Lewis Hamilton: Mercedes star hungry to show world he is ready to claim fourth title

Ebullient Brit dominates practice for season-opening Australian GP

(Getty Images)

If you’re tempted to believe that Lewis Hamilton’s high-profile social life over the winter has in any way diluted his hunger to win a fourth world championship, you should watch his face when he’s talking about the Mercedes F1 W07 Hybrid with which he hopes to seal that success.

“I’m just blown away every time to see this complete new creation,” he enthuses. “It’s just amazing to see it all come together. How the engine fits so perfectly to the chassis...”

He indicates the cockpit. “This is my office. That’s where I feel most comfortable. I can put my visor down and watch the ladies going by and they can’t see my face.”

He says he often drifts off to sleep there, in between moments of violent track action. “The cockpit is all mine. You make your own seat, sitting on a plastic bag filled with form-fitting foam.

“Every other driver I have driven against gets out and lets the mechanics file their seat down. I do it myself. This is my second seat here. The first one lasted three years. I filed it down, put tape on it and have never had to change it. The other guy is on seat seven by the end of the year.”

Hamilton, who away from the track is trying to style himself as a singer-songwriter and fashion-show devotee, is still a racer at heart: a petrolhead who loves cars.

“I’m fascinated by them – F1 cars, road cars, any cars. I like to see the different technology, so when we park up at the end of the race or practice and I get a chance to look at other cars, I do. And then I go back to the engineers and ask why we haven’t done this or that. They love that because they want the driver to show he is interested.”

He wields his detachable steering wheel, a carbon-fibre work of art which he helped his team construct specifically to suit his preferences. It’s got more controls than on a fighter jet.

“There is so much information on there. Even before these new rules on radio communication, there was a lot of information we needed to know about through the steering wheel.

“Now that we cannot have any communication with the engineers, we have to remember all these things. It’s not as if we have a booklet in the car.” Are the new breed of turbo hybrid cars easy to drive then? Not always. “That’s why I liked the older cars with just one or two buttons,” he concedes. “It was just you and the car. Now you have to take your eyes off the road, there are all these different screens, many different functions.

“When I was at school I had difficulty remembering things. But when I’m in the car, I can remember a lot. Naturally, it is a lot of repetition, but learning all these other things is going to be hard.”

Yet you sense he relishes the old-school appeal of working on his own again. “I’ve never had guidance for anything I was doing driver-wise, because I know what I’m doing out there. But jeez, man, I’m telling you there is more technology in this than there is in a spaceship. None of the drivers in the old days had that.

“One thing I can guarantee you is that it’s not easy. It’s just different. A normal road car just does not compare with what we’re doing here. There is no parallel. Nothing is the same. If people could see what I was doing in the car, it would confuse them.”

Yesterday, he dominated the two weather-affected practice sessions in Albert Park ahead of tomorrow’s opening Australian Grand Prix.

Hamilton’s Mercedes team-mate, Nico Rosberg, crashed in the second practice session after losing control accelerating out of turn six. But the damp track meant everyone’s times stayed on the slow side and the German’s error was not as costly as it could have been. “I accelerated too much and lost the car,” said Rosberg. “That was not good for sure. Good for me the track didn’t dry out.”

Hamilton, who was fastest in both sessions, did only seven laps, none on dry tyres, as he ended the session 0.467 seconds quicker than Force India’s Nico Hulkenberg, who was 0.178secs ahead of Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen.

It showed how hell-bent Hamilton is about winning a hat-trick of world titles. “I don’t feel like I have anything else to prove but, dammit, I wanted to win those last few races in 2015 and I’m here with the same fighting spirit and I want to win. I don’t want to be second.”

So Britain’s most successful driver is still as hungry as ever? “Yes. I don’t have to search for it. It’s just my stubborn DNA. I was born with competitiveness.”