“My goal is to continue to be with Mercedes,” Lewis Hamilton outlines his intentions to stay with the Silver Arrows past 2023


“My goal is to continue to be with Mercedes,” Lewis Hamilton outlines his intentions to stay with the Silver Arrows past 2023

Lewis Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton has had a tough past year. First, he lost the championship in Abu Dhabi last year in an extremely controversial fashion, and when 2022 came, the car just was never good enough to consistently compete for wins, which is a first in Hamilton’s career. While there are three races left in the season, his chances become slimmer by the second. And what can happen next year is a mystery.

But right now, the Briton is not thinking about quitting the sport. His current deal expires at the end of 2023, but as he revealed to Motorsport.com, they are looking at a new one: “We are going to do another deal. We’re going to sit down and we’re going to discuss it in these next couple of months, I would say.”

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He called the team as his ‘family’: “My goal is to continue to be with Mercedes. I’ve been with Mercedes since I was 13. And it really is my family: Mercedes-Benz is my family. They’ve stuck with me through thick and thin.” then giving examples, such as him being expelled from school, the turbulent times in 2020, and really, all throughout his ups and downs.

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Lewis Hamilton opens up on his emotions after Abu-Dhabi

Red Bull Racing's Max Verstappen and Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton battling it out at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen and Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton battling it out at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

Post-Abu Dhabi, in season break, there were some rumours that Lewis Hamilton was considering retirement. From his perspective, his championship was taken away in perhaps the most painful fashion. The safety car ending finale at Abu Dhabi was something that Michael Masi lost his job for, but there’s no question that the result stands.

Talking about that time, Hamilton confirmed that he isn’t the kind of person to give up that easily: “[It] feels like years ago. I mean, it was definitely spirit-breaking, or soul-crushing, whatever you want to call it. Was I ever truly not going to come back? I am not one to give up like that, really.”

But what hurt the most for him was that the outcome of the championship was decided by a wrong decision: “It wasn’t for my lack of love for working with my team or racing cars, it was literally that…if you can lose a championship through wrongdoing within an organisation, that was the thing that I wondered [about].”

It was Hamilton’s family that allowed him to dig himself out of that ‘hole’, that enabled him to recover and really bounce back from the low. When asked if he believed the decisions were deliberate, he put it down to ‘bad decision-making’ and did not think that it was particularly targeted.

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