Hamilton recalls why move to Mercedes was 'pivotal moment' in F1 career

Lewis Hamilton has been talking about the defining moment of his career in motorsport, which he believes was when he decided to leave McLaren and move to the struggling Mercedes team for 2013.

Hamilton had been a McLaren protege even before being promoted to the F1 grid by Ron Dennis after clinching the GP2 (now F2) title in 2006. He was runner up in his rookie season and clinched his first F1 drivers title in 2008.

Hamilton was still at Woking in 2012 and looked like the consummate lifelong company man when he made the shock decision to quit McLaren and join Mercedes, which at the time had only been competing for three seasons.

Many pundits quickly concluded that Hamilton had made a career-ending mistake that he would regret for the rest of his time in the sport. But it didn't turn out that way, with six more titles notched up in quick succession.

“I was in Thailand at the time, in between races after Singapore, and that’s when I made the decision," Hamilton told the Performance People podcast.

• Read also: Wolff decided on Antonelli ‘minutes’ after learning of Hamilton’s exit

“Pretty much everyone told me to stay," he recalled. “I was with a championship winning team. I was with McLaren, which had such a great history.

"Mercedes used to own half of McLaren. It was partly their team, but then they broke away and bought their own team and as they were trying to ramp up.

"They weren’t having a lot of success," he said. "Mercedes were the fifth or sixth-best team at the time. They were often finishing out of the top ten, struggling to get into the top ten.

“As a world champion, people were like: ‘This is the worst decision you can make, this is not a great team," he continued. “All the pundits, all the media outlets, all the fans, everyone was like: ‘Career’s over.’

"But I went with my gut and my intuition," Hamilton said. "I was like: ‘I want to take the leap of faith and I’m going to go with it, regardless of what people say.’

"And it was the best thing for me," Hamilton declared. "It went well and everyone’s like: ‘Oh, it’s the best decision ever made!'”

Hamilton said it was the challenge of helping get Mercedes to the top that motivated him to leave McLaren where he just hadn't felt sufficiently challenged to get the best out of him.

“I think it was just really that I wanted a challenge at the time and I love taking risks, I always have," he explained. “And also I never liked doing the same thing everyone expects of me. That’s why I never did well at school.

“I meditated on it, I prayed on it, trying to think of what I wanted to do and I just loved the challenge [of] going into a really uncomfortable position, getting out of your comfort zone.

"It's what I love to do, because it’s nerve-wracking, but I love that feeling. That’s the feeling you get when you get in a Formula 1 car."

It's impossible not to see history repeating itself with Hamilton's decision to bail out of a custom-made berth at Mercedes to take on a huge task at Ferrari from 2025 alongside the formidable Charles Leclerc.

"Moving into a new team, people I didn’t know, having to get integrated, all the changes you need to make, and then the growth process of building it and evolving it and growing towards a common goal.

"Getting there is the greatest feeling when you do eventually do that," he said. "I couldn’t believe that the decision I made was paying off: ‘Wow, it’s really, really happening. This is the right thing for me.’

"I was riding this beautiful wave.," he added, with half an eye on doing the same thing all over again at Maranello next season.

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