Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes life tipped for change with ‘exclusion from conversations’

Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton.

1996 F1 World Champion Damon Hill believes the process of isolating Lewis Hamilton from technical conversations for next year will have now started.

Hamilton is into his final months as a Mercedes F1 driver, with the seven-time F1 World Champion taking on a new challenge with Ferrari in 2025, bringing to an end the most successful driver/team partnership in the sport’s history.

Damon Hill: Mercedes is an honourable team

Appearing on the F1 Nation podcast ahead of the Dutch Grand Prix and the resumption of action for the second half of the 2024 championship, Hill said it’s very likely that the process of icing Lewis Hamilton out of meetings and discussions regarding the development direction of next year’s W16 will have begun.

It’ll be an unusual dynamic for Hamilton to adjust to, given how embedded he’s been within the squad since joining the Brackley-based team at the end of 2012, but Hill said he doubts Hamilton will be made to feel uncomfortable or will be treated in any way unfairly in his final months.

“I think it’s got to, hasn’t it?” he replied when asked if the process is likely to make his life harder in his final 10 races.

“I mean, he’s got to be excluded from conversations to do with whatever’s coming for next year.

“They don’t want to show many insights that he might take to Ferrari, particularly. So it may be he’s deprived of a little bit more information than he’s liked in the past.

“But they are an honourable team, Mercedes, and I think Toto [Wolff] is an honourable person.

“I think that he’ll always be treated fairly within a team, but there’s only so much you can give away, isn’t there, when you’ve got a guy leaving.”

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Despite how the process of gardening leave applies to technical and leadership staff, due to the knowledge they possess becoming less relevant after a while away from any team, Hill laughed as he pointed out most drivers wouldn’t have a level of technical knowledge that would be directly useful for their new teams to implement in any meaningful way.

“It’s not like a technical person who, when they leave a team, have to go on gardening leave, and they can’t join a team until the following year, or something like that,” he said.

“The drivers can go from day one to the next team, the moment their contract has expired. The trouble is drivers are not necessarily privy to all of the technical things that happen and, in any case, they probably wouldn’t understand because it’s highly technical, and you only have to speak to some of the the engineers in the sport to know that there is a need to understand very complex technical things, which very few drivers can do.

“You would know what they’re playing with, yeah, and you’d know what sort of directions.

“You’d know what, in general, what the team was up to. Clearly, Lewis will be able to go to Ferrari and say, ‘Listen, when we changed our front wing, and our front wing did this, and that was a special tweak with the front wing that we learned and unlocked our performance’, he’ll be able to tell them that.

“But then, of course, they’ll probably already know that. Everyone watches the other teams like hawks, and nothing really is missed in what is brought forward. You can’t see what’s under the cover.

“You can’t see what’s going on with the power unit. And, let’s be honest, that is really deep science. You’re probably never going to know what’s going on under the hood. There’s only so much you can take as a driver!”

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