When Lewis Hamilton announced that he was leaving McLaren to throw his lot in with perennial underachievers Mercedes for 2013, many recoiled almost like a car crash was about to unfold before their eyes.
There indeed seemed many historical precedents of a talented driver committing career suicide, with a bad team selection heralding a downward slide they could never reverse, such as Emerson Fittipaldi joining his brother's Copersucar team from McLaren and Jacques Villeneuve leaving Williams for BAR.
But the early evidence - as McLaren struggles and Mercedes performs ahead of expectations - is that Lewis might, just might, have played a blinder with his audacious move. And as well as bad moves F1 also has a few precedents of inspired team switches, which confounded the doom-laden expectations in place at the time they were made. I list five of the best ones below.
Graham Hill: Lotus to BRM, 1960
Let's start with a slow burner. Leaving Colin Chapman's Lotus team as it stood before its triumphant 1960s decade sounds a little like F1's equivalent of the guy from Decca Records who turned down signing The Beatles. Yet that is what Graham Hill did.
Hill got together with Chapman after a chance meeting, and recruited initially in a factory role Hill managed before long to blag his way into the driver's seat. And in 1958 driver and team together made their F1 debuts. But Chapman's cars were almost always known for being fast yet fragile; in the early days the latter was especially so as the cars would almost never last a race, and indeed the former was not always the case. Two years of meagre results led to frustration, and the clash of an exasperated Hill and a strong-willed Chapman (including Hill questioning Chapman's commitment to the job) was never going to end well.
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Graham Hill - on the way to his first championship, in a BRM
Credit: Lothar Spurzem / CC |
And thus Hill chose to join BRM for 1960. This raised many-an-eyebrow, as it was a team that had, despite periodic fanfare, persistently flattered to deceive. As Hill himself noted: 'I remember everyone saying "that's a mistake, you're joining a losing team"...it was being thoroughly trounced'. But as luck would have it the outstanding Tony Rudd was already there, and he and Hill well and truly clicked and thus began one of the sport's most iconic and effective driver-engineer partnerships. Results remained fallow for the first couple of years, but by the start of the 1962 year things had fallen into place (and at exactly the right moment as Sir Alfred Owen was threatening to cut off the team's life support). For one thing Rudd was given full executive authority for the team. For another BRM also managed to produce a V8 engine for the 1.5 litre formula that would match those of Ferrari and Coventry Climax.
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