Lewis Hamilton says his decision to sign a new contract with Mercedes was motivated by the fact he and the team have “unfinished business” in Formula 1.
Hamilton has been stuck on seven championships since then, and been forced to watch as Verstappen and his Red Bull team have swept all before them, having grasped the potential of a new set of technical rules far better than anyone else.
On Thursday at Monza, just after the new two-year deal was announced, Hamilton said “trying to win more world championships” was the reason for staying in F1.
It’s no secret in F1 that Hamilton and Mercedes both feel that they were robbed of their dues at Yas Marina that day.
Nor that it has made the past two seasons, when they have fallen dramatically from competitiveness after failing to fully grasp how to get the best from the new set of rules, especially difficult to deal with.
Hamilton, 38, will never forget what happened in Abu Dhabi, and he explained last year how tough it had been.
But he says that his new deal is about looking forwards, not back.
“I’m not really a revenge person,” Hamilton said. “It’s not about redemption. That’s in the past. There’s nothing we can do about the past.
“But what we can do is work better moving forwards, and I truly believe with this team we can win more world championships and races together. So that’s where all my energy’s going.”
That eighth title would mean Hamilton stands alone at the top of all F1’s major record lists, even if Verstappen is showing with his remarkable run of success that he could yet join him.
Hamilton already has more wins and pole positions than anyone else, but in terms of championships, the decisions by Michael Masi back in November 2021 to ignore the rules on how to restart a race after a safety car period and invent his own almost certainly prevented him from moving clear of the tie in which he finds himself with Michael Schumacher.
That evening under the lights in Abu Dhabi, there was not yet a sense that Mercedes would fall from the pedestal with quite such a thud.
They had dominated from 2014 to 2020, and it took a subtle tweak of the aerodynamic rules before the 2021 season to bring Red Bull on to a level playing field with them.
No one – least of all Hamilton and the team themselves – had any reason to think that the wholesale rewriting of the technical rules for 2022, and the reintroduction of ground effect, would leave them so far off the pace.
Instead, Hamilton and Mercedes have found themselves battling for respectability since the start of 2022.
They had a car last year that differed dramatically in technical philosophy from Red Bull’s, and Hamilton made his feelings clear to the team at the time that he felt they had got things wrong.
So when they produced a car that looked the same again for this year, and it felt the same when Hamilton drove it back in the winter, it’s no surprise that he should have vented his frustration at the first race, when it was clear they would be uncompetitive again, and say the Mercedes engineers “didn’t listen” to him.
Despite the difficulties of the past two seasons, though, Hamilton believes Mercedes can return to the front.
“The goal is simple,” he said. “Setting the target is simple, but achieving it is not. Just making sure you are performing every weekend.
“I still feel like I can improve every weekend. That’s what I love about this sport – you will never reach perfection but the pursuit of perfection is about one of the best things you can do.”
He added: “If it’s not next year, we will continue to work through it, but I truly believe that if it’s not next year it will be the year after.”
Racing beyond 40
Hamilton’s new deal will keep him in F1 beyond 40 – an age at which he not long ago was saying he could not see himself still competing at the highest level.
As Williams driver Alex Albon put it on Thursday: “To be in F1 until you’re 40, you have to be a generational talent, realistically.”
Hamilton is most certainly one of those, and at the start of the 2025 season he will follow in the footsteps of his great rival Fernando Alonso in competing in F1 beyond his 40th birthday.
Alonso continues to amaze this season, age seeming not to have affected him in any way, despite turning 42 in July.
Hamilton says it’s “great” seeing Alonso “doing an amazing job”, adding: “It just shows that your talent never leaves you as long as you have that passion and commitment.”
But he says it was more NFL legend Tom Brady’s example that he has followed for inspiration that sporting life need not stop despite reaching one’s fifth decade.
Brady, Hamilton says, “is the role model in that regard for us athletes and I’m really fortunate I’ve been able to speak to him to understand what he has done”.
Hamilton’s contract was concluded only this week after protracted negotiations with Mercedes over the nitty-gritty once the big-ticket items such as money and duration were dealt with earlier in the summer.
His team-mate George Russell, whose new deal runs for the same period and was announced at the same time, signed his months ago, but Mercedes kept it under wraps so as to be able to announce their drivers together.
Russell, 25, has been with Mercedes since he was 17, and they have guided him through the junior categories all the way to the top of F1 and he says the deal was “never in doubt”.
“It kind of feels like we’re married to each other, I’ve with the team for so long,” he said.
Russell feels like he had been having a bit of a bad patch through the summer but a strong performance with third on the grid in the Netherlands a week ago has convinced him he has “got my mojo back”.
He, like Hamilton, believes it is only a matter of time before Mercedes are back competing at the very front of the field.
“This is just the beginning,” he said.
