After Lewis Hamilton announced his shock move to Ferrari for 2025 at the start of the current season, conspiracy is swirling around his treatment at Mercedes.
What the joint partnership has achieved can only be said in the same way as Michael Schumacher’s time at Ferrari at the turn of the century, but there have been signs of disharmony during the current season.
As his qualifying form dipped in more races of the year – particularly after a strong pace in practice – there were suggestions from Hamilton’s fans on social media that the affections were now on team-mate George Russell.
A strategic decision that resulted in Russell’s victory in Belgium, which was disqualified for an illegal car, left Hamilton in doubt.
Earlier this year, there was even an email circulating claiming to have been sent by a Mercedes employee, suggesting sabotage, threats to key team members and forcing a police investigation.
While there is no evidence of sabotage, nor a claim by Hamilton himself, the way the world works now with Twitter (or X), Instagram and Facebook as the dominant force for news and opinion means that perception is often more powerful than truth.
Of course, Hamilton’s own admission that he “wasn’t good” in qualifying when he finished sixth for the Italian Grand Prix removes any doubt.
How the talks went
LH : “It wasn’t fun. We were sitting in our meeting the morning before the race – in fact, the night before they had already mentioned that they would like to share the cars. For me, I was a bit confused about that because, in the past, when we were in that position… normally, if George qualified well like he usually does, and I’m outside the top 10, then we’ll share strategies, but when we were so close, it didn’t make sense to me. But I fought as hard as I could to fight for the medium tires, but the team kept suggesting that I start on the soft tires, and everyone was on the medium.”
GR : “When I saw that, I thought ‘Lewis is not going to be happy.’
LH : “I was so angry. From that moment on, I was frustrated and then I did my best to keep up with the riders in front. They were too fast and I tried to make the tire last as long as I could. I knew [when I stopped] that the race was over for me because the hard tire was going to be painful in that heat.”
It must be pointed out that Hamilton laughed his way through his response, showing little hostility to the situation, even if his choice of words suggests otherwise.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff explained that the team “misread the race” when choosing strategy, but providing more insight, technical director James Allison said: “I’ll just start by saying we shouldn’t have started on soft. That was a mistake. If we could turn back time, we would do what those around us did and choose medium tires.”
“The rationale was that the soft rubber very often allows you to make a sharp move from the start and gives you a good chance to jump a place or two in the opening laps of the race. Before the race, we didn’t really expect that we would suffer from the difficulties we had then on the soft rubber.”
“So we imagined that we would get the soft tire advantage, get a place or two. We didn’t, because that’s just not the way they started out, and then we were hoping that the downside of the soft rubber being a bit thinner wouldn’t turn out to be particularly bad because, overall, if you look back over the years in Singapore, overall the pace starts very, very light in the Singapore race, and the drivers then pick up the pace for many, many laps, leaving the soft rubber perfectly good to go relatively deep into the pit box.”
“So we didn’t get a place at the start, the pace started to pick up from about the fifth lap and that left Lewis with a car that wasn’t particularly happy anyway. He suffered from quite a bit of tire degradation and should have come early as a result and really ruined his race for him. Yes, so a pure mistake.”
Mercedes, like any team, determines its strategies using historical race data and information gathered during an active weekend. Regardless of Hamilton’s thoughts, there is no doubt that the team chose the compound they felt was best to achieve maximum results.
To suggest anything different is grossly unfair and insulting to a professional team that has achieved all the success a group could wish for.
But this does not mean that the relationship between the team and the driver is not damaged. Hamilton was a laboratory on the track for Mercedes as he struggled to get into the current regulations and in the space of two years went from wanting to be a Silver Arrow for life, emulating Stirling Moss, to going to Ferrari.
In years past, the team might have paid more attention to his pleas during the pre-race briefing instead of letting the fight escalate.
Wolff insisted this year that his personal relationship with Hamilton did not suffer, but he was still “shocked and hurt” by the seven-time champion’s change.
The question now is whether harmony will remain between what was once an F1 powerhouse until the split at the end of the year.
