Your teammate, they say in F1, is your chief rival. Well Lewis Hamilton certainly seems to take that sentiment to heart.
The three-time world champion has had some high-profile fallings out with his teammates in the past. And now he’s calling for an end to the longstanding practice of sharing data between them.
“I go out, do my laps, do all my homework and the other guy can see everything, and I don’t think they should,” Hamilton was quoted in a report on AutoWeek. “I have asked my team. I don’t want to see my teammate. I don’t feel it’s fair that he brings his A-game and I should be able to study his A-game on a computer.”
That doesn’t bode well for Valtteri Bottas, who is joining Mercedes this season as Hamilton’s teammate to replace Nico Rosberg. Bottas will undoubtedly need as much help as he can get to get the most out of the new Silver Arrow, and so will his team – especially with the changes in store for this year in terms of both staff and regulations.
Notoriously finicky, Hamilton has had some abrasive relationships with his wingmen in the past. The driver started out at McLaren, where his rivalry with Fernando Alonso prompted the Spanish champ to leave the team after just one season in 2007. He seemed to have gotten along relatively well with Jenson Button, but since switching to Mercedes, Hamilton’s acrimonious relationship with Rosberg had escalated to Senna-Prost levels (if not beyond) before Rosberg won the championship, dropped his mic, and walked off stage.
Hamilton’s call for data privacy, while applying to his fellow drivers, does not however extend to the team’s engineers. “I am not against the engineers sharing data, but I don’t think the drivers should be able to study each other’s data,” said Lewis.
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