For me, the Istanbul GP2 weekend will always be where Lewis Hamilton truly arrived to those in the F1 paddock who hadn’t yet figured out how brilliant he was. I remember it so vividly. The Turkey weekend came off the back of the Briton’s worst event of the whole season. His championship rival Nelson Piquet Jr had thrown down the first perfect weekend in GP2 history in Budapest, taking pole position, both race wins and both fastest laps. Istanbul was the penultimate race weekend of the championship. Hamilton had to take the initiative back. But it was Piquet who again took pole and again took the race win and fastest lap… by half a second.
Hamilton, for a moment, seemed lost. His emotions had got the better of him in Hungary, something which can still blight his momentum today, and in Turkey all those years ago it looked set to derail his championship charge.
He knew he had to do something and so, overnight, he asked ART to trim all the wing off the car they could and put it basically into Monza spec. The team thought he was crazy, warning him he’d spin without the downforce. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened at the start of Sunday’s sprint race, sending Hamilton out of the top 20 and leaving his championship hopes severely dented. What followed, however, was mesmerizing. I stood, alongside my girlfriend in the Super Aguri garage, watching in awe. One by one every engineer, every mechanic stopped what they were doing and stared at the screen agog. They applauded every lap that followed. It was a scene replicated up and down the F1 pitlane.
In spinning so early, Hamilton had learned where the limit of adhesion lay. It was a mark he would not overstep again. With substantially less downforce than his rivals, he blasted past them on the straights, and somehow held it all together through the corners. Time and again through the multi-apex Turn 8 he’d start to lose the rear but would emerge on opposite lock, almost drifting the ART through the corner. He made up every position bar the top step of the podium. In a 23-lap contest in a spec championship, without pitstops, he had overtaken almost the entire field. His fastest lap was set on the final lap and was 0.854 faster than any other driver had managed that day.
Many put that drive down to Lewis Hamilton’s guts. Most, put it down to his superior driving feel… that natural ability that had always set him out as a special and unique talent. But very few put it down his intelligence, first in going against the team in choosing the low downforce option and second in adapting his driving-style within a lap to suit a set-up he had not tested.
A lot has always been made of Hamilton’s “natural” gift and ability, and it is something that has stuck with him and formed the basis of his reputation throughout his career. But as a result of that, there’s a preconceived idea that he is a seat-of-the-pants racer who can wring the neck of a racing car like few other men on earth but who lacks any real ability to use his brain. It is a reputation that could not be further from the truth.
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