Lewis to Mercedes: Good or Bad

Only time will tell.

I feel a little sad that Lewis Hamilton has decided to move from McLaren to Mercedes. I know a lot of Lewis fans will also, indeed it's a little like Nigel Mansell moving from Williams to Ferrari for 1989 or Jensen Button moving from Brawn to McLaren for 2010. Feels like the end of an era, and indeed it is. The all British team (just about) is over.

It feels like the wrong decision. McLaren creates cars that wins GPs nearly every year, it knows how to win, and at the moment it has the fastest car - so why would he leave?

Look at it from Lewis's point of view, though, and you may come to some different conclusions. McLaren has not won the drivers championship since 2008 (Brawn in 2009), and has not won the constructors championship since 1999 (Brawn in 2009). This year McLaren have had the best car for most of the season, barring a few races mid-season, and yet, even with Lewis driving magnificently, Lewis is 52 points behind Fernando Alonso in the championship. Pit-stop cock ups, bad performance on wet tyres, a major mess up in Barcelona qualifying, and a little unreliability have nearly destroyed his championship.

Even though McLaren know how to win races, they are a bit rusty on winning championships - the days of 1989 are long gone. Ross Brawn has much more recent experience of running a consistent championship contender.

Look to the future. In 2014 there is a new engine formula and the Mercedes engine could be the best one and gelled with a Mercedes chassis, designed so well for it, could be the class of the field. McLaren will be a customer team and might not have so privileged access to the data. There's rumours of Vodafone leaving McLaren too, probably hastened by Lewis's departure. Mercedes has also hired some big names this year; Aldo Costa from Ferrari and Bob Bell from Renault. They could be just about to set the world alight, whereas McLaren tend to build a good car every other year.

I think it's likely that the McLaren and Mercedes offers were pretty similar in monetary terms with a little more branding opportunities at Mercedes, but I don't think this is the crux of Lewis's motivation to move. An article on Autosport struck me as very pertinent. The essence of the article is that Lewis has grown up with McLaren, it's a parent-child relationship and now it's time for Lewis to break out and become an 'adult'. A good point made was that in 2007 Hamilton was on the verge of winning the championship on his first attempt in China and was kept out on very visible thread-bare tyres. I remember shouting at the TV screen for 5 laps that he should go into the pits and McLaren kept him out. That must rankle with him, he should have definitely won that championship. We know Lewis believes he should have won more than his solitary championship.

The relationship has soured in the last few years a little. There was the lying row in Australia a few years back, and there has been friction about Lewis's use of twitter. You may call this the teen years.

Once the parent-child relationship is formed, it's pretty difficult to break free (as any child returning to the parents would know) until you leave home. And as anyone knows, you can always return home and who knows Lewis may one day return home, calling the shots, as did Nigel Mansell.

But as I say, only time will tell.

Squiffy.