Lewis Hamilton facing same issue as Sergio Perez | Sports News

“But in recent years, you look at the two results from him and his team-mate and he’s been absolutely awful. Does that mean he’s an awful driver? I actually think if you look at other drivers up and down the grid with Lewis Hamilton being a really good example right now.

“Lewis, seven-time world champion, statistically the best driver in Formula 1, but since we went to the ground-effect automobiles on this fashionable period, first of all with him at Mercedes, now at Ferrari, he is actually struggled to get the best out of these.”

Hamilton finds himself trailing 12 points behind teammate Charles Leclerc in the Drivers’ Championship and is also seven points adrift of his fresh-faced Mercedes successor Kimi Antonelli, grappling to replicate the dominance he exhibited during the ground-effect epoch.

Priestley has dismissed the notion that Hamilton can no longer vie for supremacy on the track, but he did highlight that Hamilton, akin to Perez before him, doesn’t gel stylistically with the machinery at his disposal.

He questioned: “Now, will we imagine that Lewis has immediately misplaced all of his expertise and is no longer a good driver? I definitely do not imagine that, I do not assume many people do. Or is the issue, not that he is not a good driver, is the issue not that Red Bull cannot discover a good driver?

“Is the problem that those drivers have a set of skills, [a set] of characteristics, a driving style if you like, the nuances of how they go about performing their craft? And do those characteristics and nuances no longer match up to the car or the tool that they’re being given to apply their craft in this sport?”