An unforgettable season
In 2025, Lewis Hamilton will join Ferrari with the goal, among others, of securing his eighth Drivers’ World Championship title. This would be an absolute record, one that the Briton came agonizingly close to achieving in 2021, falling just one lap short of the feat. The now-famous and controversial ending to the Abu Dhabi GP denied Hamilton the ultimate victory after a season-long, already legendary battle with Max Verstappen. However, Lewis Hamilton had managed to claw back into contention for that Abu Dhabi showdown: four races from the end, after Verstappen’s win in Mexico, the Mercedes driver trailed his direct rival by 19 points.
To win the title at that point, Lewis Hamilton needed victories in all four remaining races, a streak he would have achieved if not for Nicholas Latifi’s crash at Yas Marina. A fascinating and lesser-known detail about those final races – including the iconic double comeback in Brazil during the Sprint and GP – was revealed by Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director, in an interview on F1’s *Beyond The Grid* podcast.
Motivational group
Andrew Shovlin shared that Lewis Hamilton created a WhatsApp group called “We will do this” ahead of those critical four races, adding key team members, including Shovlin himself. According to Shovlin, this had an energizing effect on the team: “Ahead of the final four races of 2021, I was invited to join a WhatsApp group simply called ‘We will do this’ – Shovlin recounted. “Lewis had brought in a few people, and we had to win the next four races.”
“When I saw he was the one who had created the group, I had this feeling that we were really going to do it. Because if he believes he can, we’re there to back him up. He has this sense of conviction so strong it almost seems to make things happen. The turnaround he had at that moment, the dedication, the commitment, the level of detail he put in to ensure we could win four races in a row, was incredible.”
A bitter ending
Unfortunately for #44, that extraordinary final push wasn’t enough: “We all know what happened in the final laps of Abu Dhabi, and it’s hard to take satisfaction from how that year ended, except for the fact that we did what we had to do, we hit the targets we needed to hit,” Andrew Shovlin concluded. “We put the car where we needed it. It was fast enough. Events outside our control ensured it didn’t happen, but this is the kind of thing that makes [Hamilton] unique. That’s why he’s the best of them all.”
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