Revisited: The time Lewis Hamilton posted confidential McLaren data

Matt Bishop, McLaren’s communications chief at the time, recalled the scene of Spa 2012 where Lewis Hamilton leaked secret McLaren data, though not the data he thought.

Hamilton won his first of seven World Championships with McLaren in 2008, his second F1 season, and from 2010, had fellow Brit and reigning 2009 champion Jenson Button alongside him. And it is a memory from 2012, Hamilton’s final McLaren season before moving to Mercedes, which really sticks in Bishop’s mind.

Lewis Hamilton leaks McLaren data… Just not what he thought

Claiming Hamilton lacked the “emotional poise” of Button at that time as a younger racer, a trait which he possesses “in abundance now”, the differing fortunes of both drivers in 2012 Belgian GP qualifying apparently irked Hamilton, as Button claimed pole, while he managed only P8. Hamilton responded by posting what he thought was a screenshot of telemetry data from Button’s car.

As it turned out, Hamilton had mistakenly posted data from an Oliver Turvey simulator session, though Bishop only found out about this error in the airport on the way home.

“Let’s go back to 2012, and to the afternoon of September 1, because I remember what happened after qualifying at Spa that Saturday as though it were yesterday,” Bishop wrote for Motorsport Magazine .

“I was in my office in the McLaren Brand Centre, writing our post-quali press release, composing quotes for not only Button and Hamilton but also for our team principal Martin Whitmarsh, when I received a mobile phone call from Martin Turner, the then head honcho of Sky Sports’ F1 operation, who has since become a dear friend.

“Have you seen Lewis’s tweet?’ he asked me.

“No, why?’ I replied.

“You need to check it out right now, buddy. I won’t delay you. Go do it.”

“I duly did – immediately – and what I found was not good. Hamilton had screen-grabbed and tweeted what he described as Button’s telemetry traces from qualifying, with the following comment: “Jenson has the new rear wing on, I have the old, we voted to change, didn’t work out, I lost 0.4sec just on the straight.”

“To be fair to Lewis, our engineers had already privately informed me that the consensus among them was that Hamilton’s higher-downforce set-up was probably not quite as quick over the whole lap as was Button’s lower-downforce aero configuration — which discrepancy was already becoming a sore point on Lewis’s side of the garage – but dirty linen of that nature is not uncommon within F1 teams, and the only appropriate solution is quietly, collaboratively, and above all privately to clean it.

“What you do not do is wash it in public. Worse still, Hamilton’s tweet had revealed confidential technical details about our cars’ acceleration, braking, and ride height.

“I hurried to Lewis’s room and knocked on the door. No answer. I left it a couple of seconds, then opened it. He was sitting on his day-bed, his iPhone in his hands.

“You’ve got to delete that tweet,” I said.

“Which tweet?” he replied.

“You know which one, the one showing JB’s telemetry. Delete it right now please.”

“Why?”

“Lewis, listen, just delete it. Delete it right now. It reveals tech stuff that you know perfectly well shouldn’t be made public, and you’re therefore in breach of the terms of your contract in revealing it. It makes you look rather churlish, too. Also, in a minute I bet our engineers are going to come storming in here, screaming at you to delete it. Wouldn’t you prefer it if I were able to stop them as they arrive, telling them, ‘Don’t worry, he’s deleted it.’”

“Lewis sighed, pressed ‘delete’, then turned the screen of his iPhone towards me to show that he had done so.”

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After swapping McLaren for Mercedes, Hamilton and the Silver Arrows achieved record-breaking success, Mercedes winning eighth straight Constructors’ titles from 2014-21, with Hamilton claiming six Drivers’ titles in that time, equalling Michael Schumacher’s record tally of seven.

And in an appearance on the Performance People podcast , Hamilton recalled how he went against the warnings not to leave McLaren for a Mercedes team which at that time were not challenging for the titles. Billed as a career-ending decision, it proved far from the case.

Asked to pick out the defining moment of his career, Hamilton replied: “It will probably have been when I decided to join Mercedes.

“I was in Thailand at the time, in between races after Singapore, and that’s when I made the decision.

“And I was like: ‘I want to take the leap of faith and I’m going to go with it, regardless of what people say.’

“Pretty much everyone told me to stay, but I went with my gut and my intuition and it was the best thing for me.

“I was with a championship-winning team. I was with McLaren, which had such a great history.

“Obviously Mercedes used to own half of McLaren, and so it was partly their team, but then they broke away and bought their own team and as they were trying to ramp up, they weren’t having a lot of success.

“I think they were the fifth or sixth-best team at the time, so they were often finishing out of the top 10, struggling to get into the top 10.

“As a World Champion, people were like: ‘This is the worst decision you can make, this is not a great team and your career is over.’

“All the pundits, all the media outlets, all the fans, everyone was like: ‘Career’s over.’

“And then it went well and everyone’s like: ‘Oh, it’s the best decision ever made.’”

Hamilton will move on to another fresh chapter in his career from F1 2025 in a blockbuster move to Ferrari.

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