Hamilton Reveals Some Mercedes Colleagues Didn't Take Ferrari News Well

Sunday, 14 April 2024 at 13:00

Lewis Hamilton revealed in an interview with GQ Magazine that some Mercedes engineers didn't take the news about his exit from Ferrari very well.

In an interview with GQ Magazine, seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton discussed several different topics, one of them being his move to Ferrari.

The 39-year-old suggested he manifested his move to the team from Maranello, but his commitment to Mercedes remained the same as every year before that. He also said:

"My focus is, how do I deliver the best year that this team has ever had, after all the great years we've had?"

Hamilton then revealed that not all of his colleagues inside the German team took the announcement of him leaving for Ferrari very well.

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"It's how you engage with the people around you, who have taken the news – some of them really well, some of them less so. How do you take them on this journey and leave on a high together?"

Perhaps the difficult thing to understand for some people within the team was that the seven-time World Champion claimed just a few months before his contract with Ferrari that he wanted to stay at Mercedes until the end of his career.

This was even shown in Netflix's "Drive to Survive" series. Hamilton and Mercedes have been together longer than any other driver-team pairing in F1 history.

When the 39-year-old's contract with Scuderia was announced, it was a very strange situation because, during the summer of 2023, he signed a deal with Mercedes for 2024 and 2025. Though neither of these seasons had even begun then, the British driver decided to change that decision.

Some might have taken this as a sign that Hamilton doesn't trust his team, although he tried to explain that his exit from Ferrari wasn't based on the team's performance but rather his childhood dream.