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Webber: "His personal 'battery management' is extraordinary"

6 June 2020 at 11:58
  • GPblog.com

According to former F1-driver Mark Webber it is important that you never lose motivation. The former Red Bull Racing driver himself found that difficult after years of driving in the sport. That's why he looks up to Lewis Hamilton, who can still give anything for racing after fifteen years.

Motivation problems

"That will never happen to me", thought Webber when he talked about losing motivation to Motorsport-Total.com. "Then you're fifteen years ahead of me, and of course I've lost my motivation. Maybe it's only two or three percent, but that has an effect. After fifteen years you might want to go home a little earlier, but you don't want your engineers to do that."

Someone who has been successful in his personal 'battery management' for years is six-time world champion Lewis Hamilton. At 35, the Briton is even older than Sebastian Vettel and the oldest driver on the grid after Kimi Raikkonen, but he regularly takes his liberties that he has since moving to Mercedes in 2013.

Against the trend

"Hamilton could overcome this trend", Webber thinks. "He's invested in not draining his batteries. With the private jet, with his management, or by telling Toto [Wolff] that he doesn't want to go to the track on Thursday and won't be there until Friday. Whatever. The number of days he's completed is extraordinary."