Rancour at McLaren too?

Lewis Hamilton: miscommunication?

Martin Whitmarsh and Lewis Hamilton: miscommunication?

The problem with modern racing drivers is that racing is all they’ve ever known: all that time spent honing their natural, instinctive feel for how to make a car go as quickly as possible, from an early age, leaves them undeveloped in other crucial areas. Chief amongst these is their capacity to form effective relationships with other people.

Of course, even if you’re paranoid it doesn’t necessarily follow that they aren’t out to get you – but for an F1 driver, trapped in their own self-centred bubble from the moment they first grasped a steering wheel, paranoia can be extraordinarily corrosive. The merest whiff of partiality is all it takes; and then, like any message board conspiracy theorist or tinfoil hat merchant, once they have reached their conclusion they shape and interpret all incoming data to suit it, and discard anything to the contrary. It’s all downhill from there.

This mentality is what precipitated Fernando Alonso’s meltdown at McLaren in 2007. Odd, isn’t it, that someone with the inner steel to go wheel-to-wheel with their rivals at 200mph and beyond could so easily be provoked into a destructive sequence of hissy fits? And yet that’s what happened: by the end it didn’t matter whether McLaren really were favouring Lewis over Fernando or not; it was enough that he believed they were (and let’s not forget that Lewis had a tantrum of his own that year, in Monaco, because he felt the team had favoured Fernando over him – sometimes being a team principal must be like herding cats).

As documented in my previous post, a whiff of not-invented-in-Salzburg syndrome is in the air at Red Bull after the Turkish Grand Prix. But what of McLaren? Never have I seen Lewis Hamilton look so unmoved after a race win.

Having inherited the lead after the Red Bulls eliminated one another at Turn 12, Hamilton was challenged by his team-mate at exactly the same spot nine laps later. It was a brief battle, which Hamilton resolved in his favour by edging Button wide into Turn 1 at the beginning of the following lap. And then, as if in receipt of an urgent injunction from the team to play nicely, they held station for the rest of the race.

There were the beginnings of a muttered conversation between Hamilton and Jenson Button in the drivers’ pre-podium ‘green room’, but they broke it off when they realised they were within earshot of a live microphone and camera. McLaren’s race feed on their excellent new website contains no radio conversation pertaining to the events of lap 49.

Questioned later, Hamilton explained that he had been instructed to save fuel and given a target lap time, which he thought was too slow, and which enabled Button to catch him up. He also alluded to a “miscommunication” with the team (given his recent penchant for slagging them off on the air, they can be forgiven for leaning on the mute button for that one). Fleet Street drilled down into this during the official presser. He responded:

For me it was just… the communication wasn’t clear for me. When they suggested ‘save this much fuel’ it was not easy to save that much fuel unless I went particularly slowly. I tried to reach that target and in doing so, Jenson was all of a sudden… he just appeared from nowhere and he was up my tail and then there was nothing I could do.

Button, for his part, said:

For about four or five laps beforehand they were saying you have to save fuel. They didn’t put a lap time on it. They just said you have got to save a bit of fuel. That was quite early in the race I was told to do that, probably about lap 30.

It’s possible that Button, having stayed in touch with the leading trio in the first half of the race without seriously pushing them, had burned less fuel and therefore had more ‘in his pocket’. Does the team’s failure to set him a target lap time, as they did with Hamilton, equate to favouritism? As conspiracy theories go, this is very thin gruel.

Still, as I said, it doesn’t matter whether there is any favouritism or not. What matters is the individual’s belief that it exists. At the end of the FIA press conference there was an illuminating exchange prompted by F1’s pre-eminent banana-eater, Michael Schmidt:

Q: Lewis, what happened at the pit stop because Sebastian was able to jump you. Was there any problem?

LH: I don’t know, I have to…

MW: We put fuel in, I think, at the pit stop.

LH: It seemed to be quite a…

MW: My guys weren’t quick and I thought ‘Lewis’s guys are also having a bit of a break.’

In the toxic mental landscape of the paranoid, even a sticky rear wheelnut can be taken as evidence. Mark Webber clearly has a monkey on his back. Is there one astride Lewis Hamilton’s shoulders too?

