Lewis Hamilton pours cold water on shock Red Bull switch claim

Not for the first time this year, Lewis Hamilton has strongly denied holding talks with a rival F1 team in the build-up to signing an extension with Mercedes until the end of 2025.

Back in May it was Ferrari he was linked to: this time, it’s Red Bull. And the source of the rumour is none other than team boss Christian Horner, who claimed in an interview earlier this week that the British driver’s management team had asked about pairing him with Max Verstappen in 2024. Woah.

Horner also claimed that Hamilton did discuss a drive with Ferrari back in May, although the 38-year-old has moved quickly to distance himself from the claims.

“I don’t really understand what he’s been talking about because no one - as far as I’m aware - from my team has spoken to him,” Hamilton told Sky Sports. “I haven’t spoken to Christian in years.

“However, he did reach out to me earlier on in the year about meeting up. But that’s it. I just congratulated them on an amazing year and I said ‘hopefully soon I’ll be able to fight against you guys in the near future’. That was it.

“I think he’s just stirring things. You know Christian, he loves that kind of stuff.”

As much as we’d like to see a repeat of the 2021 title fight - which controversially went down to the very last lap of the season - the only way it’ll happen now is if Mercedes do some serious catching up over the winter break.

The team hasn’t won a single race in 2023, and could still lose second place in the constructors’ championship to Ferrari if results in this weekend’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix don’t go the Silver Arrows’ way.

And anyway, when two generational talents are pitted together in the same team it, um, rarely ends well. Arguably the last time it happened was in Hamilton’s debut season in 2007 alongside Fernando Alonso at McLaren… when the duo took lumps out of each other and both missed out on the world title to Kimi Raikkonen by a single point.