

“Michael Schumacher was a better driver last year than Lewis Hamilton is this year” the paddock grumbler told me before reaching for another bottle of beer. His thoery was that Schumacher was closer in terms of pace to Mercedes team mate Nico Rosberg in 2012 than Hamilton is in 2013. Perhaps true but far too simplistic a perspective.

Hamilton has by his own admission failed to gel with the Mercedes W04, citing a lack of comfort in the car. Some people have blamed this on external distractions like his dog or his girlfriend, but thats utter rubbish. I watched Lewis rise up through the junior series and think I know what is behind his current issues.

“I don’t put it down to bad luck. I just wasn’t good enough over the weekend. The whole weekend has been a missed opportunity” Hamilton told us at Monaco

“I’ve got lots to sort out on my side of the garage, and within myself, and I’ll take time to do that. I’m not quick enough, not on it enough, so I need to get on it. Actually, even in winter testing I was struggling, The setup they have on the car in terms of brake cylinders and all this kind of thing, the steering wheel, it’s a lot different to what I obviously experienced before, where I was very comfortable. I’d been there for years so I was used to it, it was always the same. That’s been the slight weakness for me this year. Even in the first few races, but particularly in the last couple, I’ve been pretty poor,” he said



Taking a look at the two steering wheels is revealing looking at the wheel Hamilton used on the MP4-26 (above) incidentally near identical to the wheel on the MP4-28, it has a far simpler layout than the design used on the Mercedes W04 (below).



Of course having used essentially the same design for most of his F1 career Hamilton would struggle a little to get used to the new layout, but with countless hours on the simulator and half a season in the Mercedes under his belt this cannot be the real cause of the problem.

Both Hamilton and Mercedes feel that the problem is not really an engineering one rather a driver related one, but I’m not sure I agree with that, indeed Hamilton has dropped some fairly big clues as to what the problem really is.

“It’s just a general feeling with me, It’s difficult to really explain it. I’ve just not been on it all weekend.It’s not through not being focused, it’s not through not being centred. It’s just feeling comfortable in the car. At McLaren I had 100 percent confidence in the car… particularly on this track where you need 100 percent confidence in the car beneath you. It’s just that I’ve been struggling with getting that confidence. It means you can’t brake late enough. I’ve had it all season so far; it’s just been the same, it’s not got better. When you’re braking it’s all about feel through your foot, through your boot. It’s all about the stiffness of the pedals, it’s all about the modulation, it’s all about the retardation of the brakes. It’s the reaction of the car when you hit the brakes.

There are so many different things that give you confidence. What I had before, we worked on it a long time, and we got it right, and it was the same for six years. It’s a little bit different here, and we’re working on it. I’ve never in my life had brake problems, since I was five years old, when I first drove a kart. I never had a brake issue, or lack of confidence on the brakes. It’s the first time I’ve had that experience. It definitely catches you a little bit off guard. I don’t feel comfortable at the moment. When I do, you’ll know. “I’ve always been strong in a car I’ve felt confident in. I now have a car I don’t particularly feel comfortable in. While it’s a great car, I can’t say I’ve just clicked with it like that. I still don’t feel right in the car for some reason.”

Indeed in Canada Hamilton raised his own thoery on what the issue was; “maybe it’s my seat, today I was really doing my belts up really, really tight which I never do. Maybe I’m moving around in the car too much, who knows, but it’s a little bit better today.”

Actually on that I think he is wrong, I think the issue is one of what Toyota technical boss Pascal Vasselon calls ‘stability’. The Belgian is an expert on tyre performance and how the rubber interacts with the car. Some years ago when Toyota was still in F1 he used to talk about getting better stability in the cars, as driver Jarno Trulli struggled a lot, saying many of the same things as Hamilton has been saying this year.

Vasselon believes that one of the keys to designing modern F1 cars is stability as he told RCE in V20N7, V19N2 and V18N6 (he meant it obviously). For an engineer the stability Vasselon is discussing is a hard thing to deal with as it is impossible to quantify. “Its all about the feeling of the rear axle” he explains. “The driver feels the rear axle and that is stability. In F1 you go on driver comments on things like this rather than exact numbers. When a car has a general problem it is reported by all of the drivers, but drivers have different tolerances, and that level of tolerance tends to correspond to a better or worse capacity to warm up the tyres. A driver who is able to accept more instability is usually a driver that does not struggle to warm up tyres. Basically a driver struggles to warm the tyres when he is not confident enough to push the car as it is about developing friction energy. To generate this you need to slide the car and to do that you need to be confident.”

Hamilton I believe has a mild case of this, not nearly as bad as Trulli as his performances have shown. Its not really the brakes at all its the reaction of the tyres that are causing the issue. Toyota resolved this issue by increasing the wheelbase of the car, it could be that the W04 has a shorter wheelbase than the McLarens ever did. Certainly the Mercedes lineage of cars are shorter than the McLarens.

The clever FRICS hydraulically interconnected suspension system on the W04 may well have a role to play in this as the car will not react quite as the driver expects, sapping his confidence.

I wonder if Mercedes tried the car without FRICS if Hamilton would be able to get more comfortable in it, but I’m not sure thats possible on the W04 where the hydraulics are so integral to the cars setup.

But my thoery and it is only that, is that Hamilton’s struggles are down to the interaction between car and tyre, and have very little to do with the brakes, the seat, the steering wheel, Nicole Scherzinger or Roscoe the dog.