When Lewis Hamilton’s lacklustre Mercedes ground to a halt with a power unit failure just 15 laps into the Australian Grand Prix, an intrusive thought must have entered his mind.
His campaign was barely three rounds old as he clambered out of the black-and-silver lemon parked by the side of the road at the exit of turn 12, his would-be rivals streaming past.
By the time Hamilton trundled back into the paddock, the thought that must have been kicking around in his head for weeks had crystallised and was ready to be given life.
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“This is the worst start to a season I’ve ever had,” said the seven-time champion of his 18th season in Formula 1.
“It’s tough on the spirit. I think for everyone in the team, when so much work has gone on throughout the winter for everybody and you come in excited, motivated and driven and you’re with the mindset that you’re going to be fighting for wins … obviously that’s not the case.
“And then you get maybe second or third, but that’s not the case, and it cascades a bit further down and you just go through the motions.”
What he wasn’t to know as Carlos Sainz took the chequered flag, cementing Ferrari’s place as Red Bull Racing’s closest challenger way ahead of Mercedes, was that he wasn’t yet at the bottom of the barrel.
Now five races into 2024 and his worst start — if you can even imagine it — has become even worse still.
IT’S NEVER BEEN AS BAD AS THIS
No matter which metric you choose, Hamilton has never completed the first five rounds of a year in worse shape than he has in 2024, his 18th campaign at the helm of a grand prix car.
At the end of the Chinese Grand Prix the Briton was slumped in ninth on the drivers championship table, the lowest he’s ever been after five races.
His best finish so far this season is seventh, comfortably the worst season-opening result he’s ever had.
The 19 points he’s scored so far is easily the most meagre tally he’s ever collected when you consider the changing points structures through his career.
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Hamilton’s worst five starts to a season after five rounds
2024: 19 points* — 9th in the standings, best finish: 7th (1)
2009: 9 points^ — 7th in the standings, best finish: 4th (1)
2022: 36 points — 6th in the standings, best finish: 3rd (1)
2010: 49 points — 6th in the standings, best finish: 2nd (1)
2013: 50 points — 4th in the standings, best finish: 3rd (2)
*Hamilton would have only 12 points if the Shanghai sprint were excluded.
^Previous scoring system. Under today’s points schedule Hamilton would have scored 23 points after five rounds in 2009
The fact 2024 eclipses his horror start to 2009 puts this year into a particularly painful perspective.
The 2009 season — Hamilton’s first as a defending champion — opened in the worst possible fashion, with the Briton disqualified from the Australian Grand Prix for misleading the stewards.
His subsequent seventh place at the Malaysian Grand Prix was rewarded with only half points after a monsoon washed out the race.
Sixth and fourth followed in China and Bahrain before a non-scoring finish in Spain to end the five-race run.
Despite suffering only one retirement and four scoring finishes, this year has been even less productive than those insipid results.
Consider too that nine of Hamilton’s 18 seasons have started without a win in the first five races and that 2024 is still his worst ever and you begin to get a sense of just how bad this year has been on a career-long scale.
HOW DID THINGS GET THIS BAD?
There is a common thread connecting Hamilton’s previous worst 2009 season and his shocking start to 2024.
In 2009 he was hamstrung by McLaren botching major rule changes. McLaren had been locked in a fraught battle with Ferrari for both titles in 2008 that had soaked up resources that would otherwise have been directed to developing the brand-new car, and both teams started 2009 way off the pace.
It’s much the same problem afflicting Mercedes this year, having struggled under the 2022-spec regulations.
Ostensibly its troubled first car was down to McLaren’s same 2009 complaint — that it had been locked in a tense title battle with Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing a year earlier.
In 2009, however, spending and development was uncapped. McLaren, a grandee of the sport, got back onto the top step of the podium by round 10 in Hungary.
Mercedes doesn’t have those same luxuries in the cost-cap era.
But it’s also clear its problems run far deeper than just being behind the development curve.
This year the team totally redesigned its car in a bid to expunge the poisonous characteristics of its machines by applying the lessons of the last two seasons.
What it built was a car that’s started the season far worse than its two predecessors.
In fact 2024 ranks among the worst ever seasons in Mercedes’s modern history.
Mercedes’ worst five starts to a season after five rounds
2011: 40 points — 5th in the standings, best finish: 5th (2)
2012: 43 points — 5th in the standings, best finish: 1st (1)
2024: 52 points* — 4th in the standings, best finish: 5th (1)
2010: 72 points — 4th in the standings, best finish: 3rd (2)
2013: 72 points — 4th in the standings, best finish: 3rd (2)
*Mercedes would have just 44 points if the Shanghai sprint were excluded.
Notable here is that 2024 is in line with the performances dating to before Mercedes’s title-winning era.
Mercedes took over the title-winning Brawn team at the end of 2009 and found a constructor on its knees.
