with him, such as happened last year with his out-of-nowhere pole lap at Singapore, or his stunning race victory in Italy.
On the other hand, he has been more seamless, more remorseless, more consistent than ever before.
And inside his Mercedes team, they have no doubts about just how high a level Hamilton has reached this season.
Mercedes chief engineer Andrew Shovlin says: “It’s perhaps not been his most spectacular season but in many ways it’s been his most impressive season. Making mistakes, I can’t really think of any things he’s done wrong.”
Technical director James Allison adds: “He’s just been a points machine, getting them wherever. He’s won a lot of races.
“[He’s been] every bit as strong as last year, just not quite as flashy. It doesn’t have that single stand-out appeal of the Singapore lap sort of plucked from nowhere, or the inch-perfect positioning of his car to force Vettel into a mistake in Monza. But go look at his Mexico race if you want to
see a professional driver at the peak of his power.”
In the past two weeks, Hamilton has produced two drives emblematic of a year in which the 34-year-old has arguably been more complete than ever before.
There was the victory in Mexico Allison referred to, founded on the controlled way he managed his pace after the team made an early pit stop to jump him into the lead.
And then in Austin on Sunday, he clinched the title with a race that mixed a clinically aggressive first lap, including a stunning overtaking move around the outside of Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel, and then a risky one-stop strategy in an attempt to win from a disadvantageous position that
came so close to coming off, as he again managed his tyres with expertise.
But those are just two of a series of top-drawer drives. What has impressed Allison most about Hamilton in 2019 has been “just the metronomic consistency of his race performances all year. He and the car have not clicked in qualifying in quite the way he did with last year’s car, but boy oh
boy does he make it stick on a Sunday.
“From the beginning of the season, he has been really strong. Despite the fact that Valtteri [Bottas, his team-mate] has had a more consistent and more competitive year, Lewis has built up a very big points advantage by being race after race after race the strongest out there.”
The standard view of Hamilton is of a mercurial driver who hits incredible peaks, but also has weekends where, as his former team-mate Jenson Button has said, “you wonder where he’d gone”. There have been none of those this year, just a relentless drive towards success.
This change, it transpires, has come of an active choice Hamilton made before the season.
“He said of himself to us that he was determined for 2019 to start the year with the strength he’d finished 2018,” Allison says. “That was his promise to himself, that he wasn’t going to start weakly and then amaze everyone when he put the pedal down later in the year, because we have all
seen that Lewis who switches on like a rocket in the second half of the season, that’s happened more than once.
“But he stated at the end of last year that he was going to be operating at his best from the start of this year and that’s what he’s done.”
