It's all about momentum

Formula One: Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg continue their rivalry, banking heavily on their recent highs

It is no cliche to say that success in Formula One racing is often a matter of momentum. There’s more to it than just the winning car’s momentum as it races to victory. Often, a team seems to move from victory to victory like a pendulum swinging on inexorably. Once a driver gets started winning, he seems to power on from title to title.

Ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal on Sunday, the movement of the pendulum is in favour of the Mercedes team. But for both of its drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, who have won all but one of the season’s six races so far, it is no longer clear which of them has the momentum.

With three victories in the first four races, Hamilton began 2015 as he had finished 2014, when he won his second world title. But Rosberg has now won the last two races. At the Monaco Grand Prix two weeks ago, things had seemed to be in Hamilton’s favour as he dominated the race until 12 laps before the end. But a congruence of bad calculation and confusion between him and his team over an extra pit stop resulted in Rosberg being handed the victory.

It was Rosberg’s second triumph in a row this season, and his third straight in Monaco, a feat achieved by only three other drivers: Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Graham Hill. But despite Rosberg’s momentum, all eyes will be on Hamilton this weekend. The British driver has won the Canadian race three times, including his first-ever Formula One victory, in 2007.

“Everything that needs to be said about Monaco has already been said,” Hamilton said. “We’ll learn from it and move forward together like we always do. I just want to get back out there and bounce back — and I could hardly ask for a better place to do that than Montreal. This is always one of my favorite weekends.”

The mind-sets of the two Mercedes teammates have been watched closely this season, as the reigning world champion has appeared to be liberated by his second title and his rival has appeared to be crushed by having fallen short of the title in the last race last year.

Hamilton, driving for McLaren, missed winning the 2007 world title in his first year in Formula One by only one point, but he came back the next season and won the 2008 title by one point. In 2013, he made a daring move to the Mercedes team, which had been struggling for three seasons to score even a spot on the podium with its illustrious, multiple world champion driver Michael Schumacher and Rosberg.

Then with a new set of technical regulations for engines last year, Mercedes produced the best new hybrid technology in the series and the team dominated. Hamilton and Rosberg fought for the title all year, with Hamilton winning more races but Rosberg having more consistent results.

Hamilton won the title in the last race, in Abu Dhabi in November. He was on a roll that continued into this season: Until the Spanish Grand Prix last month, he had won nine of the previous 11 races. In Spain, Hamilton slipped up slightly during qualifying and at the start of the race, and Rosberg took full advantage to score pole position and then win the race.

Until then, according to Paddy Lowe, the Mercedes technical director, Rosberg had not been driving badly, but Hamilton was simply on a higher level.

“Lewis is performing really at the top of his game,” said Lowe, who was also at McLaren with Hamilton. “I’ve worked with Lewis actually throughout his Formula One career and I would say at the moment he’s really at his peak — the best he’s been driving so far.”
“That’s a tough prospect for any driver to compete with,” he added. “I think Nico is doing a good job; it’s just tough to beat Lewis.”

Just as Hamilton has the momentum in Canada, with three victories there, Rosberg has now beaten Hamilton in Monaco in the last three years. And with his back-to-back victories in Spain and Monaco, the German has curbed Hamilton’s momentum. But after Monaco, Rosberg said that Hamilton — who had scored the first Monaco pole position of his career — had performed better than him.

This year, Hamilton has seemed liberated by his second world title, as if free of doubts and pressures that had built up since his previous title, in 2008. Rob Smedley, a  racing director at the Williams team, sees it as a natural process.

“I think with any sportsman, if you keep getting positive results it’s a virtuous circle,” Smedley said. “If you keep getting positive results it brings more and more positivity to what you’re doing, and you believe more and more in yourself and small things get you down less, and you just tend to get the best out of yourself and the people around you. And I guess that’s what’s happening with Lewis.”

Only 16 of the 32 drivers who have won a drivers’ title in Formula One since the series began in 1950 have won more than one title. But nine of those have won consecutive titles. Hamilton has said several times this year that his mental state has never been better.

“I’m probably the happiest I have been for a long, long time, career-wise,” he said, “and then outside, yeah it’s great when you can do things that you want to do if you know they are not a distraction and then you can perform. I’m very careful of the things that I choose to do, that they don’t get in the way of ultimately preparing for my races and becoming world champion, which is my final goal. Then in the car, my age, I feel the best that I have ever been.”

Jackie Stewart, who won three drivers’ titles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, said that commitments with sponsors in the years following his titles had distracted him so much from his racing that he won his three titles in alternate years.

Felipe Massa, who now drives at Williams but who was the Ferrari driver who lost the championship by one point to Hamilton in 2008, said that just as winning the title can lead to an increase in a driver’s powers, so the blow of losing it under difficult circumstances — the way he lost in 2008 and Rosberg did last year — can negatively affect a driver’s performance the following season.

“Motivation, and the mind workings, are important,” Massa said. “You see it happening to many drivers to lose time because something is going on and they are not really perfect.”
“It’s important to be in good shape with your mind, doing everything correct,” he added. “Everything in our world is in the details. If you are losing something in your head, maybe you lose one or two tenths and maybe that is enough. It’s part of our job to have everything right in the head.”

Fernando Alonso, the 2005 and 2006 world champion when driving for Renault, also lost the title by just one point, in 2007, along with his McLaren teammate Hamilton. Alonso said that winning consecutive titles depended on the psychology of the driver.

“It depends on everyone’s personality and character,” said the Spaniard, who is now back at McLaren after several years at Ferrari.

“It could help you to take some weight off the shoulders and to take some pressure off after winning a championship. The following year you are more relaxed and perhaps you could perform better. Or it could be the opposite: You relax a little bit, you lose a little bit of that extra motivation and you are a little bit slower. It depends for everyone.”