“He’s started to see the benefits of it”– Mercedes reveal Lewis Hamilton’s changed opinion on simulator

“He’s started to see the benefits of it”– Mercedes’ boss Toto Wolff talks about the changed attitude of Lewis Hamilton towards simulators.

Mercedes’ superstar Lewis Hamilton used to be an old school when it came to training oneself on the simulators. Still, now he has apparently changed his opinions after recently using it.

With Hamilton’s back-to-back defeat in Austria, he used the simulator for a while before heading for Silverstone, and Toto Wolff now reveals it has changed his opinion on the technology.

“Yes, the simulator wasn’t his most favourite tool in the past. But I think we’ve developed it to a quite good level and made it best in class, and he’s started to see its benefits,” he said.

“This fight is so tough that you need to just grab every single marginal gain, and that’s why we’ve progressed together to better understand the car also with the tool of the simulator.”

The updates for Silverstone weren’t big.

Apart from convincing Hamilton to use the simulator, Mercedes also brought in some upgrades for the race in Silverstone, but according to Wolff, they weren’t significant.

“The upgrades weren’t big, but if you keep adding them up it can make a difference,” said Wolff. “We are still a little bit down on performance, no doubt about that. I think in race pace it would have been pretty similar.”

“[But] we halved the deficit [to Red Bull] in terms of performance and you just need to mobilise everything in your arsenal of weapons and that’s what [Lewis] is doing as a driver and we as a team.”

“There will be trickier ones, there will be better ones, but scoring these big points [at Silverstone] is important,” he added. Next up in F1, Hungary is going to organize the next race the following weekend.

About the author

Tanish Chachra

Tanish Chachra is the Motorsport editor at The SportsRush. He saw his first race when F1 visited India in 2011, and since then, his romance with the sport has been seasonal until he took up this role in 2020. Reigniting F1's coverage on this site, Tanish has fallen in love with the sport all over again. He loves Kimi Raikkonen and sees a future world champion in Oscar Piastri. Away from us, he loves to snuggle inside his books.

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