The last couple of weeks have been complicated for Lewis Hamilton. In Spa, he was one of the unfortunate few who were taken out of the race by Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado’s stupidity. Then just a few days later, BBC Pundit, former driver, team boss and controversy-merchant Eddie Jordan broke the “news” that Hamilton was eyeing up a move from MacLaren to Mercedes. Whether there is any truth behind EJ’s claims is yet to be seen, but would the move even benefit Lewis were it to happen?

Right now, MacLaren are the fastest team in the championship. As a team they’ve won the last three races in a row, taking their win total to five out of thirteen, the highest of any team. Hamilton himself has won three races – Canada, Hungary and Italy – making him equal highest with Fernando Alonso for race wins this season. Mercedes on the other hand have only one victory, and despite a strong start to the season they have fallen behind the top teams and settled into the “best of the rest” slot they served in 2011.

But any move to Mercedes would be about more than current form. Rule changes are ever-present in the sport, and when the regulations force teams to move to V6 engines in 2014 Mercedes will have a distinct advantage over MacLaren in terms of development. Mercedes might become a lot more competitive in the near future, but then again nothing can be taken for certain. To move to Mercedes through a desire for increased glory would be a disaster waiting to happen for Hamilton.

So what non-racing reasons does Hamilton have for moving? Firstly, he might be feeling increasingly uncomfortable in the MacLaren team, who may be growing tired of his various personal problems and numerous unprofessional outbursts of late. Even though he appears to have overcome 2011′s poor form, he still manages to land himself in trouble. This month he posted highly sensitive and important telemetry data on Twitter. He received a dressing down from his team, including Jenson Button, who called it “disappointing”. In the end, Hamilton’s employers may simply decide the risk/reward of keeping Lewis on board is too small, and that with so many promising young drivers swelling the ranks of the midfield his services are no longer required.

Alternatively, this whole thing may just be a career ploy by Lewis himself. When Lewis signed his last contract, he managed to get maximum money from MacLaren by flirting with other teams that expressed a passing interest in him. Now it’s time to sign a new contract, but he knows that MacLaren’s current economic policy won’t allow his megastar wage bill. He may just be employing the same trick twice. Whether this works is yet to be seen.

Hamilton’s change in manager certainly has something to do with this. After hiring David Beckam’s Hollywood agent as his manager, replacing his own father, Hamilton’s form fell off a cliff. After struggling through this, said agent now says he has a plan to turn Hamilton into a worldwide star, “the next Beckham”. This is probably the most absurd potential reason for a move, but it is a potential one nonetheless. Hamilton has slowly become one of the most glamorous drivers in Formula 1, tweeting pictures of himself hanging out with US rap stars on a regular basis.

Whatever his reasons, right now moving would be a stupid idea. Mercedes are still a team that can’t quite get it right, whilst MacLaren are a team still comfortably on the top of a very competitive pile. With many commentators predicting MacLaren are slowly edging towards building their own engines, Hamilton would be a fool to jump off a ship that’s currently staying immaculately afloat. No matter how much his giant wage bill stands to be reduced.

At TyreQuote.com we can’t help but get a little bit excited about watching a Grand Prix or two. We like tyres and we like racing – shame then that this weekend’s European Grand Prix didn’t exactly hit the high notes of the previous round in Montreal when Britain’s Jenson Button finally exploited a chink in the otherwise unflappable armour of Seb Vettel.

With the Canadian rain a distant memory on the sun baked Valencia street track, there was simply a sad lack of action at the business end of things. A tidy overtaking from Alonso on Webber was really the only glimmer of the elite talent that we hope to witness each time we tune into the excellent BBC coverage. Perhaps it’s just sour grapes that the McLarens of Hamilton and Button simply didn’t have the pace to challenge and with only a couple of short week’s until the British GrandPrix, it will have to be rain dances around Silverstone to mitigate against another domination from Red Bull and the infuriating finger wagging Vettel.

So while we pray for some more technological genius to pour out of the McLaren headquarters in Surrey to prompt a championship challenge at last we can briefly reflect on our other passion – tyres. This weekend’s Valencia Grand Prix saw the introduction of Pirelli’s medium compound PZero tyre in an effort to withstand the harsh and hot track surface.  During the build up to the race it seemed that as usual the different teams had different opinions on the Pirelli tyres and McLaren themselves seemed to be complaining that the medium compound wasn’t really giving them enough grip compared to the softer option tyres and getting enough heat into the medium and hard tyres over the course of the season so far was proving tricky. Ferrari have also been reported to voice disappointment in the Pirelli tyres with Fernando Alonso getting most upset at the recent Spanish Grand Prix when he was even lapped by the front runners because he couldn’t get any grip or pace from the harder tyres offered by Pirelli. Many of the drivers stopped 4 times that race, so the evidence was that the tyre strategy wasn’t quite right.

At TyreQuote.com we think Pirelli have done a good job returning to Formula 1 so far this season and hopefully we can see a return to more spectacular racing soon. Good to luck to Lewis and Jenson at Silverstone!

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