F1 | Lewis Hamilton, the ungrateful…

One hundred pole positions, ninety-eight victories, seven world titles. Lewis Hamilton is an F1 legend, he is chasing his eighth world championship and owes much of his extraordinary career to Mercedes, which has provided him with a lethal weapon under his butt since 2014.

And Lewis is an all-round global champion, a charismatic sportsman who fights for the most disparate social, political and environmental struggles, pursuing an ideal of justice. A champion on and off the track. But is he capable of being so even when things go wrong?

The question arises spontaneously because the reaction to seventh place in Monte Carlo - a bad race can happen to anyone - is one that leaves one highly perplexed. There was something about Hamilton's way of acting in the mix zone, in front of the microphones, wrong, haughty, almost inexplicable and certainly unexpected.

After a GP that went badly, where the driver never found the feeling with the single-seater, we expect declarations of unity, of a desire for redemption, but instead Lewis was nervous, angry, extremely harsh towards the team that has assisted and pampered him for years .

A totally ungrateful Hamilton, the driving force of the team, the lighthouse on which Mercedes has cemented its fortunes who attacks the team publicly, scolds it, blurts out. From the "They didn't want to listen to me, I told them what to do" al “We have to work on what happened because a weekend like this can't be repeated again, there's a lot to talk about in the team, it's not going that way” it is a grim and frowning Lewis who places all the responsibility on the team, absolving himself. There is no self-criticism, there is no sense of belonging, there is no unity. Just the outburst of a suddenly arrogant and ungrateful driver towards that team to which he owes a lot, if not everything.

One might think that Hamilton is simply hypocritical when he congratulates his rivals, when he hopes to fight on an equal footing with other cars and with other colleagues, when he says he exalts himself in difficulties. Everything is fine as long as he wins. He then proved to be a terrible loser, ready to lash out in a surreal way against his team at the first little difficulty.

Who knows what the Mercedes technicians and mechanics must have thought in listening to the vitriolic words of the English driver after the race in Monte Carlo, in hearing their champion complain so blatantly and publicly about the team's work, the behavior of the W12, like a capricious prima donna , light years away from any concept of "team".

Antonino Rendina

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