Lewis Hamilton has a happy happy, joy joy interview/post at his official website in which he says, in part, “I’m just incredibly happy at the moment.”
Being at the top of the drivers race will do that.
He also says that this year’s McLaren is the best Formula 1 car he’s ever driven, which begs the question: Just how good is that Red Bull? Is it maybe an all-time design?
But back to Hamilton:
“Wow, 86 points from 100? That’s 86 per cent – I’d have loved those marks when I was at school! Haha! When you look at it like that, it does sound good, yeah, absolutely. I’ve said it before, but I think I’m able to get those kinds of results because our car is just so fantastic to drive. My car in 2008 was fantastic, but, even though we’re not quite as quick as the Red Bull, this year’s car is still the best Formula 1 car I’ve ever driven.
[snip]
“Every day, I’d go out onto the pitwall just to wave at the fans, and I couldn’t believe how much support they were giving our team. Hopefully, they had a fantastic weekend – the weather was perfect, the racing was great, and we got a great result.
“Hopefully, next year, Jenson and I can come back and deliver a one-two – which I think would just blow the roof off the whole place. Wouldn’t that be amazing?â€
[snip]
“And you’d probably say we started from zero on Saturday morning, except that we didn’t, because Gary and the team did their homework in the simulator on Friday night. Those guys did a fantastic job, and they really made our race, because when we got in the car on Saturday morning, we hit the ground running because we had a lot of confidence in their data. That was a great example of the team really pulling it out of the bag, and it helped us get a result that, on paper, shouldn’t really have been possible.
“Now, we need to spend the next 10 days really digging deep to get the T3 floor back on the cars and make sure it has a positive impact at the next race in Germany. The guys back at the factory are already working hard at it, and I’m sure we can get it to work soon.â€
We definitely seem to have happy Lewis on our hands.
In this era of testing bans — and this is something Todd’s pointed out more than once — the job that McLaren can do at improving its car is pretty amazing. If I had to guess, I’d say there’s still a few hundreds of a second that could be pulled out of that car. I’m not sure if that’s true of the Red Bull.
And that’s what should make the race between these two teams pretty entertaining in the coming months.
