Lewis Hamilton showed qualities only previously seen in Michael Schumacher and Ayrton Senna during 2018, Ross Brawn has claimed.
The Briton produced another remarkable year of consistency at the highest level to claim a fifth world championship, as the challenge of Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari faded.
However, it was his single lap performances in qualifying that Brawn was most amazed by as Hamilton scored 11 poles over the year, increasing his record career tally to 83.
“Sometimes you get a driver who finds the performance you just don’t expect,” Formula 1’s motorsport director told Autosport.
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“There are a couple of occasions, particularly in qualifying, when Lewis did that. He just took people’s breath away. Those are the things you look at, and you just don’t know where the performance comes from.
“Everyone thinks they know what the reference is and suddenly the driver does something that changes the reference.”
Notable examples of that came in Australia, Silverstone and Singapore with two trademark wet-weather laps in Hungary and Belgium.
It is that ability which Brawn claims he has only seen in the two men widely considered as the greatest of all time.
“I was fortunate to see that sometimes in Michael Schumacher, we saw it with drivers like Senna and I think we saw that on a couple of occasions with Lewis this year,” he stated.
“Those are the things you remember because as an engineer, you almost can’t work out where it’s come from. It’s like a surreal level that they’ve reached and that’s always very special when you see a driver do that.”