He's a good F1 driver, not "great." When he's had a competent teammate, he's rarely been the better of the two. That's closer to "mediocre" than it is to "great."
In 2016, Nico Rosberg was his teammate at Mercedes and Nico stole the World Drivers Championship title away from Hambone.
The thing is, Rosberg is on the short list of the worst drivers ever to win the World Championship (along with James Hunt, Damon Hill, Giuseppe Farina, and maybe one or two others).
In 2010, Mercedes re-entered as the sport after 55 years away. They bought Brawn racing, the 2009 World Constructors Champion team, thinking that was the shortcut to glory. What they hadn't counted on was a certain Adrian Newey. Newey gave Sebastian Vettel cars he could drive the pants off of and Red Bull Racing went on a four season tear.
Four seasons after their return to F1, Mercedes had won zero World Constructors Championships and zero World Drivers Championships.
After the 2013 season, Mercedes grew impatient and did what any mega-corporation would in times of desperation. They decided to buy the pot.
To their good fortune, 2014 was the first season of the V-6 turbo hybrid engine format. And Mercedes showed up at Melbourne 2014 with a car that was a world-beater.
By the third race of the 2014 season, and thanks to the niggardly "tokens" system of limiting development that was introduced that season, it was clear it would be several seasons before anyone would be able to catch the Mercs.
At the time I guessed it would be five seasons before anyone could catch Mercedes, but it took seven.
To this day, no one outside Mercedes knows all the 'tricks' they used to make the car so powerful. We know it was burning engine oil as fuel, using a specially formulated oil that wouldn't promote fouling. Fuel flow rate had been limited since 2010, which effectively limited maximum horsepower, but oil burning wasn't regulated. That extra power would only last for a few laps but it was enough to give them about 1% more HP in qualies, and when more than half of all races are being won from pole, who wouldn't kill for 1% more HP when qualifying?
There's also a long running rumor that Mercedes' F1 motor oil would emit hydrogen gas when at full operating temperature. F1 cars have positive crankcase ventilation (PCV), so that hydrogen would have ended up being piped into the intake and being burned along with the gasoline and oil.
It bears mention that the FIA took action to be ban the burning of either motor oil hydrogen with fuel. They reduced the limit on how much oil could could be burned by ordinary means, and they put a new rule in the Technical Regulations stating motor oil could only be used to lubricate and to cool, not to play any role in propulsion. The new reg also required all teams to submit a sample of their motor oil for lab testing to assure they are in compliance.
When the F1 press asked how much they had spent developing that engine, Mercedes admitted it had cost them $250 million, but they were lying. In 2019, Forbes magazine published information from Mercedes' own internal documents showing that they had spent $1.4 BILLION on their F1 engine program since 2014.
Over the five previous seasons (2014-2018), that comes to $280 million per. But it obviously wasn't evenly distributed because the bulk of that amount would have been spent before the car ever turned a wheel in anger.
And buy the pot they did. The one certainty over the first several seasons of the V-6 turbo hybrid era is that the WDC and the WCC were both going to be won by Mercedes. And it didn't much matter who their drivers were. Rosberg's WDC win in 2016 is proof of that.
So I'd disagree that Hambone is a "great" driver' He certainly deserved his first WDC win in 2008, because his team didn't win the WCC, which (statistically) reduced his chances of winning WDC by 75%. But the six WDCs at Mercedes were a gift, all tied up in a big silver bow.
He's not the greatest driver of all time, not by a long shot, but he most certainly is the luckiest.
He got lucky again when Ferrari hired him away from Mercedes. They claimed they wanted him on the prospect of having the only 8-time World Drivers Champion to be driving for the Scuderia, but they knew that even if he was a flop on the track, the merchandise they could sell in his name would make up for it.
Since 2008, Hambone hasn't once shown the ability to win in a fair fight. He will walk on the moon before he wins another F1 WDC, but he can sell the hell out of some sneakers.
I am a very new fan of F-1 as I have written before. I happened with the hollywood movie which started out with testosterone driven opening sequence. After that I watched Drive to Survive which opened with a kid being driven to his driver’s test by his mom. That kid was Kimi Antonelli. His first season was not impressive at all. But this season the kid is driving the pants off everyone else.
I am not a Mercedes, nor Ferrari, or even Red Bull fan. But I like Kimi for some reason. He has had luck of course, but also the race at Monza was a bit of great driving coming up from P19 to P1.
Another recent documentary I saw should him being groomed from a young age. Indeed, it seems as though he was created by his father as well as Mercedes. But I hope he goes far and becomes one of the greats.
But he has to be compared in his era of hybrid cars...matching him up with the older racers and cars of yesterday may not be fair. But it will be done of course. It is very early in his career of course and frankly I do not see him matching nor surpassing Max V’s 19 wins in a season. That is stone cold brutal indeed. Even the great Niki Lauda won what, 5 gp in a season?
ok he’s a mediocre but extremely lucky F1 driver