Lewis Hamilton’s reputation risked by people who drove him down the road to chicanery

There are two ways that the Lewis Hamilton cheating saga can affect his future with McLaren Mercedes, which is now on a knife edge. Either Hamilton and his father Anthony, who manages him, can find a way to forgive and rebuild, or the trauma of what happened at the Australian Grand Prix will weep poison into the relationship and it will eventually fall apart.
The more we have found out about what caused Hamilton to lie to the stewards in Melbourne and then repeat those lies four days later to try to cheat Jarno Trulli, the Toyota driver, out of third place, the more it is possible to sympathise with Hamilton and particularly with his father's deep, deep anger about the affair. In short, Hamilton Sr, who is likely to be seeking advice on what to do next, believes the team recklessly sold his son's reputation as a fine, upstanding sportsman and budding icon in a tawdry and ham-fisted bid to gain a championship point to which they had no right.
There is no doubt that Hamilton himself should carry some of the blame. He has told us that he was “misled” and “instructed” by Dave Ryan, the now suspended McLaren team sporting director, to lie to the stewards and he did as he was told. He should not have done so and he knows it and the world champion would give almost anything to turn back the clock.
Having said that, we now know much more about the forces that were bearing down on Hamilton on that fateful Sunday evening in Melbourne. As always with errors of judgment of this magnitude, passions were running high at the critical moment. When Hamilton passed Trulli under the safety car three laps from the end of the race after the Italian briefly went off the track, Ryan made a mistake. He told Phil Prew, Hamilton's race engineer, who talks to Hamilton on the radio during races, to tell Hamilton to give the place back in the mistaken belief that Hamilton might have broken the rules.
But Ryan was wrong and he quickly realised, after Hamilton had moved across to let Trulli by, that what he had in fact done was to give third place on the podium to Trulli on a plate. And this is where the rot started because Ryan was determined to rectify his error in the stewards' room and he recruited Hamilton to assist him, as Martin Whitmarsh, the McLaren team principal, explained on Sunday. “I think Davey carried some guilt because he had made a mistake and was very hard on himself,” Whitmarsh said. “In the heat of the moment with the stewards, [he] unnecessarily caused Lewis, and led Lewis, to mislead the stewards and one event fell into another.”
In this way Ryan had repaired the damage caused by his initial error but the cost was about to spiral out of control and this is where Anthony Hamilton can feel so betrayed. A senior team manager at McLaren - the man who “ran” the team, according to Whitmarsh - had persuaded or induced Hamilton to lie and had done so at the risk of ruining his reputation for good.
In the long run, the general public will forget which teams Hamilton drove for, just as they have in the case of greats such as Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill or Sir Jackie Stewart. But they will remember Hamilton the man and they will remember that he was a champion and that he was also caught cheating, just as Michael Schumacher is widely remembered for at least three acts of gross bad sportsmanship. Whitmarsh, Ryan and everyone else involved will all be forgotten but not Hamilton.
And Hamilton is no ordinary Formula One driver. He is a remarkable young man with maturity well beyond his years and he is ambitious in every way. Not content to be just a great driver, Hamilton wants to set an example to millions of others such as him from poor backgrounds. He revels in the chance to meet iconic figures such as Nelson Mandela, he enjoys the comparisons made with Tiger Woods and he dreams of going on to do great things after his driving career is over. But all this depends on reputation and it was never part of his game plan to lose that.
The media often glibly call for heads to roll in a crisis such as this. Whitmarsh has demonstrated fairly comprehensively that Hamilton was under the influence of Ryan and Ryan alone and that is why Ryan alone has paid the price. But the affair has inflicted permanent scars on the image of arguably McLaren's greatest ever human asset in Hamilton and this has happened under Whitmarsh's watch and that of his chairman Ron Dennis. No doubt they will think about this a little more in the coming days.
Source:the times