Lewis Hamilton - THE HAMMER
The reigning world champion. When the going gets tough (and it will), you know what time it is.
Nobody can dispute Lewis Hamilton’s ownership of the 2014 world drivers’ championship. Nobody, that is, but Nico Rosberg, who outqualified his teammate 12-7 over the course of the season. And while Nico may still be wondering why or how it all went wrong on race days, Lewis, despite the confidence that comes from winning two world championships, certainly still has areas he needs to work on in 2015. If he can qualify on pole, his Sunday afternoons will be that much easier.
Lewis blew potential pole laps in Canada and Austria in 2014 by making errors under hard braking — mainly because he convinced himself that this was an area in which he would always have the advantage over Nico. Maybe that was the case in karting or F3, but in 2014 (Russia aside), Nico was brilliant under braking. Fact. And Lewis, instead, tended to find advantages over Nico where he perhaps wasn’t expecting it, amid the frenetic race variables with his basic use of the steering, throttle and brake pedals. The final result, as it turned out, was never about braking super-late.
Look out, then, for Lewis returning to one-lap braking basics in 2015 (or as basic as brake-by-wire can ever allow the driver to be). He’ll also need to tidy up some of his corner exits, as typified by Turn 12, Junção, at Interlagos, where Nico’s feel for the right rear was also a weekend benchmark. Nico is likely to remain Lewis’s biggest threat this year, but a host of rivals will be gearing up to try to stop the Brit.
