Q+A with Lewis Hamilton

Although the fight for the championship title gets closer and closer, Vodafone McLaren Mercedes F1 Team driver Lewis Hamilton remains very optimistic towards the end of the season. The Briton is preparing for the following race in front of the Ferrari fans at Monza.

"At most races, I arrive on a Wednesday or a Thursday, it’s good to be chilled and relaxed when you get to the track because there’s a lot of work to do. One of the first things I like to do is walk the track with my engineers. After that, we’ll go through a run programme for the weekend – we’ll discuss the changes we might have made in testing, what we’ll be running on the car that’s new and what we expect to do throughout the two free practice sessions on Friday. Then it’s a bit of media work, interviews and TV stuff, dinner in the Brand Centre and an early night.”

“It’s one of the closest bonds you have in racing so it’s essential that you have a good, close working relationship. My race engineer is Phil Prew, and we spend a lot of the time talking together with the other engineers, looking at the data, thinking about set-up and drawing everything together so that when we get in the car, we know what we are doing and what direction we are going in.”

“Well, firstly, we do a lot of work back at the McLaren Technology Centre to ensure we arrive at each track in very good shape set-up wise. That means when we hit the track on Friday morning I normally have a pretty good idea of how the car needs to be, how to find its sweet-spot. It’s never a good idea to make a snap judgment on the car, because the track is often dirty and slippery, but that first impression is usually pretty representative of your overall pace – I can feel if the car is going to be good or not.”

“We make small changes to the car – usually to the front wing, the brake balance, the tyre pressures, just giving the car little hints to make it better; that’s what modern F1 is about – detail changes that just improve your feel in the cockpit. It’s unusual for us to make big changes, things like changing the ride-height, changing the suspension or changing the rear wing. If you make a big change and go the wrong way on set-up, it can be difficult to get back to a good baseline.”

“It’s a question I’m asked quite a lot, actually. You just feel it – you can pretty much find the limit at any circuit straight away but, sometimes during the weekend, you might make a small mistake at a corner, miss an apex or run wide. The best feeling is when you’re in qualifying and you manage to string it all together at once, getting every corner just right – it wasn’t totally perfect, but that’s the sort of feeling I got at Spa in qualifying.

"Also, you just feel so connected to the car. I can honestly say that our car just feels amazing to drive – not only does it react to every change we make to it in the garage, but it also feels really responsive to drive on the circuit. The buzz you get from being totally plugged-in to a racing car is just crazy.”

“The only things you can do really is to adjust the front-wing flaps and maybe change the tyre pressures. The rules don’t let you change anything else, so you’re pretty much stuck with the car you started the race with. But I don’t like to change too much during the race – maybe a small turn on the front wing if the car doesn’t feel perfect.”

“All of the circuits are a challenge, but Monza is unique: you can literally feel the history of the place when you see the old banking, and it’s the only track that places such individual demands on the car. It’s the only place where we trim off all the downforce and run a seriously stripped-down aero package. It’s the fastest circuit of the lot – we’re reaching 350km/h along the main straight – and that’s pretty quick. I think we’ll be quick.”

"I have spent many of my junior karting years racing in Italy and it is a place that is really, really close to my heart. I have some extremely great friends in Italy and so I am looking forward to being there this weekend."