Hello! Welcome into this edition of Formula Curious! Please, make yourselves comfy.

Lewis Hamilton made an unusual statement in his media pen interviews over the Hungarian GP race weekend:

“I’m just useless. Absolutely useless. [….] We’ve seen the car’s on pole. Probably need to change driver. ”

This level of bluntness shocked at least one interviewer, Lawrence Barretto, and he responded, “Sorry, can you say that again.” During that interview, as part of the post-quali reactions, Lewis continued on his self flagellating comments, Lawrence interrupted, “That’s clearly not the case,” but Lewis continued, not having any of it, clearly very uncomfortable being in the media pen at that point.

Unsurprisingly, this “I’m useless” comment was picked up and ran with by many media outlets. Sky F1 did a follow up interview with Lewis, asking him if he still felt that way. I guess, trying to get him to say it again. He didn’t.

But he did hint at a reason for his recent “poor” performance. Lewis said:

“There’s a lot going on in the background that is not … great.”

This bit of of his response wasn’t picked up on by Sky F1, and doesn’t seem to be widely reported. I won’t speculate on what he’s referring to, but having Things affect your performance is not unusual.

There’s also the mitigating factor that he is still new to a very different car, that his teammate is also usually struggling with. But, he loves the Hungaroring.

Fun fact: the only driver to be more sucessful at one track than Lewis Hamilton at the Hungaroring, is Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone.

The Race did a video where they explained a little about how the media pen interviews work and, importantly, when. They say that the interviews used to be longer after the practice/quali/race but now they aren’t. And, as a result we get far more raw comments from the drivers.

But the frustration is because he cares. He’s achieved more in Formula 1 than anyone else, and it will probably take a while before his records are surpassed. But he’s still in the game and he still cares.

Lewis is by no means the only driver to be self critical in the media pen. Charles Leclerc, Lando Norris are also popular figures to be written about when someone wants to point to a “weak” driver.

The thing is, Formula 1 drivers are not normal people. Regular people going through such negative thinking spirals would for sure be suffering from at least some thing, and likely a few things.

These drivers don’t get to that level by thinking like regular people. They are elite, high performance athletes.

But imposter syndrome can come for us all.