Lewis Hamilton contract: How long will fresh talks take with Toto Wolff?

Sam Cooper
Lewis Hamilton pointing next to Toto Wolff. Paul Ricard July 2022.

Lewis Hamilton pointing at a screen next to Toto Wolff in the Mercedes garage. Paul Ricard July 2022.

Toto Wolff said a meeting with Lewis Hamilton to get a new contract sorted will take just “half an hour” for everything to be agreed.

Mercedes achieved their best result of the weekend in Spain but it was something Hamilton said post-race that caught many people’s attention and it was the subject of his contract extension.

The seven-time World Champion is now just six months away from the end of his current Mercedes contract with an extension originally planned to be announced over the winter break. That break has since come and gone as have seven races and still Hamilton has yet to put ink on a new deal.

Speaking after his P2, Hamilton revealed he would speak with Wolff on Monday but later suggested he had already had plenty of meetings with the Mercedes team principal and CEO.

“I haven’t signed anything yet,” Hamilton said. “I think I’m meeting Toto tomorrow [Monday] so hopefully we can get something done.”

As for that meeting, Wolff predicted it would not take long for a new deal to be agreed.

“I think we just need to get time to sit over coffee,” Wolff told his former driver Nico Rosberg on Sky Sports F1. “That’s going to take half an hour.”

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A history of Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes contracts

Hamilton first put pen to paper on a Mercedes deal way back in October 2012 when he made the surprising move away from McLaren and to a constructor that had only just returned to the grid.

He was given a £45 million deal over three years and signed a three-year extension to that in May 2015, shortly before the Monaco Grand Prix. That deal was then extended in July 2019 by a further two years but then Hamilton’s contract negotiations appeared to get a little trickier.

Come the end of 2020 and Hamilton was actually a free agent as his deal ran out before he and Mercedes had agreed to a new one. They eventually did shortly before the 2021 season, just for a single year, but the contract was extended further in July when he signed on for two more years, taking him up to the end of the current season.

There has been plenty of speculation but as of yet no concrete reason why Hamilton has yet to sign a new deal but it is certainly not something that has never happened before.

Theories from his wage demands to wanting to see how the Mercedes car would perform have been put forward but judging by the words of both parties, it is a matter of when not if he will finally sign a new deal.