Toto Wolff has put to rest the rising speculation about Hamilton wanting to switch to Ferrari from his current team. Hamilton’s contract with Mercedes is until the end of 2018. Hamilton skipping the London F1 event added fuel to the fire.
Toto, however, says these rumours have no relevance to him or the team. He also took a shot at the media for criticising Hamilton’s recent 2 day holiday skipping the London Event.
Toto Wolff says “If he [Hamilton] feels that staying away from an F1 environment, being with his friends, helps him to overcome what have been hard weekends and helps him to extract performance at Silverstone, then so be it.”
“I don’t know who talked about Ferrari and Lewis, but it is nobody in the team and not himself [Hamilton]”
“What he has said was that he is a Ferrari fan, like we all are, and that it is a team that every driver needs to drive in. Full stop.
“He’s in a very good place, he drives the fastest car at the moment, and that’s a Mercedes.
“We have a contract that goes for one and a half more years and we have the best dynamic in the team until now. All the talk outside has no relevance for me, zero.
The speculation gained more ground due to Hamilton’s statement about what we might do in six months’ time. When he asked Hamilton said, “I just think in life – you don’t know what’s going to happen.
“Right now I love driving, in six months you could say – it’s very unlikely – because I think I’m always going to like driving, always going to be doing crazy stuff, I’m just saying you can’t say what frame of mind I’ll be in come Christmas time, but hopefully it’s a really good one with a fourth title.
“Even getting another championship, it will never be a case of ‘now it’s time to hang up my gloves’.
“I’ll always want to win more, even when I do stop something inside me will say I’ll still want more, but I’m just focused at the moment on trying to get that fourth.”
Hamilton signed his existing contract with Mercedes in 2015 for over £100 million, making him one of Britain’s best-paid sports persons. The Three-time Formula One World champion is gunning for his fourth title in the next race.
