The Mercedes star went from contending for the world title in 2021 to sitting seventh in the ’22 standings, 58 points behind Charles Leclerc.
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Lewis Hamilton has had a difficult start to the 2022 season, to say the least, and it has led to some saying he should have retired after the ’21 campaign.
Despite the speculation of his unhappiness, the British F1 driver posted on Instagram that he is “working on my masterpiece, I’ll be the one to decide when it’s finished.”
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Hamilton’s finishing positions have lacked consistency through four races this season, starting with podiuming in Bahrain to P10 in Saudi Arabia, P4 in Australia and 13th in Imola. Since the season opener, he has finished below his new teammate, George Russell, who is the only Formula One driver this season to finish in the top five of every race.
The Emilia Romagna Grand Prix was arguably one of the tougher races for Mercedes as the porpoising was the worst it has been the season, Russell said. The young rising star experienced chest and back pain from the bouncing.
Meanwhile, Hamilton was lapped by Max Verstappen, who beat him for the world champion title last season. It brought forth multiple comments, such as Red Bull’s motorsport advisor Helmut Marko joking that Hamilton probably should have retired after 2021.
Sky Sports asked Marko about what might have been going through the Mercedes driver’s mind, to which he responded, “I mean, he was lapped by us. Maybe he should have stopped last year, he is thinking! Maybe.”
Over the team radio, team principal Toto Wolff told Hamilton that he knows “this is undriveable” and that it was a “terrible race.” Hamilton later told Sky Sports, “I’m out of the Championship for sure,” echoing similar comments he made after Saturday’s sprint race.
“There’s no question about that, but I’ll still keep working as hard as I can to try and somehow pull it back together somehow,” Hamilton said. “...There is nowhere else I want to be. Just because we have hit a rough patch, it is not in my DNA to back out.”
Wolff said over the weekend, per Reuters, “You see the bouncing on the main straight, I wonder how the two of them can even keep the car on the track at times.”
He continued, “Because of the bouncing, we are not able to run it where it should run. That has huge ramifications on the set-up, on the tyre grip etc, so one is interlinked to the other. I think if we were to get on top of the porpoising, we would unlock much more in terms of performance on the car.”
Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin revealed that they have discovered some small solutions to the problems, per Formula1.com.
“Being realistic, we think this will be something we approach in steps rather than one big moment where the whole thing [porpoising] vanishes, but we are seeing encouraging signs,” Shovlin said, per Formula1.com. “We are hoping to bring parts to the car soon, maybe even Miami, where we can hopefully see progress on this issue.
“Lots of people are suffering with this problem and we know that lifting the car is a way of alleviating it. A lot of the work that is going on in Brackley has been to understand the phenomenon and whether we can actually control it, whether we can engineer it out of the car.”
Time will tell whether the Miami Grand Prix will be a different story for Hamilton and Mercedes, but it does not seem that the knight will be throwing in the towel any time soon.
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