Lewis Hamilton has confirmed he will sign a huge new Mercedes contract this week – a deal that looks set to be worth more than £27 million a year.The 30-year-old reigning world champion says his talks with the team are now complete, and the deal is merely being finalised by lawyers prior to signatures.
Hamilton has been handling negotiations with team bosses himself, an unusual situation in modern-day sport, but he and appears very content with how the process has developed.
The Brit, who won the opening race of the season in Melbourne but could not match Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari in the second in Malaysia, has been poised to sign the new deal for a long time.
But finally it appears that the contract is to be secured with Hamilton committing his future to the team, who dominated the sport last season.
“It should be done this week,” he said. “There is no reason it shouldn’t.
“Honestly, it’s 99.6% done. There’s no negotiating left, it’s just legal stuff.”
Hamilton, who joined Mercedes in 2013 after six years with McLaren, will earn $31m (£20.9m) plus extensive bonuses, according to the BBC.
What will dictate exactly how much Hamilton earns from the deal will be dependent on how many races he wins and whether he becomes world champion again.
If Hamilton meets his bonus targets per season, his annual earnings should be comfortably over $40m (£27m).
If, as is being reported, Hamilton earns £27m-a-year with Mercedes, his earnings will equate to a staggering £3,082 per hour and 86p per second.
The new deal, if confirmed this week, would be a timely boost for Hamilton after he felt that poor balance and strategy were partly to blame for Ferrari and Vettel outdoing Mercedes in Malaysia.
“I don’t know whether or not if I stayed out with (Vettel) if that would have made much of a difference,” said world champion Hamilton who started on pole.
“They were probably just as good if not a little better in terms of tyre degradation, so it would have been very close,” he told reporters. “Naturally, after the first stop, I just had so much ground to catch up, it was pretty much impossible,” he added.
“All day I was struggling with the balance, I had a lot of understeer so I couldn’t really look after tyres. I was doing everything with the controls but couldn’t find a good balance.”
Team boss Toto Wolff described the race as the “wake-up call” that the team needed.