He didn’t win a race or score a pole position finishing sixth in the Championship, 35 points behind Russell, who managed to achieve everything Hamilton failed to do.
However, it’s unwise to say Hamilton was the worst performer. In fact the evidence points more in favour towards Hamilton.
EARLY SEASON WOES
In the early part of the season, Mercedes was trying to figure out the complexities of its W13 which needed to be run extremely low and stiff to achieve the required downforce, however suffered invariably from porposing and poor ride quality over the bumps, it appeared Russell had the edge over his seven-time World Champion teammate.
However, over those first nine races Russell was only the quicker of the two on four occasions. The other results were skewed by poor VSC timings for Hamilton in Australia and Miami. A first lap incident at the Spanish Grand Prix with Kevin Magnussen where he had a car much more in tune for race conditions and lapped significantly quicker than Russell for the entire Grand Prix.
Between races at Britain and Mexico, where Mercedes began to understand the best operating window for the W13, which Hamilton described in an interview with selected media which included Autosport:
“Imagine if you are creeping up behind a horse and you’re trying to get as close as possible, what’s the breaking point before it kicks you in the face”
Hamilton was the slightly quicker of the two drivers.
HAMILTON FINDS THE PACE
Hamilton out-qualified his younger teammate nine times out of 11 in that stint, missing out in Hungary where Russell scored Pole and in Mexico where Russell had a slight edge on Saturday only for Hamilton to comprehensively out pace him on the Sunday.
Numbers don’t lie, in an article by Mark Hughes for Motorsport he revealed that where fair comparison could be made between the two drivers in the dry qualifying events Hamilton out qualifies Russell 11-5 with a tiny 0.012sec advantage, eradicating the notion that Hamilton’s younger teammate was the better and quicker driver over the season.
As always in racing at this level there’s always more to the story.
There’s no denying however that Russell proved his incredible talent yet again, and with a win in Brazil to cap off a successful season he certainly showed that he has the hallmarks of a future great.