Tomorrow Lewis Hamilton will embark on his final grand prix as a Mercedes driver. It’s unlikely, though not impossible, that he might add to the 84 victories he’s scored since joining them. But no one is about to call his tenure at the team a failure.
Not everyone was convinced he’d made the right decision when, late in 2012, the then one-time world champion announced he would leave McLaren, the team which had brought him in to F1. After all, he had an outside shot at the title that year, though badly served by unreliability, while Mercedes won just one race.
The unprecedented success Hamilton has enjoyed since joining Mercedes makes it all the more unfathomable in retrospect that anyone doubted it. But the idea of a driver overcoming their doubters is a powerful narrative, one F1 is eager to tap into in building up a mythology around one of its biggest stars.
“It’ll never work, they said,” F1 declared on social media yesterday, above a list of apparently invented historic quotes declaring Hamilton’s decision a mistake, attributed to no one. But who is the real “they” in this story, and did they truly predict Hamilton’s move would end in failure?
Hamilton went public with his decision to leave McLaren for Mercedes in September 2012. Even he admitted it was a tough call, describing it at the time as “the hardest decision I’ve ever made.”
The announcement stung his McLaren team, who had backed his junior career and brought him into their team as a rookie – a highly unusual step for them at the time. Inevitably, those Hamilton left behind at the team cast doubt on his decision.
“He is not going to say ‘hey, they offered me more money’,” said McLaren’s team principal at the time, Martin Whitmarsh. “He is also not going to say that he’s made an awful mistake. I hope he thinks today that he’s made an awful mistake and I hope he thinks that next year. He’s made that decision and he has to live with that decision.”
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Hamilton’s last McLaren team mate Jenson Button – who joined them from the very team Hamilton was now moving to – said: “It is his decision, although I personally don’t think it is the right decision.” But realistically, McLaren team members were never going to back his decision to leave.
Former F1 drivers offered a mix of…
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