Lewis Hamilton has faced a few frustrating races in 2013, but in Austin the Mercedes driver was delighted with his drive to fourth place.
He’s had better results this year, but the key was that he felt able to push hard through the afternoon in the wake of a particularly frustrating race in Abu Dhabi.
“It felt great, I’m so happy that I was able to have a race where I was going forward, and I was able to stand my ground and look after my position,” he said. “It was finally great to just have a real race.
“At this point of the year I’m the fittest I’ve been through the last seven years. The last seven years have been so draining, all the stuff that I had going on. This year I feel the best, and unfortunately although I feel the best I wasn’t able to give the results. We’ve had some problems in the last races, and to come here and get a decent result and stay ahead of Ferrari, I really am so proud of the team. And I’m proud of myself today.”
Hamilton was relieved when the team found a crack in his chassis after Abu Dhabi, and replaced it with the spare. It’s impossible for the team to quantify any gains that may have resulted, but there was definitely a psychological boost.
“Naturally when you have bad races like the last one… I personally really don’t like to blame anything else on the car, especially if you can’t see anything, or you can’t feel it so much. Naturally for me I was doing a lot of soul searching over the last couple of weeks, do I need to train more, do I need to pay more attention to something, do I need to work harder?
“We came here and was just going to try and work even harder if I could, and then we found that big crack, and the car has been night and day different this weekend. I’m pretty happy with that.”
Adam Cooper F1 
He certainly didn’t sound happy during the race – demanding his engineer be quiet one minute then criticising him for not giving more information a little later.
I asked MercedesAMGF1 about this directly on Twitter and their response was that it’s totally taken out of context and not at all indicative of the respect and professionalism that defines the relationship w/ LH and his race engineering team.
While radio messages are interesting, they are just snippets and they can be cherry picked by FOM producers to create sense of drama – or even scandal. But if you don’t believe me, just look in my Twitter feed and you’ll see the exchange w/ the Mercedes ppl.
JP
Id be pretty grumpy too if I had Webbo or Alonso chasing me and someone was trying to talk to me about traction metrics.
But I agree with JP. Ross said the same thing that sometimes Lewis gets grumpy but he always apologizes after the race. And remember, its a new team for him, so both him and his engineer need to get used to each other.
What’s your point? Lewis didn’t say anything every other F1 driver in history hasn’t said at one time or another. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for these drivers to constantly have to listen to the engineers telling them to slow down and “manage” the tires and not go proper racing. Did you have the same comment when Kimi said “Yes, yes, leave me alone I know what I’m doing?”.