Lewis Hamilton says he is surprised how much his old team McLaren is struggling in 2015.<\/p>\n
“When I saw them so lost in Australia, I thought to myself ‘How can that be?'” the reigning world champion said, referring to the once-great British team.<\/p>\n
Having been mentored and sponsored by Ron Dennis throughout his boyhood, Hamilton made his debut for the Woking team in 2007, winning his first title a year later.<\/p>\n
Eight years on, the now-superstar Hamilton is dominating formula one with his new team, Mercedes, and speculating that McLaren “underestimated” the challenge of switching to works Honda power.<\/p>\n
“When you think of their factory, their history, their potential, (where McLaren is now) seems impossible,” Hamilton is quoted by Spain’s El Pais newspaper.<\/p>\n
“They decided to change the engine and my experience tells me that in F1 it is quite common when challenges are underestimated.<\/p>\n
“For example, in 2009 when the double diffuser (introduced by Brawn GP) suddenly came into play, most people underestimated that.<\/p>\n
“I love that Mercedes doesn’t underestimate anything,” Hamilton insisted.<\/p>\n
“It made sense that McLaren would not be fighting to win.\u00a0 I am convinced that they will do so again, the question is when.”<\/p>\n
Struggling with the Woking team in 2015 is Hamilton’s first McLaren teammate, Fernando Alonso, who Hamilton says deserves more than his career tally of two titles.<\/p>\n
“You make the decisions you make,” he said, “but you also need to be in the right place at the right time.<\/p>\n
“Michael Schumacher won seven titles but I see Alonso on the same level as him in terms of talent,” Hamilton added.<\/p>\n
“He (Alonso) made his own decisions but when you look at Ferrari now, how well they are going and you think that he left when he still had a contract, you think ‘My god!'” he said.<\/p>\n
McLaren had a dismal weekend in Barcelona, including 30 laps for Jenson Button that he described as “the scariest of my life” due to handling problems.<\/p>\n
“After today, I don’t think I expect points at all this year,” the 2009 world champion admitted.<\/p>\n
Alonso, meanwhile, almost collected his front jack-man in the pits when his brakes failed.<\/p>\n
Five races into his new McLaren adventure, the Spaniard might be forgiven for finally showing some signs of frustration.<\/p>\n
“It seems that many people want myself and McLaren to be frustrated,” he smiled to Spanish reporters on Sunday.<\/p>\n
“The truth is that we were four and a half seconds behind in Australia and now it is two.\u00a0 No team in history has recovered two and a half seconds in such little time.<\/p>\n
“Before we were racing alone and now we are racing other teams,” said Alonso.<\/p>\n
And Alonso says that despite the Barcelona blip, even more progress is looming.<\/p>\n
But: “We are a long way off so we need to make double steps, because everyone else is improving during the season too.<\/p>\n
“This is a very challenging project, but we are recovering well and we need to keep it up,” he added.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lewis Hamilton says he is surprised how much his old team McLaren is struggling in 2015. “When I saw them so lost in Australia, I thought to myself ‘How can that be?’” the reigning world champion said, referring to the once-great British team. Having been mentored and sponsored by Ron Dennis throughout his boyhood, Hamilton …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25464,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[3700,5262,149,5340,153,154,5284,4374,880],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29215"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29216,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29215\/revisions\/29216"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}