Between the lines

F1’s official FIA Press Conferences are the traditional home of ‘for sure’, ‘the team’s done an amazing job’ and ‘we’re investigating that’, but what lies behind the platitudes? F1i reckons it has the answer…

Thursday 12 March 2015 – Drivers’ Press Conference

Lewis Hamilton 

The Question: You won here in Australia back in 2008, the year you won your first title, but you haven’t won the race since then, despite being on pole a couple of times. Can you talk about how important it is for you this year to start on the front foot, as opposed to last year where you were chasing for a while in the first part of the season?

What Lewis said:

LH: It’s the same. I don’t see a particular exaggerated importance [compared] to any other time. Of course you come here and you’d like to start on the right foot, but as I did want to last year, but there is a long, long way to go so it’s not the most important start of the year.

What he might have meant:

LH: Well, James [Allen], that’s a fascinating question that raises all sorts of discussion points regarding a driver’s confidence, his expectation of future success, his optimism regarding increased car reliability, the challenge coming at him from a team-mate known to be hungry to put up an even tougher fight than last year.

What I can say is that indeed last year’s result was far from ideal. With just two laps on the board there was a catastrophic engine failure aboard my Mercedes and there my race ended.

Obviously that severely compromised my start to the season. Indeed, my team-mate and eventual title rival Nico Rosberg went on to win that race, giving him an immediate 25-point advantage over me. That deficit was not fully erased until after the Spanish Grand Prix. I won that race and in so doing led the championship for the first time.

Now, you could say that memories of such a setback would lead to a determination to post a good opening result this time out. But that is simple projection. Of course I would like a good result but the future is unknowable. All you can do is trust to the reliability we built into the car over a successful winter test period. Thereafter you have to put your faith in your own ability to extract the maximum across one lap in qualifying and then to your ability to avoid trouble at the start of the race. Then it’s all about putting in a consistent performance. If that happened then the result should come.

Errrr…. Sorry, I seem to have had a moment there. What was I saying? Basically I dunno, man, just blessed to be here.  Can I go now?