Mika Häkkinen questions the fact that Lewis Hamilton has lost his peak performance, after a disappointing 2024 at Mercedes F1. The Finn remembers the moment he himself realized his Formula 1 career was over.
“Well, I'll tell you what, I retired in 2001, and in that year, 2001, I started to lose track.” he told PlanetF1. “Sometimes I was very fast. Sometimes I wasn't there. I lost two or three tenths and those two or three tenths are a big, big problem.”
“So, at that moment, I decided to say to the team: 'Thank you, this has been an incredible experience and the journey of my career and my life in Formula 1, but now, for me, it It’s time to go.’ It was a very big decision, but it was mine.”
“It's impossible to comment on what's going on with Lewis, or what's going on in his mind, or what's happening right now, or why he's not performing at 100%. I'm not the right person to answer that – it's Lewis, but it was my story.”
He advises Hamilton to do the same if he perceives the same problem: “If something similar happened to him, he needs to speak out. It's up to him to answer, but he's committed to the future. So I'm sure he'll work on it to make things right. are going well this year.”
-Former boss Eddie Jordan is convinced that Hamilton is letting himself be overcome by self-doubt: “If you don't believe 100%, you're screwed. Because belief, 99.9%, means there's this tiny, little, little thing that's knocking on your head that's telling you that you don't “I don't have the ability or the confidence. And right now, what I've heard from Lewis, he's saying he's not fast enough.”
“And when people say things like 'I don't think I'm fast enough anymore,' I mean it registers in the head. Psychologically, I'm a person, yes I believe in talent, yes I believe in performance , and yes I believe in speed, but I'm a psychological person I like to know what's going on in that brain.”
“Because I think fundamentally what happens inside the brain is very often replicated in work or in the problems that you encounter, whether it's driving a car, a truck, a train, a crane, it doesn't matter. What matters is how you approach the moment.”
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