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Lewis Hamilton’s miserable Monaco Grand Prix weekend brought out clear signs of frustration across qualifying and the race, where he made it clear the Mercedes Formula 1 team had fallen short of its high standards.
Hamilton lost the championship lead after a miserable Monaco Grand Prix weekend in which he qualified and finish seventh having battled tyre warm-up issues on Saturday and then lost out on strategy on Sunday.
His dissatisfaction was evident over the team radio in the grand prix and in front of the media on both days, and it has led some to question whether Hamilton – on Mercedes’ bad days – undermines the ‘win as a team, lose as a team’ mantra he and the team often espouse.
Hamilton was irate during the race, with the initial anger that AlphaTauri driver Pierre Gasly was able to rejoin still ahead of him after the pitstops compounded by Sebastian Vettel’s Aston Martin emerging in front of both and then Red Bull’s Sergio Perez leapfrogging the lot of them.
“I can understand why he is unhappy because effectively we lost a chunk of places with the strategy call we made” :: James Allison
In those moments, Hamilton probably twisted the knife a bit more than Mercedes would ideally want. But expressing frustration over the radio is a common coping mechanism that every driver employs at some point or another.
And it wasn’t a baseless complaint given his entire race hung on gaining ground on strategy and instead, as Mercedes’ technical director James Allison put it, the choice that was made caused ‘the world to fall on our heads’.
“I can understand why he is unhappy because effectively we lost a chunk of places with the strategy call we made,” said Allison.
“You come up to the stop, your options are undercut to try and get ahead of the person who is blocking you, or go longer than the person and overcut them. It’s always a finely balanced call and we picked the wrong one of those two options.
“Lewis still had some rubber left on the tyre for what would have been a few decent laps, but the chances are that Gasly probably wouldn’t have stopped anytime soon and our fear was that Gasly was simply just going to stay out there as a roadblock forever.
“We had a window behind where we could do an attempted undercut and unfortunately we weren’t able to get enough laptime in our out-lap to get past Gasly on the track when he subsequently made his stop to protect against it.
“Then Gasly’s pace after the stop was so slow that it effectively allowed Vettel and then Perez to leapfrog the pair of us.
“So we didn’t have good options either way we felt that would have been a long way distant [of being able to run long enough to overcut] and we had to make the undercut stick in order to then stop the world falling on our heads.
“Sadly, by choosing the undercut and not making it work, the world did fall on our heads with the subsequent loss of places to Vettel and Perez.”
If the radio rage was understandable, there are other moments from the weekend that people will point to as evidence Hamilton was not the best team player.
His blunt evaluation after a nightmare qualifying, which included comments about planning difficult conversations with the team after the weekend, seemed to take a few people by surprise.
And post-race there was one particular TV interview with Dutch broadcaster Ziggo that seemed to get a few social media users riled up, when Hamilton was asked if he had lessons to learn from this weekend and said no, then was asked if the team did, and said yes.
These are pretty common examples of the sort of thing that get picked up as proof Hamilton’s “we win and lose as a team” rhetoric is simply hypocritical. And it’s a cheap shot.
At his most frustrated, Hamilton doesn’t cover himself in glory. But nor has he undermined what his team stands for: that culture of honesty, of not blaming anyone, of putting the group before the individual.
You could easily flip the argument and point out that Hamilton is always quick to credit Mercedes when he’s won the race, so why shouldn’t the responsibility be on the team when it drops the ball?
Where he risked crossing the line was post-race, if he’d stressed that ‘the team let me down today’ or something. He didn’t do that.
“It’s constructive discussions and if there’s any constructive criticism, we take it on board and then we just huddle up and do the work” :: Lewis Hamilton
Instead, all that really happened was some whining over the radio that was understandable in the context, and making some relatively strong Saturday remarks amid the rare occasion where there had been a genuine disagreement over which direction to pursue.
In general, it was expressing some blunt honesty. But that’s part of what Mercedes does well. When it goes wrong it goes badly wrong and the likes of Hamilton, Toto Wolff and Allison tend not to bother sugar-coating it.
Drivers of vastly different characters and temperaments have proven countless times over the years that anything said in the heat of battle or after a particularly bad result has to be kept in context. And then view it as part of a wider picture.
With that in mind, it’s worth reading one of Hamilton’s post-race reflections in full, because it reflects the reality of the Hamilton/Mercedes dynamic better than emotional soundbites in the heat of the moment or when the adrenaline is still high.
“We don’t like to kick each other when we’re down,” he said when asked what he does to keep morale high after a weekend like this one.
“There’s no finger pointing, there’s no one individual here that takes blame. We win and we lose as a team. We have a very open discussion, very open and honest.
“It’s not a personal thing, it’s like ‘hey man, this should have been better, this should have been better, why didn’t we do this, why didn’t we do this?’, and we all take everything on board.
“It’s constructive discussions and if there’s any constructive criticism, we take it on board and then we just huddle up and do the work. We get on a call.
“There won’t be silence between now and the next race, we’ll have a great couple of meetings. Just so we’re clear on what happened and where we went and what things we might want to learn from.
“The reason we have all the championships we have is because we’ve made plenty of mistakes, but we always come back stronger. And we learn from it.
“I’m often grateful for crappy days like this because it’s the days that you learn the most. If you’re just winning all the time, you learn less.
“There’s a lot to take from this weekend and we don’t have all the answers, but it will force us to have to go and search for them.”
