Lewis Hamilton's Success: The Man or the Car?

(Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

Winning the title is an amazing achievement. And winning it in the best and fastest car is great. But winning it despite your own car is even better.

I have always had more respect for the drivers that, purposefully, choose to drive for a lesser team and aim to win races and the championship by beating the best car rather than sitting in it, clocking off laps like taxi drivers, and collecting easy points.

Between 1980 and 1993, all of the titles except for two were won by drivers for either McLaren or Williams. Then Michael Schumacher. He had an impressive debut race with Jordan in 1991 before moving to Benetton for the next race.

After an astonishing wet/dry race in Spa 1992 where he collected his first win, he would go on to win the title in 1994 and again a year later. The first title being even the more impressive after being disqualified from two races and excluded from a further two. 

Seeing that Benetton had won a mere six races between 1986 and 1992, it was such a great achievement to win back to back titles against better opponents. This was a shock to McLaren and Williams, seeing their duopoly broken by the competitive young German.

Indeed, after Schumacher moved in 1996 to Ferrari, Benetton would only win one more race before morphing into Renault.

His move to Ferrari was again one to a lesser team, in that the Italians had only won two races since 1991, but Michael thought that winning the title with Ferrari and getting this historic team great again would be a far better achievement than if he had joined Williams. Doubtless he would had cruised to both the 96 and 97 titles.

He then had an opportunity to join McLaren in 1998, and for more money than Ferrari were offering, but he choose once again to stay.

This determination of winning the championship againstthe best car would result with his five titles. He indeed said "if you are in the best car, anything other than first place is losing and winning is standard. Where's the motivation in that?"

And this was backed up by his clear unhappiness with his Indy win in the farcical 2005 race. I think that was the only race he did not do his trademark jump! For Schumacher, the challenge was proving himself to be the winning factor and not his car.

In the first three Ferrari seasons he brought the team back up the championship tables with a third place and a second place (and another second place points wise in 1997 although officially he was excluded).

But this success was achieved with just nine poles and 10 fastest laps in those 49 races, meaning his car was by no means the fastest on the grid. To have scored so many points and gained wins but having such a slower car was down to Michael's ability. Triumph against the best.

So whatever views people have about Michael he didn't want to just cruise around to easy wins. His four pit-stop race adds to this in his victory in France in 2004. He was prepared to try something different to win and let it be known that he, the man, was the key to winning, not the car.

We now come to Fernando Alonso, who began in 2001 with Minardi, the perennial underachievers. He finished in eight of the 17 races and considering his car's (lack of) speed, had a successful season.

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