Lewis Hamilton warns Mercedes to leave his team set-up alone
- Nico Rosberg beat Lewis Hamilton to the 2016 F1 world title last month
- Mercedes driver Hamilton complained about the six mechanics being swapped between him and Rosberg at the beginning of last season
- Team-mate Rosberg retired from the sport five days after his 2016 triumph
- Mercedes are still searching for a replacement driver for Rosberg
Lewis Hamilton has laid the law down to his Mercedes team, telling them not to meddle with the personnel on his side of the garage.
With Nico Rosberg’s shock retirement five days after winning the title, it would look like carelessness to lose a second world champion, a risk that makes Hamilton more powerful than ever.
Having complained about the six mechanics being swapped between him and Rosberg at the beginning of last season, Hamilton said: ‘I’ll speak to Toto [Wolff, Mercedes chief] about next year and say I don’t want my guys being changed. I want to keep all my engineers. All my mechanics. There is not a single person who needs to leave.
Lewis Hamilton (right) had to settle for second best in 2016 behind Nico Rosberg (left)
Hamilton (#44) chases down his 2016 Mercedes team-mate and F1 champion Rosberg
Rosberg and his wife Vivian are sprayed with champagne after he clinched the world title
‘I am now their only world champion so hopefully they respect and appreciate that and the commitment I’ll put in next year.’
Wounds are still raw at Mercedes after the controversial final race of the season in Abu Dhabi, where the pit wall bosses told Hamilton to speed up rather than try to push Rosberg, who only had to protect his championship lead, back into the chasing Ferraris and Red Bulls.
Hamilton ignored their pleas, leading Wolff to say immediately after the race that he was unprepared to accept ‘anarchy’.
Those comments caused the triple world champion to pretty much blank Wolff at the FIA gala dinner in Vienna a fortnight ago. And, in an interview with Channel 4, Hamilton claimed he had been ‘disrespected’ and that the issue was not yet resolved.
Since the recording, Wolff and Hamilton have spoken and the Austrian reiterated his public comments that he thought in retrospect they were wrong to ask their star driver to accelerate away. Hamilton is said to have accepted this and moved on.
Hamilton (left) and Mercedes GP Executive Director Toto Wolff (centre) with Rosberg
However, Wolff explained they had not expected him to try to push Rosberg into congestion, saying: ‘It was not naive of us. What he did was not what we had discussed in the morning (at a team meeting). It did not come into our minds that he would not follow what we had discussed.’
Hamilton said: ‘I did not go into the race with a pre-set plan. I wanted to win obviously, to get away at the start, get into the lead. I thought I had enough pace to have pulled away into the lead, but what use would that have been to me?’
McLaren are re-evaluating the future of two Ron Dennis loyalists after he was put on gardening leave. German Jost Capito, the team’s F1 chief executive, is understood to be on his way out of the company, though a McLaren spokesman refused to comment last night.
Marketing guru Ekrem Sami, who has worked for McLaren for more than three decades and supported suspended chairman Dennis during his recent marginalisation, is no longer a director of McLaren Technology Group.
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