Lewis Hamilton; reigning Formula One world champion, findind it hard to defend title with an under-par racing car.
Lewis Hamilton, the reigning Formula One (F1) world champion, and his team, Vodafone- McLaren- Mercedes, started the new season with their fingers firmly stuck on the self-destruct bottom, not too dissimilar to the way they conducted themselves in 2007 and 2008. In 2007 McLaren were excluded from contesting the constructors-title after being accused of obtaining confidential technical data belonging to their arch rival, Ferrari.
In his first season, Lewis Hamilton was on the brink of making history by becoming the first rookie to win the F1 drivers championship. That year
McLaren-Mercedes, despite the blistering start to the season by Jenson Button and the Brawn GP, who have won four out of the five races so far, still regard Ferrari as their main challenger. Lewis Hamilton and his crew believe once things settle down and all the teams get to know their new cars better, it will be McLaren and Ferrari fighting for both the drivers and constructors titles just as they did in 2008.
This gives a little insight as to why McLaren-Mercedes felt the need to mislead the race officials after an incident involving the Toyota of Jarno Trulli during the season opening race in
It was very disappointing that McLaren, after the faux pas of the two previous seasons, hadn’t learnt any lessons and were still operating with the same reckless abandon and lied to race officials about whether or not they instructed their driver, Lewis Hamilton, to let through the Toyota of Jarno Trulli under safety car conditions, which a driver should not do unless instructed to by the race controller for the purposes of un-lapping themselves and forming behind the race leader. An audio was played during the ‘liar-gate’ hearing proving they had indeed instructed
The opprobrium was overwhelming and eventually Lewis Hamilton was forced in front of the world press to make a contrite and humiliating apology.
The ‘liar-gate’ furore has long been (partially) resolved; McLaren were given a suspended three-race ban; we hope their mendacious ways are now behind them, we can look forward to seeing Lewis Hamilton edge his way back up on to the podium; where we’ve all become to expect as a given right after he thrilled us with some of the best drives ever seen in Formula One for a long time during his first two seasons.
McLaren will be hoping for better results in
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This time last year Lewis had 28-points going into
The Brawn GP, made up of the defunct Honda team, and now powered by Mercedes- Benz; are miles-ahead of the chasing pact. Their driver, Jenson Button’s dominance sees him go to his ‘home’ Grand Prix – he lives in the principality – with 41 points. Brazilian team-mate Rubens barrichello is 14 points in arrears.
It is unlikely that
Like the current Manchester United line-up, or Michael Jordan’s rampaging Bulls of the 90s’, this should have been Lewis Hamilton’s ‘Three-Peat’ season; but Hamilton fell victim to his own meteoric rise to the top; he believed the hype; the buzz he had created, he let it ‘go-to-his-head’, he disobeyed team orders; crucially his team also believed the hype, they failed to control Lewis and Alonso, eventually the two team-mates destroyed each other.
Lewis Hamilton still has an opportunity to do at McLaren what Michael Schumacker did at Ferrari, especially since he is the undisputed number one driver at the team; his team-mate, Heikki Kovalainen is not in the same league as him. So, Lewis better pray that they don’t bring in Sebastian Vettel, the Red-Bull driver, as a team-mate any time soon. Vettel would be the equal of