Formula 1: Will Lewis Hamilton tie the single-season wins record?
By Asher Fair
With four races remaining in the 2018 Formula 1 season, Lewis Hamilton has the opportunity to tie the single-season wins record. Will he do it?
If you would have asked anyone after the 10th race of the 21-race 2018 Formula 1 season whether or not they believed that Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport’s Lewis Hamilton, would be able to tie the all-time single-season Formula 1 wins record this year, they likely would have responded with a “no” and without any hesitation.
At this point in time, the British Grand Prix was the most recent race, and Hamilton had earned just three victories in 2018. He won the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the Spanish Grand Prix and the French Grand Prix, which were the fourth, fifth and eighth races on the schedule, respectively.
In only one of his previous five seasons driving for Mercedes did the 33-year-old Briton only three or fewer victories to his name through the first 10 races. That season was the 2013 season, which was his first season driving for the team and the final season before the V6 turbo hybrid era began. He had only one victory, his lone victory of the season, through the season’s first 10 races.
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However, the four-time champion and likely soon-to-be five-time champion has somehow managed to put himself in a position where he could very well tie the all-time single-season Formula 1 wins record, which is 13, this year. Michael Schumacher won 13 races in the 2004 season and Sebastian Vettel won 13 races in the 2013 season.
With four races remaining on this year’s schedule, Hamilton will need to win the all considering the fact that he has earned nine victories so far this season, but he is in a great position to do it.
Hamilton has finished nine of the last 10 races. The only race he failed to finish is the Austrian Grand Prix, from which he was forced to retire as a result of a fuel pressure issue. This race is the only race that he has failed to finish since he failed to finish the 2016 Malaysian Grand Prix.
In the nine races that Hamilton has finished over the course of the last 10 races, he has never finished lower than second place. He has earned seven victories, of which six have come over the course of the last seven races, and he is on a four-race winning streak, which is his first four-race winning streak since he won the final four races of the 2016 season.
Will Hamilton add four more wins to his active winning streak to end the season with 13 victories?
The final four races of the season are the United States Grand Prix, the Mexican Grand Prix, the Brazilian Grand Prix and the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Hamilton is a six-time United States Grand Prix winner (five-time winner at the current host track, Circuit of the Americas) and a three-time Abu Dhabi Grand Prix winner. He won both the Mexican Grand Prix and the Brazilian Grand Prix in the 2016 season.
Ironically, Hamilton’s four-race winning streak to close out the 2016 season included victories in each of these four races, so there is no reason for him not to win them again, unless, of course, he gives teammate Valtteri Bottas a win since it was Bottas’s obedience to team orders that allowed Hamilton to win the Russian Grand Prix.
That said, Bottas has already stated that he wants to win by his own doing, not because someone else allows him to do so, so if Hamilton is in a position to win these four races, don’t be surprised if he wins them.
Will Lewis Hamilton end the 2018 Formula 1 season with 13 victories to tie Michael Schumacher and Sebastian Vettel for the most victories in a single season, or will another driver or drivers win at least one race before the season concludes? See whether or not he will keep the possibility of winning 13 races this season alive by tuning in to the live broadcast of the United States Grand Prix from Circuit of the Americas. It is scheduled to begin at 2:10 p.m. ET on ABC on Sunday, October 21.