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Lowe: F1 will never see another rookie like Hamilton

Back in 2007, Lewis Hamilton had a highly impressive start to his F1 career in the McLaren. Paddy Lowe - who was the team's Engineering Director at the time - believes no other driver will ever have a debut like it.

Paddy Lowe believes that Lewis Hamilton's achievements in his rookie season back in 2007 will never be repeated in Formula 1. Hamilton made his debut with the McLaren team 14 years ago and enjoyed immediate success, with his first win coming on only his sixth Grand Prix appearance. The Briton eventually missed out on the title by just one point. Lowe - who was McLaren's Engineering Director at the time - is still in awe of how successful Hamilton's first year as an F1 driver was and cannot see another rookie ever reaching the same level. "He arrived in terrific shape and hit the ground running," Lowe told F1's Beyond The Grid podcast. "Nine podiums in his first nine races - I don't believe we'll ever see that again for a rookie. So he was already at a very uniquely high level from the day he arrived in Formula 1, but he has improved massively in all that time." Lowe went on to work alongside Hamilton at Mercedes. When it comes to singling out an area in which the seven-times world champion has grown in strength since his early McLaren days, Lowe thinks that Hamilton has become more consistent. "There's nothing left on the table any day," Lowe said. "Lewis is supremely talented, and one of the features of people who are supremely talented is that they generally know they are. "That does sometimes leave scope for relaxation at certain points when they think, 'I'm the best, I'm good enough, I'll make it work, I'll carry it through.' "Of course it's not always down to you. Luck will play its part, disturbance will get in the way of your talent. 2016 was a great example of that, where Lewis had an extremely bad share of the bad luck around reliability, which itself was very rare but it all came onto his plate. "And that asked a lot of him. Unfortunately [he] didn't have enough in the end to close the championship [to Nico Rosberg], so I think that's an example of where he learned you can't leave any race on the table. You've got to take them all, whatever way it's looking."

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