The race is on, and now the dust has settled on Lewis Hamilton's 7th World Championship.

What better time to take an in-depth look at statistically F1's most successful driver.

Is he a true great or just a driver in the right place at the right time?

I'm Ed Straw and joining me to talk all things Hamilton are Mark Hughes and Scott Mitchell. Mark, hello, how are you? I believe you've just

come from your COVID test, haven't you? Yes, I don't know how many that is, 20 something. I'm sure you're at

about the same. Yes, went well as far as I know. We'll see when I get the results.

Yeah, always fun to have someone rummaging around in your nose. Not a great way to go, but a small price to pay for Formula One happening this year. And in fact, Scott Mitchell, you've been vigorously avoiding COVID tests this year, haven't you?

Yeah, that doesn't mean that I've been sort of finding a way to sort of sneak around to the need to have tests or anything like that.

I haven't been avoiding protocol or anything. I've just been avoiding the F1 paddock.

While the two of you have shared on-site duty, I've been manning everything at base, basically. And like, it's been an

unusual year. Obviously, would much, much rather have been in the paddock and seeing everything

at trackside. But thanks to the miracle of Zoom and to a lesser extent, Microsoft teams and in a

distant third place, WebEx, I've been able to actually speak to the team bosses, speak to tech people all season

long and just making sure that I roll out of bed straight to the desk and start work and

finish and go straight to bed pretty much.

So I've been making good use of the extra time that not being at the track actually affords you. It hasn't made a vast difference. Although I was thinking about this. We're talking about Lewis Hamilton today. And in fact, Lewis Hamilton is 7th World Championship. That's one of the great sporting achievements in any sports. And I can't think of many that had so few people on site. So I feel very privileged to have been one of the few who's actually been there.

I mean, I say the few. It's still thousands of people because the Fon Paddock is a big old place. And it takes a lot of people to run a Grand Prix, but still a great privilege to be there for a little bit of sporting history. And of course, it's that sporting history. we're going to be talking about today by having a proper deep dive on Hamilton.

We didn't talk too much about him on last week. course it's that sporting history we're going to be talking about today by having a proper deep dive

on Hamilton. We didn't talk too much about him on last week's Turkish Grand Prix podcast because

otherwise we'd have not really got on to talking enough about the race. So we want to look at

some of the criticisms of Hamilton, ask if they hold water, if they don't, and just try and give everyone a bit of a deeper understanding of what we've seen from Lewis Hamilton over the years, not just in 2020, but every season.

So let's go straight into it, Scott. Looking at this year, Hamilton's got a 110 point lead over Valtteri Bottas. He sealed a title with three races to spare.

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