Speaking to the media ahead of his final race for McLaren this weekend in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Lewis Hamilton has refused to rule out a return to the Woking based team in the future. Hamilton will join Nico Rosberg at Mercedes AMG next season, replacing the retiring Michael Schumacher.
Speaking to Sky Sports News, Lewis said that he likens his move to Mercedes as 'going traveling for a while'. He also said that he would always consider McLaren his home. Hamilton joined McLaren's F1 team in 2007 after being brought through the motor racing ranks with McLaren's backing since the 1990's.
He came extremely close to winning the championship in his debut season however narrowly missed out to Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen. In 2008, with Alonso having returned to Renault, Hamilton won the championship and to date that is his only championship win. He joins Mercedes at a great time in my opinion, as the team will be going through a transition period with Schumacher retiring and the fact that Lewis Has worked with Mercedes on the engine side since he entered F1 he knows the engine and how it works.
He has also worked with Mercedes vice president of motorsport Norbert Haug who was part of McLaren's operation until 2010 when Mercedes bought Brawn GP. Next season will be the first year however that he will work with team boss Ross Brawn so it is going to be very interesting to see how that relationship develops.
When Lewis was racing in the junior category he was team-mates with Nico Rosberg and they get on extremely well. Now it is going to be interesting to see what the dynamic between the two will be like. Since joining the team in 2010, Nico has consistently beaten Michael Schumacher so it is going to be interesting to see if Hamilton can hit the crowd running and stamp his authority on the team from the word go?
Another thing that I think will be very interesting is the identity of Lewis' race engineer. When Schumacher joined Mercedes he inherited Jenson Button's race engineer Andrew Shovlin, so I think it would be extremely interesting to see if Lewis gets Shov (as he is known) as his engineer.
Interestingly enough in Formula One it is not very common for engineers to follow driver's from team to team, this practice is more come in my opinion in the US in IndyCar and NASCAR. However there has been an exception this season in Formula One with Lotus team as Kimi Raikkonen's pld race engineer from when he was with McLaren, Mark Slade is now his race engineer at Lotus.
Do I think that Lewis will return to McLaren one day? I doubt it. The reason for this is because if he happens to be extremely successful at Mercedes over the next years (the duration of his contract) he won't want to go back to McLaren.
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