Lewis Hamilton is facing perhaps the biggest test of his Formula 1 career just 57 racing laps into 2017 Formula 1 season.
The Briton was left powerless to do anything about Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari as they took a comprehensive victory at the Australian Grand Prix.
Yet, in reflection, if you were to judge Hamilton’s demeanour on his radio calls during the race, you would think he knew the race was lost well before he actually did.
Mercedes is an operation based on precision when it comes to everything and particularly strategy. Each driver must target a certain lap time to pull out a pre-determined gap that the engineers feel would make them safe from attack by those behind.
Over the past few years, doing that has been pretty easy, but from the moment it became clear Vettel was sticking to the gearbox of car No. 44 and there was nothing Hamilton could do about it, panic set in.
Complaints about the tyres brought back memories of 2013 and though Vettel wasn’t really on the attack, the strange call to pit and, therefore, free up the German resulted.
Afterwards, came perhaps the most un-Hamilton thing about the entire race. Red Bull aren’t exactly fast, that became quite clear, but the first whiff of dirty air Lewis got from Max Verstappen’s car after his stop, another radio complaint ensued.
Now this year’s F1 cars are meant to sort the men from the boys, you don’t just get new tyres and breeze past with DRS anymore and the thought of having to earn an overtake on the Dutchman somehow irked the three-time world champion.
I’m not saying he didn’t try because this is Lewis Hamilton and overtaking is what he does right? But now you have to turn the power up to 12 and be prepared to get the elbows out if you want to succeed and did that happen? Well, it’s questionable.
Compare this to Vettel who kept the pressure on early, showed you can follow another car by around 0.8secs consistently and relentlessly pumped in the fast laps after Hamilton pitted. This allowed him to not only overhaul the Mercedes but also pull away to an easy victory.
That is where the four-time champion is so much better than Nico Rosberg and let’s not forget, he can’t be controlled by Toto Wolff either as maybe Valtteri Bottas was.
But if Ferrari can keep this car within a tenth or two of Mercedes and help Vettel with strategy, he can repeat the same formula race after race after race.
Publicly Hamilton welcomes the rivalry and we all do because it’s the one we’ve wanted for a decade. Privately, he’ll likely acknowledge that the next generation German driving for Ferrari gave him a bloody nose in Melbourne and now he needs to respond.
That means the lifestyle he could get away with when fighting someone he should be faster than is a lot different to that he can now afford when his day job involves beating the man challenging him for the best of his generation.
It’s time for Hamilton to get really serious about F1 again and re-find that will for a fight because should this rivalry continue it will be the one that defines the pair’s legacies. The guy who goes down as an all-time great versus the guy who won multiple titles when given a superior car.
