Lewis Hamilton delivers most damning proof of his diminishing powers

Telegraph

6 hours ago

Little encapsulated Lewis Hamilton's fading star this season quite like the sight of the seven-time world champion, a conjurer of all manner of miracles around Silverstone, trying and failing for 17 laps to hunt down a Sauber.
Here, after all, was the figure who had adorned the history of the British Grand Prix with outrageous highlights. Take his rain dance in 2008, when he won by 68 seconds with water streaming down his visor, or his three-wheeled finish in 2020, when his front-left tyre delaminated rounding the final corner. And yet here his streak of 11 successive podium finishes at his home circuit came to an end at the hands of Nico Hülkenberg, a man who had not stood on the rostrum in 238 previous races. It was, to put it politely, galling.
Traditionally, this is the place where Hamilton is immaculate, where the cheers of 140,000 fans inspire him to rediscover the sorcery of old. But he was anything but flawless on this occasion, twice losing control in the final stages on soft rubber as Hülkenberg, driving one of the day-glo green Saubers that had only amassed 29 points in 11 grands prix, disappeared into the distance. While his race engineer, Riccardo Adami, tried to congratulate him on fourth place, Hamilton would have none of it, shooting back: 'Oh mate, that was pretty bad overall. So much opportunity there that was missed.'
His diagnosis was accurate. Although Ferrari deserved their share of blame, dropping him from fourth to eighth after the first round of pit stops, Hamilton was unusually error-prone himself, struggling to stay on track after the late switch to softs and then veering off the road with four laps left to surrender his chance of a maiden grand prix podium in red. There was a temptation to resist criticising too harshly, given the treacherousness of the conditions, with several mid-race downpours playing havoc with both strategy and racecraft. But was this not the type of challenge to make Hamilton come into his own? Had he not proved his enduring Silverstone love affair just 12 months earlier, winning a similar wet-dry race for his first victory in two and a half years?
There has been the odd sign that Hamilton's edge could, at the age of 40, be slipping. In qualifying, the ultimate one-lap master suffered a spot of understeer at Club to sacrifice a potential front-row spot. It was in his abortive pursuit of Hülkenberg, though, that the cracks were most visible. At one stage he was within DRS range of the German but still could not produce the overtake, with his uncharacteristic errors leaving him stranded five seconds behind.
Plainly, he was unimpressed with Ferrari's management of the race, placing his relationship with Adami under renewed strain. Hamilton has been memorably withering towards him already over the radio, losing patience over the Italian's dithering in Miami as he snapped: 'Have a tea break while you're at it.' Asked here whether he felt the team's important calls were correct, he replied: 'Not all of them. The first one wasn't a good call, because we got undercut by a bunch of people, so I'm not sure exactly what happened there. We'll have to go back and see what happened, but I was P4 and came out P8. I chose to come in close to the right time, but it was super tricky when I came back out, and I lost a ton of time. I went off at turn three, turn nine, turn 11 – it was just one of these days.'
The worry is that these days are, increasingly, less the exception that Hamilton suggests. Once the consummate performer in the wet, he is finding that his typically infallible instincts are deserting him. The torrential rain in São Paulo last November, for example, should have been his opportunity to dazzle, bringing his full range of amphibian brilliance to the fore. Instead he was knocked out in the first phase of qualifying, creating such misery that he briefly floated the idea of breaking his Mercedes contract early.
At Ferrari, there is no option of repeating this fit of pique. Hamilton is being paid £50 million a year to restore glory to the Prancing Horse, but so far that prospect looks hopelessly distant. He appears deflated, crestfallen, incapable either of carving a path to a record eighth world title or even of seizing his moment at the track he has made his manor. In one sense, you could not help but feel happy for Hülkenberg, a true grafter who had been waiting to savour the podium champagne for 15 years. But as he relished the fulfilment of a lifetime ambition, he acknowledged the weather had come to his aid, that the outcome would have been very different in the dry. The Sauber, after all, is supposed to be a backmarker, not a podium-chaser. What to make, then, of the fact that Hamilton, cheered relentlessly by his disciples at his beloved Silverstone, could still not reel it in? You could only regard it, ultimately, as the most damning evidence yet of his diminishing powers.