The car is not the only key area of Mercedes in which the bar has been raised in recent times. That also applies to the team’s lead driver.
Hamilton has said that in the second half of last year he found a “sweet spot” – and that he has held on to it ever since. The result has been 12 wins in the past 17 races.
This has coincided with a marked change in the Briton – over the past two and a half years he has become a much more serene character than the occasionally anguished figure of his first three or four years at Mercedes, or his McLaren years.
Equally noticeable is a recurring theme in Hamilton’s life, and coverage of it – he receives criticism for what is perceived by some to be an irresponsible lack of commitment to his job, such as flying from Shanghai to New York to launch his new clothing collection before last year’s Singapore Grand Prix, only for him to turn up at the race and smash it out of the park.
Wolff is unapologetic about the freedom he gives his lead driver to live his life the way he wants to – in fact, he says it is key to his on-track performance.
“Most important is to acknowledge that we are all different individuals and we need different frameworks in order to perform well,” Wolff says.
“Lewis is somebody who needs to be able to pursue his other ambitions and interests. And rather than putting somebody in a box and saying, ‘This is how a racing driver needs to behave – you need to be on time, you need to avoid jet lag before the race, or don’t record music overnight when you are jet-lagged but try to sleep,’ I realised very early on that giving him the freedom of pursuing his interests, we were able to extract more performance on track.
“I have the feeling that he needs to get his mind off motor racing. If he’s able to do a fashion show that excites him, or record some music, or do some snowboarding with his friends, he forgets about the racing side, and he can come back stronger and more energised.”
And yet Wolff did not know this the first time he allowed it to happen, after which he needed the courage to continue to let it happen. Not everyone would have found that an easy idea to embrace.
“I realised in previous roles that you need to be able to accept that we all function in a different way,” Wolff says. “And sometimes the most creative people, the ones that are able to outperform others and perform on a different altitude, are the ones that live a different life. And you just need to be able to embrace that.
“When you take the analogy to a very popular sport in the UK – rugby – you need the solid members of the team that keep the team going. But you realise that probably the geniuses score the tries, and these are the ones that are sometimes not easy to integrate in a structure that needs process.
“But with Lewis, we love who he is and he is clearly an absolutely outstanding athlete, and we have been able to embed him in the organisation. And he has been able to inspire us and drag us with him.”