Lewis Hamilton is set to enter the 21-race in 2019 Formula 1 season having won both of the last two and four of the last five Formula 1 championships.
A championship in the 2019 season would give him three consecutive championships for the first time in his career.
Will the five-time Formula 1 champion pull it off, thus giving himself three consecutive championships, five championships in the last six seasons and six career championships, a total that only one other driver in the sport’s history, seven-time champion Michael Schumacher, has been able to reach?
The 33-year-old Briton will likely have more serious championship challengers in the 2019 season than he has had in past seasons.
However, he is still the clear favorite to be crowned champion once again by the time the 2019 season comes to a close.
While both Scuderia Ferrari and Aston Martin Red Bull Racing, the two teams that, along with Mercedes, have combined to win the last 118 Formula 1 races dating back to the 2013 season, have seemingly closed the gap to the Brackley-based team and are expected to continue to continue to close it in the 2019 season, Mercedes are still the top team until proven otherwise, and neither Ferrari nor Red Bull Racing have really even come remotely close to officially proving that otherwise.
Mercedes have won the last five constructor championships, as they have won them every season since the beginning of the V6 turbo hybrid era in 2014. Their 84-point winning margin (655 to 571) over Ferrari in second place in the constructor standings this past season was their smallest during this five-year span, so it stands to reason that many people believe that Mercedes’ reign is poised to end in the 2019 season.
However, even in Mercedes’ worst season of the V6 turbo hybrid era, Hamilton was practically unstoppable.
Hamilton entered the season on a three-race win drought, and that became a six-race win drought after he failed to win any of the season’s first three races. But over the course of the season’s final 18 races, he only failed to win seven of them.
In other words, Hamilton failed to win nearly as many races in a six-race span as he failed to win in the subsequent 18-race span, and he did so despite the fact that Ferrari and Red Bull Racing supposedly made gains on Mercedes during that 18-race span.
Hamilton’s 11 victories during this 18-race span allowed him to tie his career-high win total for a single season. He also earned 11 races in the 2014 season, the season that resulted in him winning his second career championship. He finished the season with 408 points in the driver standings, the highest point total for a driver in a single season in Formula 1 history.
Can Hamilton win what would be his third consecutive championship, his fifth championship in the last six seasons and the sixth championship of his career?
That remains to be seen, especially with Ferrari’s addition of Charles Leclerc as Kimi Raikkonen’s replacement and Red Bull Racing’s switch from Renault engines to Honda engines.
But so far, the only driver to stop Hamilton during the V6 turbo hybrid era is Nico Rosberg, who was his teammate from the 2013 season through the 2016 season. Rosberg beat him by five points (385 to 380) to win the 2016 championship. The odds that another driver will pull off what Rosberg pulled off in the 2019 season are small, especially after the season that Hamilton just had.
