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Mercedes boss Toto Wolff recalls 2016 ‘divorce’ talk with Lewis Hamilton amid contract gridlock
Lewis Hamilton’s current Mercedes contract is set to expire at the end of this season.
Lewis Hamilton joined Mercedes from McLaren ahead of the 2013 season. Hamilton’s move coincided with Austrian executive Toto Wolff taking over as the Team Principal of Mercedes. Hamilton and Mercedes forged a tremendous partnership winning six drivers’ titles and eight constructors’ championships. Wolff has now revealed that the relationship between him and Hamilton was not always smooth. Wolff said that Hamilton needed some time to re-engage with him in 2016, which saw a bitter fight in the Mercedes team for the title between Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. Hamilton, the defending champ, lost out to Rosberg for the F1 title, and he wasn’t happy.
“Lewis has become a friend. And over the years we’ve gone through difficult spells and very good moments. We celebrated many championships and we had discussions among ourselves which were not always easy. A key moment was at the end of 2016 when we didn’t speak to each other for a while. So I invited him to come to my kitchen in Oxford and sit down and have a chat. The analogy I gave to him is that also I have arguments with [my wife] Susie.
“Even if we shout at each other, even if we have this argument, there’s never thought of divorcing, and that’s why I said to him, ‘I don’t want to divorce you and neither do you. Because I want the best racing driver in our cars and you want to have the best cars.’ So we came to the conclusion that we can have conflict, we can create an atmosphere where we’re able to be brutally honest with each other, and sometimes we agree to disagree, but we move on,” Toto Wolff told BBC’s Desert Island Discs.
Wolff has talked about the Hamilton and Rosberg rivalry before and even claimed that he was ready to drop the Mercedes riders for races. “It was very difficult, because I came into the team as a newcomer in F1 and Nico and Lewis had been in the sport for much longer.. But still I was able to create an environment where they had to respect the team, sometimes with an iron fist, and they understood that they couldn’t let us down, they couldn’t let Mercedes down,” Wolff said in a podcast in 2021.
The rivalry between Hamilton and Rosberg was at its peak in 2016 and they even took each other out at the Spanish GP that year. Rosberg retired after winning the title in 2016 and was replaced by Valterri Bottas. Despite enjoying a fabulous stint at Mercedes, Hamilton seems to be currently in a deadlock over a contract extension. Hamilton’s current contract with Mercedes expires at the end of the current season. It was widely reported last month that the British racer had agreed to financial terms and the contract duration with Mercedes. Though the seven-time world champion is yet to finalise his agreement.
