Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari nightmare

Well, it’s official – Lewis Hamilton’s debut season at Ferrari has been a disaster. It’s official because he said so himself following a catastrophic Brazilian Grand Prix. Actually he said this season has been a ‘nightmare’, but given the context I reckon those two terms are pretty well interchangeable. Either way, it’s not been what Lewis fans like me were hoping for.

Let me go one step further. For extended periods of this season, being a #44 supporter has been completely miserable. There have been silly errors, like spinning out of the Dutch GP, and absent pace, but also bad luck and a number of questionable decisions from F1’s stewards too, all of which has conspired to make one race weekend after another genuinely painful for us Hamilton fans.

He’s right to call this season a nightmare – not because it necessarily has been (we’ll come to that), but because it would be unbecoming for the sport’s most successful driver to attempt to dress it up any other way. He trails his teammate in the qualifying head-to-head 16 to 5, he’s 66 points adrift in the championship standings and he hasn’t stood on a Grand Prix podium once while Charles Leclerc has done so seven times. If it looks, feels and tastes like a nightmare, it’s better for the man at the heart of it to say as much.