F1: Hamilton sets the scene for leaving McLaren

Racing drivers have only one objective: to win Championships and to do that they generally have to win races. Lewis Hamilton isn't doing enough of the latter and therefore isn't likely to do the former.

Since coming under McLaren's wing as a junior kart racer in the UK, both team and driver have displayed tremendous loyalty to each other. But Ron Dennis, who was Hamilton's mentor, is no longer at the helm of the Formula One team. Hamilton has also broken with the other primary anchor in his personal and professional life - about a year ago, he ditched his father as manager.

For sure, Hamilton Snr was a bit of a pain: as manager he tended to be rather too involved in race days. Hamilton Jr has made up for the lack of his father in the garage by the near-constant presence (without the interfering) of his girlfriend Nicole Scherzinger who is a darling of the TV producers at every race - despite almost constant media speculation of one alleged break-up after another.

Martin Whitmarsh - who now runs the McLaren F1 team - has said that he wants to sign Hamilton and Button for a further five years. Frankly, that is almost certainly not going to happen: Unless Button plans to try to outdo the grand-old men of F1 - Barrichello and Schumacher - he probably does not have five years left in the sport - and both of them have found that staying around too long means slowly dropping back down the field. And for Hamilton a further five years in the team that he has been part of for so long must raise questions of becoming stale - Button, after all, jumped ship from what became Mercedes for the primary reason - he says - that he wanted a new challenge and had been with the BAR - Honda - Braun team long enough.

But hovering in the background is the question of who Hamilton is listening to when it comes to career advice. For the last year, since the highly publicised (professional) split with his father, Hamilton has, to all intents and purposes, been self-managed. But in the close season, he was courted by a number of management companies including the mighty IMG. Indeed, in February, The Sun, a UK tabloid, reported that he was "poised to sign" with them. He didn't.

As testing got under way, Hamilton grew increasingly irritated with his growing difficulty with the car. Technical development around the exhaust system and the aero package had created a car that, in pre-season testing, way off the pace. Throwing away all the clever bits, McLaren turned up in Melbourne with a competitive car. But Hamilton did not capitalise on it and it is becoming increasingly obvious that his problems lie not with the car but with the tyres. The skills that mean he can drive around most problems - throwing the car at corners by maintaining a higher approach speed to counteract a lower straight line speed on the straights - and also giving him a more direct exit line - depend on the tyres being able to cope with such aggression.

This year, the FIA has asked new supplier Pirelli to produce compounds that provide similar levels of grip to the previous Bridgestones but wear out faster. The aim is two fold: to increase the number of pit-stops (apparently they are exciting for fans) and to create a fall-off in performance so that new-v-old tyre strategies can come into play and provide a performance differential on the track. Button, who gets criticism and praise in equal measure for his smooth driving style finds that he gets more performance out of the new tyres than anyone, not only Hamilton. Indeed, in Malaysia, the average tyre life on the harder "prime" tyre was 12 laps. Button ran his for 19, getting faster on almost every lap at the end of the race.

That the tyres degrade and - literally - fall apart fast is demonstrated by the massive amount of "marbles" that collected around the outside of corners in Sepang last Sunday. Indeed, this writer cannot recall seeing so much dead rubber on corners since the 1970s when tyre technology was relatively primitive.

Hamilton is becoming increasingly desperate to win another championship and his eventual decision to join the XIX Entertainment stable run by Simon Fuller (of music industry fame but also representing David Beckham and Andy Murray as well as actor Michael Caine. Announcing the deal, Hamilton said XIX "not only wanted to help me become an even better racing driver, but they also shared my ambitions for the longer term."

The announcement of the deal was made after Hamilton had another spat with his team - and Martin Whitmarsh said that Hamilton was justified in his complaints. His problems began before the race: he used up an extra set of soft tyres - and he did not like the car on the harder tyres. Hamilton made four tyres stops: his team mate - who has a tendency to feed back to the team and tell them what he wants - made three. As in previous races where Button has made a call but Hamilton has relied on the team, Hamilton blames the team for their strategy - but the fourth stop was in part driven by the question of whether the right rear would survive until the end of the race after Alonso belted it with his front wing and in part by the realisation that Hamilton was chewing tyres at an alarming rate and would have difficulty making them last for 20 laps. A mistake during one of those pit stops cost Hamilton three seconds.

Even so, Hamilton was slower than Alonso even before the last change while Button, who had trundled up into second with no drama, was amongst the quickest in track.

Almost predictably, Hamilton immediately blamed the team in a very public statement without waiting to find out why what had happened had happened. Worse, his battle with Alonso resulted in penalties for both of them - Alonso for an avoidable accident and Hamilton for weaving (about which Alonso had complained several laps before the impact - in a strange parallel to the complaint made in Melbourne by Button about Alonso's team-mate Massa which resulted in Button shortcutting a corner and being penalised while Massa was not investigated).

What rubbed salt into Hamilton's wounds was that Button's second place took him above Hamilton in the standings. Hamilton still feels that he is the spiritual number one although the team is scrupulously fair to both drivers, even to the extent of redesigning their garage so that the engineers for both drivers work at a common table to better facilitate the exchange of information.

So, with a new and aggressive management team behind him, the big question is whether Hamilton will make good on his implied threat after Melbourne to leave McLaren. His name was linked with Red Bull - and neither Hamilton nor Red Bull would deny the rumours.

No doubt, there are teams that will be queuing up for his talents if they smell blood in the water. But there's no place for him at Red Bull any time soon unless Vettel moves on. And there aren't many teams in the pit lane who will pay him more than McLaren does.

But Hamilton said this week "there's a limit to loyalty."

That's what Herbert felt at Team Lotus back in the 1990s - and after that, he found teams less anxious to engage him. While it's not a direct parallel, the latest driver to dump on his team was Nelson Piquet II after Singapore-gate and, to a lesser extent - Nico Hülkenberg who told WIlliams that he expected to get a drive on the basis of talent not by buying a seat: his place has been taken by the heavily sponsored Pastor Maldonado.

According to Eurosport.com, Hamilton was the second highest paid driver last year at GBP13.1m - the same as Ferrari paid Kimi Raikkonen to sit out for the year so they could pay Alonso just shy of GBP25m.

Hamilton's not going to get close to that wherever he moves to. He may hope that a move will improve his chances of winning and he has made rumblings about the improvement of Mercedes. Last year, they paid Schumacher GBP6.6 million - less than Button's GBP7.4 - which was itself far below what most people expected him to get. Ironically, a Hamilton move might cut McLaren's operating costs significantly while not making too much impact on their results.

He really needs to think carefully about what he is saying.