Hamilton will sign new Mercedes deal
The Team Mercedes principal, Toto Wolff, says he has no concerns about Lewis Hamilton moving to another team or out of Formula One altogether when the seven-times world champion’s contract expires at the end of the season.
Hamilton agreed to join Mercedes in 2012 and signed his most recent contract in 2021.
At the time, the team was the most successful in the paddock, but Red Bull have taken that mantle over the past two years, with Max Verstappen winning back-to-back drivers’ titles.
There has been speculation that Hamilton may move on if Mercedes’ fortunes do not improve rapidly, but Wolff made it clear that he is comfortable with how things stand and is confident that the relationship will continue.
“It has been 11 years that we’ve been together. Every single time that we talk about Lewis’s contract it is six months of, ‘Where are we and what is happening?’ We keep saying the same thing, that we are just rolling on,” Wolff said.
“It is not any different in terms of negotiation. It is just about putting different timelines and different numbers down. That’s how we do it. We are working on this, it’s a work in progress. We are bouncing emails back and forth and eventually we are going to sign it.”
Mercedes endured a torrid 2022, when their W13 car suffered terribly from bouncing at high speed.
The problem seemed to have been ironed out towards the end of the year, but their form over the first four races of this season has been unspectacular.
They sit third in the constructors’ championship with 76 points, already 104 in arrears of Red Bull.
Hamilton and his team-mate George Russell topped the leaderboard in the first practice session for Sunday’s Miami Grand Prix, but Wolff warned against reading too much into that achievement as he stressed the need for a more predictable car.
“I think the car has some goodness, it is just very tricky to unlock it from a set-up point of view. The drivers have confidence that it can go quick, but it is on a razor’s edge,” he said.
“When we are a little bit beyond the edge then the car is really difficult. It’s unpredictable. It steps out under braking, it understeers, it does the whole thing.
“A good car is a car that the drivers are able to push and feel that it doesn’t do anything unpredictable. Unfortunately, we have had that over the last year, and particularly in qualifying when a driver really needs to push to the limits. The drivers just couldn’t find any confidence in the car.”
