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Introduction 

Some things that I’ve seen being discussed when it comes to driver’s preferences include:

Early vs. late breaking into turns 

Agressive vs. smooth steering 

Preference of Understeer vs. oversteer

Just to name a few but it all plays a part in how fast you exit a corner, tire degradation, and possibility of getting overtaken. 

Lance’s “Style”

On the grid, there are a lot of drivers who vary in their approach to how they take corners, such as Checo who always anticipates the best line to take, or Fernando who drives aggressively and uses a braking area to go into a corner without losing speed exiting it.

Lance differs because he’s always been a true reactive driver, meaning he relies more on instinctive feel. You can see it on his onboards, how he’s constantly adjusting the wheel and makes very erratic inputs while driving. 

This is in contrast to other drivers who we see handle the steering wheel in a smoother way that doesn’t make it look like they’re wrestling with their car. In his first year of F1 especially, he was significantly overdriving the car. 

He uses very deep braking and carries a lot of speed into the corner because of this. From the outside, it seems like he only plans up to the middle of the corner and somehow fights his way from there to the straight, but his reaction time is amazing, therefore he doesn’t completely lose the car. You can see how his approach is unorthodox.

Quali

If you’ve been following Lance for a bit, you probably know that quali has never been his strong suit, he’s definitely more of a Sunday driver. And this correlates directly to his style. 

No two laps from him are exactly the same, and since it’s not very smooth, his one-lap pace suffers. 

“Rainmaster”

Lance’s driving is far from ideal for a dry quali, but this is why he reacts very well to unforeseen events and changing conditions. On a wet track, drivers have to constantly correct themselves, but he’s already doing that normally.

After his pole position in the wet, he said, “In these conditions you can’t think about everything. You just have to focus on the next corner”. This just highlights how he literally takes it one corner at a time, acting on instinct, as opposed to forecasting what he’s gonna do in the next corner. Ironically, people have said that this instinctive driving reminds them of Gilles Villeneuve. 

Adding on, his frantic steering style is really good for heating up cold tires in the wet.

Growth

I would say that over the years, he’s definitely learned how to tone down the way he handles the car. For example, his tire management used to be very bad as his steering would just overwork them. 

But even just looking at recent races such as Brazil and Las Vegas, he manages to go on long stints, even exceeding the predicted tire life which would be impossible if he still drove as aggressively as before. His reaction time has only gotten better as well, often gaining places at the start.

However, if you look at his onboards, you can still tell his driving apart from any else’s, and I don’t think his way of driving will ever change. 

He has such a natural talent for feel and being able to quickly react in the most extreme conditions, but that has forced him to work on other aspects of racing such as tire management and one-lap race pace. 

One reason why it might have taken him longer to develop his racing may be his jump from F3 straight to F1. Lower series cars have less grip overall, which suits his style, as opposed to F1 cars that have good grip. So you can probably see why he struggled in the beginning.

Conclusion

As you can see, his driving is quite different, and it shows through his strengths and weaknesses. Reactive driving was more the norm back F1 from the 70’s to early 2000’s, but went away as cars became smoother. I actually think he’d be really good at rally driving…

But I dunno I guess this makes me like him even more because of all the work he’s had to put in to make his unconventional driving work in modern F1.