A Daily Round up of Formula One news, inside whispers, opinion and comment. Today,
Hamilton third best paid driver in F1
Mercedes engine caution in Sepang
Hamilton third best paid driver in F1
Lewis Hamilton’s contract is 99.6% complete. “There’s no negotiating left, it’s just legal stuff,” Hamilton tells the BBC.
Toto Wolff said during the Malaysian GP, “The pay structure was never an issue between Lewis and the team. We have the same expectations. Lewis knows his value and we know his value and that was all very positive and very aligned.”
According to the Forbes’ list of the world’s highest-paid athletes, Hamilton’s salary in 2014 was £19.6m.
Lewis is expected to re-sign with Mercedes for two years with an optional third, but his basic ‘salary’ will rise fractionally to just under £21m. With bonuses the British world champion could earn around £27m a year, which is about £7m less than Vettel will make for just turning up to drive a Ferrari in 2015.
Fernando Alonso is guaranteed around £27m a year, for what the BBC reveal to be a 3-year deal with McLaren Honda.
Lewis will therefore be just the third best paid Formula One driver on the grid, before bonuses – yet the performance of the Mercedes car should ensure his income is on a par with Fernando Alonso, though some way short of Sebastian Vettel – for 2015 at least.
Lewis sacked his management company XIX and claims he has been negotiating this deal in person.
Mercedes engine caution in Sepang
Ferrari fans should enjoy their day in the sun, because Vettel’s popular win at the second round of the F1 2015 championships may be his and Ferrari’s only one for quite some time.
TJ13 has learned that following the race in Australia and the failure of Romain Grosjean’s engine, Mercedes in Brixworth decided to retro fit all their engines with a new – but not fully tested seal.
The Lotus of Grosjean was forced to retire during the formation lap of the Melbourne F1 season opening event. “Romain suffered from a loss of power which we are investigating,” explained technical director Nick Chester at the time. “We ran very reliably in pre-season testing, but sometimes certain issues don’t manifest themselves until the season starts.”
Mercedes Australian GP postmortem revealed that a seal in the ICU had unexpectedly failed in Grosjean’s engine. They were concerned that in the heat of Malaysia, a repeat of this would be catastrophic for all their engines. So a revised version was developed for all the Mercedes engines running in Sepang.
However, the test bench data was inconclusive as to when exactly the seal would fail, so all the Mercedes engines were restricted in their maximum output to ensure a safety margin existed.
Good team factory visit today. Coming up with a plan to beat the red cars in shanghai! @MercedesAMGF1 @LewisHamilton pic.twitter.com/JfKkprHkdR
— Nico Rosberg (@NicoRosberg) April 2, 2015
Mercedes believe they have now resolved this problem completely, so all their engines will again have full power available during the Chinese Grand Prix.
Except for the customer teams, obviously.
DOPE
Wait for it……
Interesting piece on the Merc engines. Not read that story anywhere else. Good job.
We will likely find out who, if anyone, has been flaunting the fuel regs in China, I would imagine that during qualifying would be when it would be at its most obvious. (if anyone was actually cheating in the 1st place)
Just as a piece of ironic humour, would be funny if it turned out to be Renault, shall we say *stretching* the boundaries once again…. Not saying that is the case but, it would be kind of entertaining…
Or the new kid on the block: Honda… 🙂
But it will probably be Ferrari hahaha sorry Carlo
Another nail in the coffin……
Is “seal” the new and improved nomenclature for “gasket”?
We ought to be told…
lol… One has to believe so…
Any chance of describing your source on the merchant engine story? Also, got any figures to go with that?
Bloody auto correct… merchant = Mercedes.
Yes – we’ll give you the name address and telephone number of our friend in Brixton….
If you don’t yet understand we have enough ‘scoops’ which are solid, I don’t understand why you comment as you do.
ONLY TJ13 had the Red Bull camo livery before it rolled out of the garage on day 1 of testing.
We had it 2 weeks before Jerez, released it 3 days before the car was first seen and anyone else knew about it.
Some people will never believe a story if it doesn’t come from a “established” source, the same that lies to them every day… and that’s what they want, they daily dosage of BS to keep they dream world alive.
This! Is the reason TJ13 is a daily read for me. Insightful data like is not easily disseminated, nevertheless you continue you astound. Keep up the great work people.
PS
HAPPY EASTER! Everyone
Hmmm…
So Merc, in fact, were running lower power in Malaysia. And not just the Merc team, but ALL the Merc engined cars were down. Seems perhaps those of us that were claiming Merc had “turned down” the engines were correct.
What are the chances that this happened at the exact time there was “equalization” talks? So many amazing Coincidence’s in F1.
And so many amazing conclusions after one race in F1….
Engines were turned down..but not for the initial reasons that were speculated
@Tourdog, From the start of practice 1 (Melbourne), i thought, something is not right, is Mercedes ‘sandbagging’? I must admit that i thought that it was a strategic play in response to the ‘equalization’ talks.
Yeah, the only reason another engine manufacturer took the win was because we turned all of our engines down – even the works team. And it only took us a week to come up with that one.
If I was in their position I’d do the same thing just so I could read all the spurious conjecture people would come up then just go “lol, no”. It’s worked an absolute treat this time, Toto and Niki must have been pissing themselves since they boarded the flight home…
For those who think electric cars aren’t the future…
http://adamcooperf1.com/2015/04/06/former-red-bull-chief-mechanic-handkammer-joins-tesla/
An aging RB guy bailing out of the hectic fragile world of F1 to take up a steady job tells us the world is going electric….LOL Good luck to him in his new job but your seriously stretching!
I might be missing something here, but surely the guy who negotiates his own contract (saving the 15% vig) and scores the most dominant car that is gonna guarantee 3 titles, and actually gets a decent wage (instead of pay to drive, Senna offered to drive free for the best car), surely this is the deal of the century?
Put it this way, does the obviously street smart and clever author think Alonso would be happy to have an extra 7 million more than Lewis to be in the Mclaren instead of the Merc????
Not been funny, but the article kinda implies that receiving the 3rd highest wage in the most dominant car ever seen is somehow a negative result of a driver negotiating his own contract.
Please, are we missing something from that most succint and intelligent article?