Lewis Hamilton should be a TEN-time F1 champion and it's closer than you may think

Lewis Hamilton is a seven-time world champion, and by the way his Ferrari season is crumbling that figure looks like it will stay that way for now.

After making the bold call to leave Mercedes, where he won six of his world titles, in 2024 the 41-year-old joined Ferrari for a chance of landing the ultimate feat of not just ending the Maranello team's 18-year-wait for a championship, but also to secure his record eighth drivers' crown.

That would take him past Michael Schumacher's seven titles - and given most of those were at Ferrari, a record Hamilton title win in scarlet would be incredibly fitting.

We should not be talking about the prospect of an eighth Hamilton title though, it should already be a thing... as should a ninth... and even a tenth world championship!

There have been three years where Hamilton can really count himself unfortunate not to have won the world title.

Granted, there have been years where the odds and events have been favourable towards him too for title triumphs but a sequence of events can exist where he has that good luck and some very minor things change in the seasons he missed out.

GPFans looks at the three seasons where the title evaded Hamilton, and it really could have been so much different.

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2007 - McLaren

The one that got away from McLaren, not just Hamilton. Both the teams drivers in the Brit and Fernando Alonso missed out on the title by one point to Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen.

This one is incredibly painful for Hamilton, he was on course to win the crown at the penultimate race of the season in China, but after McLaren delayed pitting him, his balding intermediate tyres had little tread left by the time he came into the pits, resulting in him spinning into the gravel next to the pit-lane and out of the race.

It's such a freak occurrence. How often do you see a driver spinning out in the pit-lane, let alone one in the crucial stages of a title fight?

If that wasn't bad enough, the final race in Brazil still offered Hamilton the chance to be champion if he finished fifth. Something he had only failed to do twice the entire season, including the pit-lane fiasco in Shanghai.

Hamilton suffered technical gremlins at the start of the race to put him at the back of the field, and despite recovering to seventh it wasn't good enough to land the world title in his rookie season. Even now it seems incredible how he lost the championship from a winning position at the Chinese GP.

2016 - Mercedes

Mercedes were at their most dominant in 2016. Quick and reliable, there was hardly any stopping them across 21 races. Well, except for themselves in Spain when Hamilton and his team-mate Nico Rosberg collided, putting them both out of the race and handing Max Verstappen his first ever win.

Such was how reliable Mercedes were, they didn't suffer a single mechanical issue with Rosberg's car all year. Hamilton though had one and it was catastrophic for his world championship. While leading the race at the Malaysian Grand Prix, his engine blew up in spectacular fashion, leading to a crestfallen Hamilton famously shouting down the radio 'oh noooo, nooooooo'.

Verstappen once again took victory but Rosberg's third place finish put him well in control of the championship, one that Hamilton couldn't reverse despite winning four of the last five races. Hamilton wouldn't suffer another mechanical failure for nearly two years until the 2018 Austrian GP.

2021 - Mercedes

You knew this was coming but despite how obvious this is I can't just leave it off the list and do something random like 2010 to be some sort of F1 edgelord.

The 2007 season may have been Hamilton's most self destructive title charge, 2016 his unluckiest but 2021 will forever be the most scandalous to go against him.

He was set to win the world championship with two laps to go at the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi. He was leading under the safety car, and although Verstappen had closed up on soft tyres, he had backmarkers in his way to prevent him from attacking Hamilton under the safety car conditions.

That shouldn't have been a problem, lapped cars would need a lap to get past and catch up again under green flag conditions meaning by the rules, Hamilton was due to win the race and championship under the safety car.

Then racing director Michael Masi in the interest of not letting a thrilling championship end in such a damp squib, allowed only the lapped cars between Hamilton and Verstappen to get past and in an unprecedented move allowed the race to restart on the same lap.

That left Hamilton a lamb to the slaughter to Verstappen on the final lap, who easily passed the Mercedes driver to claim his first and one of F1's most controversial titles.

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Written by

Dan Ripley - Global Editor

I've been a massive F1 fan since the mid 1990s and continue to study the history of the sport long before that. As an experienced motor sport reporter covering F1, MotoGP and the LeMans 24 Hour race, being part of GPFans has allowed me to work with a diverse team with all sorts of different backgrounds in watching the sport and given me a greater appreciation of F1.

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