Autosport - 5 March 2015 | Page 28

SEASON 28 PREVIEW XPB IMAGES WorldMags.net Ferrari aims to make 2015 more than just the Lewis/Nico show It was after this flashpoint that part one of the Hamilton/Rosberg rivalry seemed to (sadly) fizzle out. Mercedes came down hard on Rosberg, fining him part of his wages after a bizarre social-media poll asking fans how he should be punished for breaking the golden rule of professional motorsport: ‘don’t drive into your team-mate’ It’s not that . Rosberg lost any of his speed (his qualifying form remained peerless), but errors in the races – that previously weren’t there – began to creep in. Meanwhile, Hamilton seemed galvanised by the team’s reaction to Rosberg’s petulance. For a driver who has seemed so emotionally driven in the past – displaying the sort of ‘you’re-either-with-meor-against-me’ persona that defined his hero Senna – the realisation that Mercedes did not favour his team-mate in moments of conflict (something he certainly did not think after qualifying in Monaco) appeared to put Hamilton at ease. After Spa, Hamilton won six of the final seven races of the season, and could easily have made it a clean sweep but for a small misjudgement adjusting his brake balance for fading tyres while hunting down Rosberg in Brazil. In the past, Hamilton has been known to go off the rails when off-track matters unsettle him. Anyone who watched his bizarre sequence of uncharacteristic mistakes and collisions during his penultimate season at McLaren in 2011 will attest to this. But when all is right with his world, Hamilton can be unstoppable. That’s the Hamilton we saw dominating F1 in the closing stages of last season, but he has since split up with his on-off celebrity girlfriend Nicole Scherzinger, while his contractual situation with Mercedes (his current deal with F1’s top team expires at the end of this year) remains unresolved heading into the new campaign. These are small, external details, but they can be significant with regard to mental and emotional stability, and are thus potential areas of weakness that Rosberg (happily re-signed to Mercedes last summer and expecting a child, “I WANT TO BE ABLE TO ENJOY THE BATTLE. THAT IS WHAT I LIVE FOR” LEWIS HAMILTON 28 AUTOSPORT.COM MARCH 5 2015 WorldMags.net having recently married his long-time partner Vivian) could exploit. Hamilton has not looked particularly happy during pre-season testing, but many racing drivers of high calibre find this task arduous. He has also been unwell, which won’t have helped his mood . Regardless of off-track matters, if Hamilton can retain the supreme ‘zen-like’ balance he found inside the car at the end of last season, there may be nothing in the world Rosberg can do to stop him winning a third world championship. “It feels exactly like the start of 2014,” says Hamilton of the impending season. “I’m actually in a better position in terms of my approach to the software and set-up. I’m in a better position, but mentally it feels just like last year; I want to win, but how am I going to learn, to execute on race weekends, to improve? “It starts on Fridays, which was what impacted qualifying. This year I’ll be working to improve in FP1, FP2 and FP3; those are the areas that need to be strengthened. Last year, if I’d done better in qualifying, it would have made the races easier – not that I want to have it easy, but I’ll definitely try to improve those areas.” Although Mercedes’ rivals are desperately trying to improve too, in an effort to make F1 more than an all-Mercedes battle for glory, there is something to be said in favour of the team retaining its dominant position in 2015. If – as many suspect it will – Mercedes increases its advantage over the rest, then Hamilton