Breaking:.Lewis Hamilton Formula 1 announce another new contract worth $1220 billion for future ..
Lewis Hamilton Formula 1 announce another new contract worth $1220 billion for future
“I absolutely had it on my radar that Lewis would go.
“I just couldn’t understand why he’d change to another team before we knew if we were going to be competitive.
“It also didn’t give me any time to react, I had to emergency call our partners, and I possibly missed out on negotiating with other drivers who had signed contracts a few weeks earlier like Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris.
“[But] I like the situation. It helps us because it avoids the moment where we need to tell the sport’s most iconic driver that we want to stop.
“There’s a reason why we only signed a one-plus-one-year contract.
“We’re in a sport where cognitive sharpness is extremely important, and I believe everyone has a shelf life.
“So I need to look at the next generation. It’s the same in football. Managers like Sir Alex Ferguson or Pep Guardiola. They anticipated it in the performance of their top stars and brought in junior players that drove the team for the next years.”
The seven-time world champion chose to leave Mercedes for Ferrari in pursuit of his elusive eighth world championship title. Hamilton endured two winless seasons with the Brackley-based team, hindered by the challenges of Mercedes’ troubled ground-effect cars since 2022. This year, the team finally tasted victory mid-season with the W15 F1 car. However, the issues resurfaced after the summer break, culminating in Hamilton describing the car’s performance during the São Paulo Grand Prix as its worst of the season.
Now though, Wolff clarified his earlier statements ahead of the upcoming Las Vegas Grand Prix, suggesting that he was referring to everyone in general and not just Hamilton when talking about age. Speaking on BBC Radio 4, as reported by PlanetF1, he said:
“That was taken a little bit out of context.
“What I was referring to is that all of us, we age, and whether it’s in the car, on a pitch, or as a manager and entrepreneur, you have to, and this is what I’m trying to do with myself, understand am I going from great to good.
“Because good is not in Formula 1 anymore.
“Now, contrary to my own self-assessment, I think we see with Lewis that he’s very much there when the car is right. And we haven’t been able to give him that car for him to perform best and that is a frustration that we equally have in the team and for himself.
“But he’s very sharp. He’s different to when he was a 20-year-old, that’s certainly clear. His experience and his race craft is tremendous.”
