Next Monday will be the 10th anniversary of something unfortunate happening to Lewis Hamilton: the Mercedes chapter of his storied Formula 1 career getting off to rather a bad start…
After just 15 laps behind the wheel of the W04 challenger Mercedes had produced for 2013 – Hamilton’s first season with the Brackley-based squad after departing McLaren – he locked up going into Jerez’s Dry Sack hairpin. Hamilton skated across the gravel and went straight into the barriers. He climbed out, the damage relatively minor, but it came just a day after Mercedes had been forced to cut short its running due to an electrical gremlin with Nico Rosberg at the wheel.
Quite the down note on which to start one of F1’s most famous success stories. What followed, starting from what was to be a mainly challenging 2013 campaign, were six world titles, 82 wins and 77 poles for Hamilton. For Mercedes itself, the run included eight straight crowns after it vaulted to the front of the F1 pack when the V6 hybrid era rewrote the established formbook from 2014 onwards.
The tale is well known. So too, that Hamilton opted to leave McLaren in part because he was frustrated with its underachievement in a period when Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull had swept away the records the Briton and the team he’d joined aged 13 in 1998 had established when making an instant and instantly impressive full arrival on the F1 scene. This time a decade ago, no one could have predicted precisely how pivotal a decision Hamilton had made when it came to cementing his F1 legend. Mainly because, for all his 21 wins and 2008 world title with McLaren, he simply hadn’t yet reached that status.
Famously, in a sport so complex and covered as motorsport, there are many ways to define greatness. But in F1 one such criterion must be winning titles with multiple teams.
