Lewis Hamilton is one of the greatest Formula 1 drivers of all time; the seven-time World Champion has broken just about every record the sport has but he DID NOT invent the flat-bottom steering wheel as he claimed in a recent interview.
The Mercedes living legend made an erroneous claim in an interview with CNA Luxury: “What a lot of people don’t actually know is that I re-designed the steering wheel when I was at McLaren. And when I came to Mercedes, I did the same thing, and the other teams have all copied the wheel.
“All the old wheels used to be circular. Now, you’ll see there’s a top and the handle comes down and it doesn’t join at the bottom. I should have copyrighted it. This is something I’m really proud of; I really love working on the ergonomics of the car,” added Hamilton, winner of 103 Grands Prix.
Clearly, neither Hamilton nor the author of the piece did any research (Google is Good) on the claim because his former McLaren team had flat-bottom their steering wheels for well over a decade before Lewis had his ergonomic brainwave.
The graphic above, published on the McLaren website shows the evolution of F1 steering wheels over the years, the Woking team even using one during their 1995 Le Mans winning campaign.
Of course “copyrighted” is the wrong word used by Lewis, more appropriate would’ve been “patented” the concept would have made it his invention.
However, history shows that Hamilton’s claim is not true because McLaren used a flat and top-bottomed wheel on the 1999 McLaren MP4-14 driven by Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard.
McLaren said of that steering wheel: “Clearly, this wheel is a quantum step ahead of what had gone before – a legacy of the rapidly increased automation that hit F1 in the 1990s.
“By the end of that decade, grand prix cars were on the verge of becoming the most complex ever, using automatic shifting, pits-to-car adjustments and, by the start of the 2000s, traction control – both of which are now banned .”
That was not the first time either that flat-bottom steering wheels appeared in F1
In 1996, the Ferrari F310 sported a flat top and bottom, furthermore, flat-bottom steering wheels appeared in the nineties in karting and other forms of motorsport, particularly endurance racing (including the 1995 Le Mans winning 1995 McLaren F1 GTR 01R) where driver swaps are required and used the truncated wheel (below) until fully removable wheels became the norm.
Thus, while Hamilton may have rightly claimed many great things in F1, inventing flat-bottom steering wheels is certainly not one of them and rewriting history is not allowed. The Champ has been corrected!
Hamilton and indeed all of F1 returns to action this weekend for the 2022 United States Grand Prix at COTA in Austin, Texas.
1995 McLaren F1 GTR 01R – Winner of Le Mans ’95. @McLarenAuto @fosgoodwood #GOODWOODFOS #McLaren #lemans24 pic.twitter.com/mWP7cleEXI
— Place Conducteur (@PlaceConducteur) July 22, 2018
