Jock Clear has worked with most of the great ones. He engineered Jacques Villeneuve to a world title at Williams, spent years inside Mercedes during the Hamilton-Rosberg era, and is now the senior performance engineer at Ferrari, where he sits across the garage from both Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton. Now, he’s opened an interview by saying it hurts him to read what people write about Hamilton online as he compares the Briton to the legendary Michael Schumacher.
Speaking to AutoRacer, Clear pushed back on the idea that the seven-time champion is somehow aloof, ego-driven, or coasting on past wins with Mercedes and McLaren.
“It hurts to read comments from those who think Lewis is arrogant or not a team player, as if everything was about him,” he said. “That couldn’t be further from the truth.”
He went further, comparing Hamilton’s personality to that of Schumacher: “He knew how to treat people,” he said of the German. “You wanted to work for him, you wanted him to win, you wanted to be on his side.”
The Schumacher era at Maranello was built on this, a driver who made the mechanics, the engineers, and the strategists feel like the result was theirs as much as his. Jean Todt has said as much for twenty years. It’s the thing Fernando Alonso never quite replicated at Ferrari, and the thing Sebastian Vettel openly admitted he struggled with after Schumacher-shaped expectations followed him into the same garage.
“He is a very spontaneous driver, with a great feeling for the car. At the moment, he is the only one who, in my opinion, can equal Max Verstappen in terms of pace,” he said.
“What he has to keep working on is taking the team by the hand towards the championship. Getting in the car and driving at the maximum on track comes naturally to him. Everything else is what he is learning.
“I think he is learning very well. I believe he will be the driver who takes Ferrari to the next level. And the next level has to be the championship.”
“It doesn’t matter how much money you earn: you still remain vulnerable to the same things that affect all of us.”