"I think Lewis' drive was utterly inspirational," Whitmarsh said. "
He may be downplaying it, because
he's a perfectionist and
he wanted to win, but to withstand such enormous pressure, for lap after lap, from a faster car, was a drive absolutely worthy of
the great champions. His finishing position may only go down in
the history books as another second place, but, make no mistake, this was a fantastic drive; beautifully assured and perfectly judged."
Whitmarsh said that an odd problem was also costing Hamilton performance and giving him a lot of understeer, which made
the drive even more impressive.
"To cap it all,
the data showed that
he was losing a significant amount of downforce from his front wing. After
the race,
we inspected Lewis's front-wing and discovered that
theleft-hand slot-gap had become filled with congealed tyre rubber, doubtless a result of
the marbles on
the track. As a result,
he was suffering with masses of understeer, which further hurts
the tyres. In
the circumstances, his was an absolutely fantastic drive because it would have been all too easy to have gone backwards when faced with such massive, and constant, pressure."
Such gushing praise from Martin. Hey RC what did you do, send him hate mails?
