Lewis Hamilton takes swipe at Aston Martin in warning to ‘nervous’ Mercedes F1 team

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Lewis Hamilton has taken a swipe at Aston Martin for trying to ‘copy’ Red Bull amid a warning for his ‘nervous’ Mercedes team about their new car for the 2024 F1 season.

The 38-year-old admits the Silver Arrows are fearful that next year’s car may again fail to see Mercedes return to the front of the pack. Hamilton and George Russell have stomached two tough seasons after the Brackley outfit took the wrong direction with the design of their car.

Mercedes thought they alone had struck gold at the start of Formula 1’s latest ground effect era last season. But the team’s radical zero-sidepod concept backfired and they dropped the concept this May. Mercedes have since been trying to regain their sizable deficit to Red Bull.

Mercedes admitted they made a mistake with their 2023 F1 car design

Having made progress toward the end of 2022 with their zero-sidepod concept with Russell winning the Sao Paulo GP, Mercedes controversially stuck with that philosophy for 2023. But the team accepted they made the wrong decision after pre-season testing showed the error.

Yet that decision came too late as far as Hamilton was concerned. The Briton recently stated that Mercedes ‘frustrated’ him by not making the changes he requested last winter. It led to a very annoying campaign for Hamilton, who failed to win a single race for a second season.

Lewis Hamilton warns Mercedes about copying cars like Aston Martin

Hamilton now believes Mercedes are in a much better position going into the winter as they design next year’s car. But the Stevenage-born star will not hold his breath that the W15 will make them title threats again. He accepts that their car will retain some of the W14’s traits.

To illustrate his point, Hamilton has also taken a swipe at Aston Martin for trying to copy Red Bull’s RB18. The Silverstone team started this year as Red Bull’s nearest rival after spending a large part of 2022 creating the AMR23 with Red Bull’s title-winning car as their inspiration.

“I think we have understood the car so much better,” Hamilton explained, via quotes by the Express. “We have developed great tools in the background. So, naturally, I’m hopeful but I’m not going to hold my breath.

“The thing is with the timeline you have and the limited resources you have, you can’t just throw it away and start from scratch. You can’t copy a car and start from that. Look at the Astons, they tried to copy a car and it wasn’t the same.

“It is not as easy as that. You have to try and take the good parts and through trial and error just try to add other parts. But you can imagine they are also nervous of making too big a change and it being the wrong one.”

While Fernando Alonso started 2023 with four third-place and two second-place finishes in the first eight races, Aston Martin could not keep pace with Red Bull. They even finished the season fifth in the constructors’ championship, also behind Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren.