Hamilton on his improvements: 'I now know what I need in the car'

Lewis Hamilton is now driving his seventeenth season in Formula 1. At Fox Sports Australia he reveals what he has learned in his career and how he has improved. He says that, among other things, he has learned how to deal with disappointment and that these days he knows exactly what he needs from a car.

Hamilton has been around for a while and has enjoyed hugely successful periods. Between 2014 and 2020, he won six out of seven world titles. Since 2022, his team Mercedes has been less successful, managing to win only one of the past 25 races. This victory was not achieved by Hamilton, but by his younger teammate George Russell.

The seven-time world champion is currently going through a disappointing period in Formula 1, but he says he can deal with it just fine these days. "Particularly when I was younger when I had a bad race you couldn’t talk to me for days - I was in such a dark place often. So being able to recover from that, you know past is past five minutes ago I can’t change that but what I can change is how I move forwards. So that was a huge step for me," said the seven-time world champion.

The Briton also says he is much more knowledgeable about the car than he used to be. That obviously helps a lot in finding the right setup for his car. "I understand the car so much more now than when I did when I first got here. I was at the mercy of the engineers around me. I couldn’t dictate a huge amount, I couldn’t say: Hey guys this is the direction we need to go. But I can do that now, I know what I need in the car."