Ross Brawn and Nick Fry had saved Brackley following Honda’s withdrawal but didn’t have the resources to build on it. Brawn GP effectively limped to both fairytale titles and was in desperate need of rebuilding.
Mercedes was eventually convinced to tip considerable sums into reconstructing the team into what became the dominant constructor of the decade.
It’s instructive that Mercedes’s current performances reflect those of its previous rebuild.
THE REALITY CHECK THE TEAM HAD TO HAVE
While on paper 2024 looks like a sharp decline, really it’s more of a correction.
The team was flattered in 2022 by Ferrari’s implosion and McLaren’s ongoing underperformance.
Last year it finished second in the standings largely because Ferrari and McLaren had such slow starts, and Mercedes was lucky to cling to position once both got going. It was likewise fortunate that Aston Martin tailed off dramatically, not helped by Lance Stroll not pulling his weight in the points tally.
“Now those teams have picked up their performance levels,” Wolff said, per Autosport. “This is a relative game, and suddenly what was good enough for third last year is now [only] good enough for sixth. That’s why it is tough.
“The car is as difficult as it has been in the past, tricky for the drivers. George [Russell], when we discussed it [on Saturday in China], said it was the trickiest qualifying car he has had so far.
“Overall, in a way, the same symptoms [as pervious years].“
Single-lap pace, frontrunners
1. Red Bull Racing: +0.003 seconds
2. Ferrari: +0.341 seconds
3. McLaren: +0.453 seconds
4. Aston Martin: +0.505 seconds
5. Mercedes: +0.663 seconds
In fact you could argue there’s still some way to drop from its current fourth place in the standings.
On qualifying pace and on estimates of race pace Aston Martin is the quicker car, and the green team — a Mercedes engine customer — would likely be ahead if Stroll were scoring at the same rate as Fernando Alonso.
Mercedes is only 12 points ahead of Aston Martin, while Stroll is 22 points behind Alonso.
Estimated race pace, frontrunners
Red Bull Racing: +0.12 seconds
Ferrari: +0.33 seconds
McLaren: +0.48 seconds
Aston Martin: +0.68 seconds
Mercedes: +0.72 seconds
Instead of being the worst of this three-year regulatory era, this might be better described as Mercedes’s true level.
And given teams don’t usually make half-second gains on the opposition in single-season cycles, that inevitably has the team looking to long-term fixes in anticipation of the new regulations in 2026.
“I believe that we are in a rebuild phase,” Wolff admitted, per Autosport. “You need to acknowledge that now three years into these regulations, we have got to do things differently than we’ve done in the past without throwing overboard what we believe is goodness in the way we operate.”
WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF 2024?
It’s not total doom and gloom for Mercedes for the rest of this season.
It’s unlikely to fall behind Aston Martin unless Silverstone comes up with some particularly powerful updates given its expected Stroll handicap in the points standings.
And though the margins are too big to move around dramatically based on execution — in China Mercedes believes it got the most out of the weekend but still ended up sixth and ninth — the teams aren’t so far apart that conditions can’t play a role.
Hamilton’s second in the Shanghai sprint was merited not on pure speed but because wet qualifying got him onto the second row, from where the clear air allowed him to manage his pace with such precision that he finished ahead of everyone bar Verstappen.
That should also be a potent reminder that Hamilton is still operating near the top of his game.
But that’s not enough for Wolff, who is growing tired of picking out tiny glimmers of hope from dire weekends.
“We can keep telling ourselves that there were bright spots at the weekend, but we have to take a step,” he told Austrian channel ServusTV.
“Today [in the Chinese Grand Prix] you’re just behind the Ferraris and behind [Lando] Norris — just not good enough.”
The trend through Mercedes’s three years of underperformance has been a fundamental lack of understanding of its car.
In previous seasons it talked about a correlation problem from factory to track. The wind tunnel would predict some astronomically high downforce figure, but in the real world the car wouldn’t be able to generate anything close to those figures, at least not consistently.
Part of the problem is that simulating ground effect aerodynamics is very difficult. The closer the car gets to the road — and the idea is to get it as close as possible — the harder it is to simulate in the wind tunnel. Mercedes’s problems have existed in that grey area.
This year, however, the problem is more confusing.
“We’re measuring downforce with our sensors, pressure taps, and it’s saying we have 70 points more downforce in a particular corner in Melbourne than we had last year, but on the lap time, it’s not a kilometre per hour faster,” Wolff said, per The Race.
“I see you looking at me like, ‘What the hell?’. Imagine what we think.”
What it does know is that the car is strong in high-speed corners. It thinks it understands why last year’s car was more competitive in slow-speed corners.
The trick now is to match theory with reality.
“We have something coming for Miami that looks like a good step,” Wolff told the UK’s Sky Sports. “Let’s see [how much performance it brings] — hopefully a bit.”
It’s not too late to save Mercedes and Hamilton from their worst-ever seasons in their final year together, but it’s unlikely be enough to do much more than save face ahead of a bigger overhaul in 2026.
Source Agencies
