Lewis Hamilton’s driving abilities can make it difficult for his team to understand his car’s behaviour on-track, according to one of his former engineers.
Williams team principal James Vowles, who worked on Hamilton’s cars when he won six world championships with Mercedes, explained the complications they sometimes encountered working with him.
“Lewis just had these oodles of natural talent,” Vowles told High Performance. “He’s got these tendencies and traits where, when you go out in [first practice], he’s like an octopus all over the wheel. He’ll change every setting of the wheel near enough and explore it. But it’s what makes him incredible.”
Hamilton’s feel for the car sometimes gave him an advantage over his team mate, such as when he was paired with Nico Rosberg, said Vowles.
“There was a time where on simulation in Brazil it said to go into seventh gear up the hill. Nico was doing exactly as we asked him to do. Within two laps, Lewis went ‘this doesn’t feel right’, went back down to sixth and was finding a tenth there.
“It took until the end of the session before Nico saw the data and saw that. He’s this optimiser. He’ll use data as the starting ground, but he’s got a feel beyond anything else for it.”
When Hamilton first joined Mercedes in 2013, he had a tendency to abort laps immediately if he made an error at the first corner, which the team gradually encouraged him to change.
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
“He has no issue exploring the boundaries,” said Vowles. “That originally manifested itself in, you’d often see him go off at turn one, he’d find the absolute limit of braking and it would just push him wide at turn one, then abort the lap.
“One of our biggest frustrations with him was that out of 20 laps, he did one. [We thought] come on, you’ve got to do more than that. And actually, if you look at the maturity Lewis had between ’13 to now, you’ll see he completes every lap. He’s now found a way of still gaining the experience and make a lap out of it.
“But he was this perfectionist and braking was his strength, his forte: ‘Maximise everything under braking and then I know the limits of the car and then I can build from there and get into the rhythm of things’.”
However the speed with which Hamilton adjusted to a circuit and explored his car’s handling configurations sometimes left his engineering team struggling to keep up.
“Because he’s explored all these boundaries he knows in just a few laps in [first practice] – and he learns the track incredibly quickly – what the boundaries of the car are, what the limits are already within his tools that he has available in the steering wheel. Which was quite fast, for what it’s worth. And [he] understands therefore how to get the car to the right positioning as the grip comes up.
“It’s very, very impressive: where others are still just spending seven or eight laps learning the track, he’s explored quite a bit of the boundaries. Now that came with some downsides, often.
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
“Often he would change the car so quick that you’d lose yourself. Certainly, as engineers, it’s difficult when your data is all moving: the track’s moving, the grip’s moving, the driver’s moved everything on the steering wheel. You don’t know where you are, and then he comes in and we’ve changed [the] aero balance. You think, okay, we’re starting from scratch here, basically.
“That’s some of the reasons why, at times, you’ll see Lewis drops backwards and often when he jumps forwards again is [because] he’s gone to a set-up that’s known and now he’s back on the money. But he’s able to do that and many drivers aren’t. He’s able to explore often, accept that he’ll have a whole session perhaps in the wrong place on set-up, but he’s learning from it and that’s Lewis all over.”
Miss nothing from RaceFans
Get a daily email with all our latest stories – and nothing else. No marketing, no ads. Sign up here:
Formula 1
- Aston Martin suffer blow as Ferrari court victory delays Cardile’s arrival to July
- Mercedes used Schumacher 1997 controversy as lesson to Hamilton and Rosberg
- Pirelli concludes latest 2026 F1 tyre test but Russell warns new rubber is “a step worse”
- Teams can be ordered to stop damaged cars under new rule after Perez’s 2024 penalty
- Confirmation of Cadillac’s 2026 F1 entry ‘should not take too long’ – Domenicali
