Hamilton interview: How Mercedes lost and found its Northern Star in 2023

Lewis Hamilton endured a second consecutive winless Formula 1 season in 2023. With the campaign now over, the seven-time champion talks about his frustrations with the W14, Mike Elliott's departure from the team, the pressure Toto Wolff is under, and much more

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If it was remarkable that Lewis Hamilton had a first winless season in Formula 1 in 2022, it was perhaps unthinkable that his victory drought would extend for at least another 12 months. A combination of Red Bull producing the utterly dominant RB19, allied to Mercedes stumbling at the first hurdle with the design of its W14, left Hamilton treading water in 2023 as Max Verstappen roared to his third straight drivers’ crown.

From the outside Hamilton’s 2023 campaign appears to be little better than the previous year, but the dynamics within his Mercedes team have been different. Some of this has been a positive – in Mercedes wasting no time in committing to a new car concept and unlocking potential from that, rather than flogging a dead horse and sticking with a design that was clearly going nowhere.

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Author Jonathan Noble

Jonathan Noble is Motorsport.com’s Formula 1 editor. Having graduated from University of Sussex Jonathan worked for sports news agency Collings Sports reporting on F1, F3, touring cars and other sports, with articles appearing in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Reuters, Autosport and other publications. In 1999 he moved to Haymarket Publishing to become a senior editor at Autosport Special Projects, and one year later he became Autosport’s grand prix editor. In 2015 he moved to Motorsport Network, becoming the F1 editor for Motorsport.com. He is also a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers, and sits on the FIA Media Council.

Jonathan has won multiple awards for journalism - in 1991 he was the winner of the Guild of Motoring Writers’ Sir William Lyons’ Award for young journalists, in 2010 he was awarded the Outstanding Individual accolade for consumer journalism in the Haymarket wards, in 2011 he won Haymarket’s Scoop of the Year, and in 2018 he was awarded a prestigious Medaglia d’Oro at the Lorenzo Bandini Awards for his contribution to F1 journalism.