Ross Brawn believes Lewis Hamilton would deserve to equal Michael Schumacher’s record of seven world titles should the British driver take the championship this season. Formula One’s sporting director considers both drivers to be exceptional but that their skills differ because the sport has changed since the German’s era.
Brawn, who has also been fundamental in shaping the form F1 will take, also insisted that an overdue restructuring of governance would take place next year.
Hamilton has won the world championship six times, and with stable regulations and Mercedes in imperious form last year, he approaches the new season as the strong favourite.
Brawn has worked closely with both drivers. He was the technical director at Benetton when Schumacher won his first two titles and then at Ferrari, where Schumacher secured five more between 2000 and 2004. He became principal of Mercedes in 2010, persuading Hamilton to join the team, and worked alongside him in 2013 before retiring a year later.
“They are both massively talented in what they do in the car and those moments where they pull something out of nowhere,” he said. “Some of the qualifying laps Lewis has done have left the team speechless. Michael was the same, there are sometimes just those drivers who can do that.”
Brawn joined F1 management as sporting director in 2017, since when Hamilton has taken the title every year, an achievement Brawn considers every bit as impressive as Schumacher’s. “Lewis has deserved it, he has deserved every championship he has won,” he said. “He has got himself at the right team at the right time and he is at peak performance. He doesn’t make mistakes and is a fantastic driver, his performance is exceptional.”
Brawn enjoyed a close relationship with Schumacher and the German cited him as the main reason he came out of retirement to join Mercedes in 2010. Schumacher remains in recovery after suffering a brain injury while skiing in 2013.
Brawn recognises that Hamilton has earned his place in the record books on merit. “It is not like Lewis is winning out of luck,” he said. “He is winning because he is doing a fantastic job and you have to give him credit.”
This will be Hamilton’s 14th season in F1 but he remains motivated and the new season, which starts in Melbourne on 15 March, looms large. However, Brawn feels it is difficult to make direct comparisons between Hamilton and Schumacher. “They were different cars, different eras, different competition,” he said. “Lewis is incredibly professional, dedicated and committed but Michael had an intensity of detail toward the car that Lewis doesn’t need.
“Michael came up in an era where there wasn’t the technology there is now. Data analysis was pretty crude. Now a driver gets out of the car and the engineer has an analysis of the car’s behaviour through every corner. When I first worked with Michael we had a sheet with the corner numbers on and he had to explain where he had understeer or oversteer and we would then analyse that.”
Brawn has been at the centre of framing the new regulations for 2021, including technical changes and the introduction of a budget cap. He was insistent the sport has to evolve and the changes are intended to promote closer racing.
“These cars at the moment are terrible aerodynamically when they get close to each other,” he said. “They have a plethora of bits that fall off as soon as they look at each other. That’s not a racing car, you don’t want a tank but you want something which is robust enough to race properly and we have lost that.”
He has also been instrumental in overhauling the sport’s governance, which has been unwieldy and restrictive. In the past all the teams had to agree to make changes, which has left F1’s management struggling to achieve objectives. Last season a new sprint race format for qualifying was rejected. The system expected to be agreed for 2021 will require only a majority or super-majority –a seven-eight split – to authorise a proposal. It will also enable F1 to deal swiftly in closing loopholes in regulations that teams may be exploiting.
“We are moving away from this unanimity which has always blocked anything happening,” Brawn said. “It has been counterproductive. We are moving away from the rigid, locked situation where things can’t change even when they are wrong. Developing F1 is not just technical or sporting regulations, it’s financial regulations and the governance.”
