According to three-time world champion Nelson Piquet, Lewis Hamilton would not be involved at all at Mercedes if he had Max Verstappen as a teammate.
It is always nice to be on good terms with your (future) father-in-law and Max Verstappen is already on the right track in that area. Nelson Piquet, three-time F1 world champion and father of Verstappen’s girlfriend, thinks Lewis Hamilton would not stand a chance at Mercedes if he had Max Verstappen as his teammate.
“First and foremost, we have to take into account that F1 is a category of different cars, so it’s very difficult to make a direct comparison between two drivers if they are not on the same team,” Piquet told Motorsport.com.
“But if Max were to drive for Mercedes, I am sure he would crush Hamilton. Max is more aggressive. Because of that aggressiveness he may make mistakes more often, but in my opinion he is better than Hamilton. ”
The sixty-eight-year-old Brazilian also thinks Hamilton has it way too easy with a teammate like Valtteri Bottas.
“It’s too easy for Hamilton to win everything with Bottas by his side as second driver.”
“It’s a bit like Mansell and I at Williams, the other drivers were way behind us. I won the 1987 championship, and I wasn’t driving like before because I had the accident at the beginning of the year and had problems with my depth vision. ”
“But I won that championship, with a bit of luck. I should have won in 1986, but won in 1987. But it was so easy, the car was much better than the others and in recent years Mercedes has been much better than the others. ”
Piquet does not want to say that Hamilton is a bad driver, but he thinks he has never had a worthy opponent on his own team. Piquet is not only referring to Valtteri Bottas, but also to his predecessor, Nico Rosberg, who was the only one who managed to snatch Hamilton a world title in the current hybrid era.
“It’s not that Hamilton is no good,” argues Piquet. But he has a lesser rider by his side and the previous one [Rosberg] was even worse.
“He won because it was a year when Hamilton had crashes and retirements.”
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