F1 News: Max Verstappen Family Friend Praises Lewis Hamilton For "Unprecedented" Career
One of Max Verstappen's family friends and Dutch racing driver, Tom Coronel, has commented on one of Verstappen's main rivals, Lewis Hamilton's impressive career.
When writing for Dutch FORMULA 1 magazine, Coronel wrote about Hamilton's performance over the 2022 season.
Mercedes had many issues this year and fans saw a decline in performance which they are not used to. Both Hamilton and his teammate George Russell struggled with porpoising at the start of the year which turned out to be masking a host of other issues with the W13.
Thankfully, they had a late surge in performance towards the end of the season which saw Russell take his first F1 victory in Brazil with Hamilton in second place.
According to the fan site SilverArrows.net, Coronel wrote:
“The motivation was not there for a while, the preparation was maybe not top and he had to take stock of the competition.
“However, not hitting the sweet spot does not mean you have lost it, as he has underlined in the second half of the season.
“It is clever how he has recovered, and that he now wants to continue even longer. Because with him you could easily think: ‘you’ve seen it anyway, what do you still have to prove?’
“So that drive is there and that is unprecedented, because he doesn’t have to do it for money, fame or unfinished business,”
Although from the outside it is easy to assume that Hamilton struggled more with the car than his younger teammate, Mercedes have been quite honest throughout the season that Hamilton pushed to have more testing set-ups and a focus on collecting data on his car rather than Russell. This was partly to give Russell more of an opportunity in his first year with the team, and Hamilton has already got seven championship wins under his belt so was willing to sacrifice his performance to better the team.