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  • Comments (10)
  1. Won’t this be fun – the top 2 teams might just tear each other apart. It would be amusing (albeit unlikely) if we end up having Hamilton and Webber rooting for each other, while Button and Vettel do the same. :D

  2. One problem with instructing a driver to save fuel is that some of them have to slow down a lot to save X amount and others barely need to slow down at all. The most extreme example of the latter I can think of is Heinz-Harald Frentzen, who was told to save a considerable amount of fuel for the last 10 laps of the Brazillian GP 2001 and managed to do so… …in exactly the same lap times as he’d been doing before receiving the instruction. So giving a target lap time would have been of limited use, but that’s probably what McLaren will have to do from now on.

    It’s a situation where nobody really has enough information to set a useful instruction. Worse than Michael Schumacher’s “2ml of rain” instruction – at least with that there was an alternative effective means of expression.

    • Steven Roy
    • June 3rd, 2010

    I get the impression Lewis thought the McLarens had been told not to race and was shocked when Jenson passed him. Considering how he was mugged while in cruise mode it was quite amazing how quickly he got back to racing mode and got the position back.

    I thought it was remeniscent of Villeneuve / Pironi.

  3. Steven Roy :I get the impression Lewis thought the McLarens had been told not to race and was shocked when Jenson passed him.

    It’s one of those cases where one wonders what they were told exactly. If they were just told to save fuel, Jenson isn’t exactly disobeying them if he can race while saving fuel…

    • Stuart C
    • June 3rd, 2010

    Steven Roy :

    I thought it was remeniscent of Villeneuve / Pironi.

    Hopefully without all the awfulness that entailed!

    • Steven Roy
    • June 3rd, 2010

    Hopefully without all the awfulness that entailed!

    I think the fact that Lewis got the position back immediately and Jenson didn’t try it again on the last lap coupled with the instant response of those on the pitwall to sort it out should prevent any serious escalation.

    Strangely enough although Lewis clearly did not react well to what happened on Sunday I think he will feel better than Jenson now because Jenson mugged Lewis and only managed to hold the lead for a few corners. Jenson must wonder how Lewis went from cruising to taking the position back in not time flat.

    • michael
    • June 6th, 2010

    Wonderful stuff Stuart! Now that we understand that McLaren have told Lewis Jenson will not overtake once in fuel-save mode plus the fact that they have given him a specific lap-time target yet failed to do so with Jenson begs the question whether this was an orchestrated plan by the team to do as Red Bull tried with Vettel or whether Jenson is his own man and did what he thought best suited his ideas of a team-mate?

    Stuart aside from this one fact which you have so pointedly stated (The merest whiff of partiality) how are the chances that Whitmarsch actually is rying to prove his decision making bringing Jenson n board or trying to write his own history within the McLaren group with his own man (Jenson) and not on the back of Ron’s kid Lewis Hamilton?

    Telling Jenson since lap 30 to save fuel seems like placing him in a position to take action when Lewis has fired all his Amo fighting Webber which we all knew is what was happening.

    superb JOB Stuart!

    • JZ
    • June 7th, 2010

    “The problem with modern racing drivers is that racing is all they’ve ever known: all that time spent honing their natural, instinctive feel for how to make a car go as quickly as possible, from an early age, leaves them undeveloped in other crucial areas. Chief amongst these is their capacity to form effective relationships with other people.”

    Brilliant! Very thoughtful analysis.

    I must admit to being a bit confused about the last part, re: the FIA presser. “We put fuel in, I think, at the pit stop.” Eh? In-race refueling? Was this post-qualifying? Or from last season or somesuch? Also, who is Michael Schmidt and what is his fascination with bananas?

    • Stuart C
    • June 8th, 2010

    @JZ

    The bit about putting fuel in about the pitstop was a not-so-oblique reference to the fact that he thought his stop was somewhat tardily executed, and that perhaps the team had an ulterior motive for doing so. He was clearly trying to suggest to Lewis that a similar malarkey was going on at McLaren.

    Mr Schmidt is a man of principle who does not avail himself of team hospitality. Bananas help him through the working day on a GP weekend.

  4. Mr Schmidt is a man of principle who does not avail himself of team hospitality. Bananas help him through the working day on a GP weekend.

    didn’t know that.

    stuart, you should do a series of posts on infamous paddock insiders ;)

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