Is Hamilton playing ‘mind games’ and giving Russell "false hope"?

Russell unexpectedly beat Hamilton in his first year at Mercedes and is already 3-0 up in this year’s qualifying head-to-heads, though a retirement at the Australian Grand Prix has left him 20 points behind the seven-time world champion in the drivers’ standings. 

As the closely-fought intra-team battle at Mercedes heats up, the relationship between the British duo is being observed and scrutinised extremely closely. 

And FIA press conference and F1 Nation podcast host Tom Clarkson has floated the idea that Hamilton might be attempting to lull his younger teammate into a false sense of security. 

“In the press conference [in Australia], after qualifying, they’d qualified second and third in Melbourne. Max, of course on pole,” Clarkson said on the latest episode of the F1 Nation podcast.

“And every time a question was posed to both of the Mercedes drivers, Lewis was quite happy for George to answer the question.

“He almost became the spokesperson for the team in that press conference. And I was interested as to why Lewis was happy to just sit back and let that happen. I don’t know whether he’s sort of keeping his powder dry.

“Is he trying to sort of give him a sort of false hope of being the dominant person, and then he’s going to really hit him hard where it matters most on the stopwatch later on?

“I don’t know what his thought process was. But it was interesting anyway, to observe that he very much let George be the man.”

Asked for his take on the fascinating dynamic between the Mercedes teammates, 1996 world champion Damon Hill said: “We [drivers] are competitive.

“And we are kind of political as well. You have to be aware of rising forces or rising empires within the team. George has to make himself a valued asset of the team. And he’s obviously doing that really well.

“But at the same time, he’s the one that has to do all the hard work. I think Lewis doesn’t have to. They [Mercedes] know what they’ve got with Lewis, and they know that given half a sniff of a chance, he’s going to be back on on top form and can deliver those extraordinary races.

“They know that George can do that too. But he has yet to prove all that.

“So I think Lewis is very good and will suss all this out and then he’ll be sitting there thinking ‘well, okay, I’ll let you do all the hard work, George, because it’s exhausting doing all this’.

“George is also the director of GPDA so he’s got a big workload, George, he’s taken on quite a lot.

“But I think Lewis’ strategy has always been to remove as many distractions as possible and leave time for downtime and clarity.”