Hamilton: Vettel 'highly unlikely' to switch to Mercedes

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Lewis Hamilton has brushed aside suggestions that his championship rival Sebastian Vettel might be eyeing up a move to join him at Mercedes in 2018. However, he wasn't able to definitively rule it out either.

Vettel's current contract with Ferrari expires at the end of this season. He is yet to confirm his plans for next year. His current team mate Kimi Raikkonen has just confirmed he'll stay on in 2018. In contrast, Ferrari has so far been quiet about Vettel's status.

"At some point there will be news," Vettel said on Thursday. "There's no news yet. The main focus now is not to focus on news, the main focus is to focus on the race. And that will be the same next week.

"I don't expect news in the next two weeks, to be honest."

With Vettel's position up in the air, it puts a question mark over Mercedes' talks with Valtteri Bottas about extending the Finn's current one-year contract.

However Hamilton insisted that Vettel has no interest in joining Mercedes.

"I think it's highly unlikely that he will be here," Hamilton said ahead of this weekend's Belgium Grand Prix.

Former Ferrari stars expect Vettel to stay at Maranello

"I know he doesn't want to be my team-mate," he added. "He wouldn't be in the position he is now, in his team, in terms of how the team operates, if he was here."

Hamilton says he sees no reason for Mercedes to change its current driver line-up.

"I don't believe any of the bosses or any individual in the team is unhappy with what is in place," he said. "I find it hard to believe they would change that.

"The team is in a very, very good union," he added. "The last race is actually probably one of the best examples of it, just how great the team is currently."

In one of the better displays of team harmony on the grid this season, Hamilton and Bottas carried out team orders without argument in Hungary. Hamilton says that he's been very pleased by Bottas' arrival at Brackley this season in place of Nico Rosberg.

"Coming into this season I haven't changed a single thing that I do, but there's another new element in the team, and it works."

But if Mercedes did decide to replace Bottas, Hamilton said he would take it in his stride - whoever his team mate ended up being.

"I am always game to race whoever it is, and racing against the best drivers is always a great thing," he said.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.