Will Hamilton be rattled by Russell?

Hamilton vs Rosberg – Part 2

Rosberg was firmly beaten in 2015 but he re-grouped and came back fighting the following year after spending two hours every other day working with a mental coach to get his mind into gear to beat Hamilton.

“It really brought huge improvements for me, especially in 2016,” Rosberg revealed in 2019. “That is how I beat Lewis. It was learning why am I jealous, why am I scared, why do I have a fear of failure and how do I deal with it?”

Rosberg won the first four races of the season and had Hamilton rattled. The Briton was on pole for the fifth, but Rosberg made it past and by turn four the pair had collided when Hamilton tried to get the place back.

At the next race in Monaco, Hamilton revealed the pair had spoken but said: “We didn’t talk through the incident. There are more emotional beings on the planet who will talk a lot about it but we don’t need to do that.”

Again, Hamilton turned the inner frustration into dominant form, winning six of the following seven races including Austria, where the pair collided again when Hamilton went around the outside to take the lead on the final lap.

After the controversial event in Austria, Hamilton rubbed salt in Rosberg’s wounds, explaining: "I had to go to the outside, but even got past him - which was mega. It's very hard to do that here.”

The incident, however, led team boss Toto Wolff to take a more active role in managing the rivalry and at the time he said: “In Barcelona, I was much easier with it because we had 29 races without any collision.

“It was clear it was eventually going to happen [but] from my naive thinking I said to myself 'Okay, that's it, they've learned their lesson. They've seen the consequences and it's not going to happen any more.'

“One option is to freeze the order of a certain stage in the race. It's unpopular, it makes me puke myself because I like to see them race, but if the racing is not possible without contact, then that's the consequence.”

It all went Hamilton’s way until Belgium, when a 60-place grid penalty for replacing his engine and gearbox put him to the back of the grid. He made it up to the podium in third, but Rosberg started a run of four wins in five.

After a tough wet race in Japan, it was out of Hamilton’s hands as even if he won all four remaining races, Rosberg just had to finish second each time to maintain his lead to the end.

Hamilton won three, then at the final race, in a determined bid to snatch the title, he took the lead and tried to back Rosberg into the chasing Ferrari of Sebastian Vettel to put his team-mate in trouble. It almost paid off, but not quite.

Hamilton vs Russell

As Hamilton prepares for what is likely to be another big team-mate challenge, he will need to draw from the benefit of all his 288 races of experience, and particularly from the years discussed above.

Russell is now the driver Mercedes has pinned its future hopes on, much like Hamilton was when he made his F1 debut with McLaren alongside Fernando Alonso in 2007.

Behind the friendly front, Russell is just as determined a racer as young Hamilton was at McLaren, and while he will not want to upset his employers, his job is to get the best results for the team. And if that means beating Hamilton, so be it.

Speaking before Russell’s signing had been confirmed, Hamilton’s former team-mate Button said: “It puts pressure on his shoulders because he's never had a young hotshot come into his team that he's had to beat.”

In November, Hamilton said he expected Russell to have the same attitude that he had himself when up against Alonso, telling Auto Motor Und Sport: “He will certainly be quick and want to win whatever you set out to do for a new role.

“I remember saying before the duel with Alonso that I wanted to beat him right in the first race. I expect George to approach the matter with the same attitude, otherwise, he wouldn't be a winner.”

In December, Toto Wolff was already recalling the Hamilton-Rosberg rivalry of 2016, saying: “Trying to manage the two sides of the garage and obviously not being one-sided but keeping everything transparent was very, very difficult.”

He said he did not “want to go back to the difficulties of that relationship” where, he recalled, in 2014, he had to rule with an “iron fist” to eliminate “selfish behaviour” and steer the pair back into a team mentality.

“If the debriefing room is full of negativity because the two drivers are hostile with each other, then that will spill over into the energy into the room and that is not something I will ever allow again,” he added.

“[At that time] I couldn’t change it because the drivers were hired before I came. Nobody actually thought ‘What is the dynamic between the two? What is the past between the two?’

“There was a lot of historical context that none of us knew and will never know. That’s why it is something we are looking at - how do the drivers work with each other, what happens in the case of failure of one and the other.”

The battle will commence in March. New cars, new rules, and a former champion still eager to secure that record eighth championship.

And, if Russell does get ahead, then past history suggests he had better watch his back.

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