Whichever way you look at it, statistically 2022 was Lewis Hamilton’s worst season in his Formula One career to date.
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 the 7- time champion was the worst performer. In fact, The evidence points on the contrary.
EARLY SEASON WOES
In the early part of the season, when Mercedes were 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 from porpoising and poor ride quality over the bumps, it appeared Russell had the edge over his teammate.
Hamilton would often try more adventurous setups compared to Russell in an attempt to understand the car, and find his personal sweet spot.
However, Over those first nine races Russell was clearly the quicker of the two on four occasions. The other results were skewed by poor VSC timings for Hamilton in Australia and Miami and 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 his teammate for the entire Grand Prix.
Between races at Silverstone and Mexico, Mercedes began to understand the best operating window for the W13, however, the car developed some difficult handling charecteristics which Hamilton described in an interview with selected media including 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”
During that period, Lewis out-qualified his teammate nine times out of 11, missing out in Hungary due to a DRS problem where Russell scored pole. In Mexico he missed out on Saturday, only to comprehensively out pace the sister Mercedes on the Sunday after getting past at turn one.
It appeared that as the W13 became a more difficult car to handle, number 44 was able to deal with the traits slightly better than his teammate.
The Stats 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 sessions, Hamilton out qualified Russell 11-5 with a tiny 0.012sec advantage, eradicating the notion that his 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 George 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.