Lewis Hamilton hopes to see McLaren and Alpine battle it out at the front in 2023 as the Mercedes driver comments on his team’s rivals. The former Formula 1 multiple Champion also hopes his team will be able to challenge Red Bull and Ferrari for the title in 2023, but the Mercedes driver believes McLaren and Alpine should step up and challenge the top two as they were very competitive in 2022.
Seven-time F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton is hoping to see Mercedes back in the title fight in 2023, but the British driver has also named two other teams that he believes could join the fight at the front of the grid, and potentially take points away from the top two teams in the championship battle.
In 2022, the long championship winning streak came to an end for Mercedes as Red Bull Racing clinched both the drivers’ and constructors’ world titles. The team from Milton Keynes dominated the 2022 campaign with seventeen wins, fifteen of which were for Max Verstappen alone.
Mercedes had to settle for a single victory thanks to George Russell at the Brazilian Grand Prix at the end of the year, while Scuderia Ferrari had one of its best seasons by finishing second in the constructors’ world championship. All of which cemented the fact that Lewis Hamilton was far from achieving his goal to claim a record breaking 8th world championship title.
While Lewis Hamilton expects to see Red Bull and Ferrari fighting for the title again in 2023, the British driver hopes Mercedes will be able to get back into the fight and is not ruling out Alpine and McLaren, who finished the 2022 season in fourth and fifth place overall respectively. These two teams could therefore support him in his bid to win the championship by taking away points from Verstappen and Leclerc.
“I’d like to think we’re going to be the ones to compete with them and be able to beat them [Red Bull] again, and I believe that for sure,” Hamilton was quoted by the offical F1 website as saying at the end of last season.
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“But I really hope Ferrari will be strong in the years to come. They’ve certainly had a tough year, but there have been some strong signs we’ve seen this year, which has been nice to see.”
“It’s nice to see Ferrari doing well again, and I hope it will be more than a two-way battle next year [in 2023]. If not, surprisingly, maybe more…why couldn’t McLaren be there? Even Alpine has done wonders, so we’ll see.”
The Mercedes team was the first team on the grid to start the engine of its 2023 car, but the German manufacturer’s team has yet to reveal the date of its W14 presentation unlike Ferrari, which will lift the veil on its 2023 F1 car on February 14.
W14's first words! 🤩
Firing up our 2023 @F1 car… pic.twitter.com/6delOaaE4H
— Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team (@MercedesAMGF1) December 22, 2022
