25/07/2022
NEWS STORY
Only just missing out on fulfilling Damon Hill's prediction by marking his 300th Grand Prix with a victory, Lewis Hamilton insists that there is more to come.
Barely a race weekend passes by without Lewis Hamilton breaking at least one more record.
Though he is effectively 50 races down on Kimi Raikkonen – just over one and a half seasons if Liberty continues with its expansion of the calendar - Sunday saw seven-time world champion Hamilton join the Finn and four others in F1's unique '300 Club', those drivers who have started 300 Grands Prix.
As memories of the Briton walking away from the sport in the aftermath of Abu Dhabi fade, in the moments after finishing second to Max Verstappen at Paul Ricard, Hamilton was asked if he might stick around for 400 races.
"That's a lot of races!" he laughed.
"I firstly just want to be grateful to get to this point," he continued. "But I still feel fresh and still feel like I've got plenty of fuel left in the tank.
"I'm enjoying what I'm doing. I'm enjoying... really, really proud and enjoying arriving every day and working with this incredible group of people. I'm also enjoying working with the sport more than ever.
"We've got some great people leading the sport and having great conversations about the direction we're going as a sport, so I'm enjoying it more than ever.
"I would say in that space, of course, I want to get back to winning ways and that's going to take time," he admitted, "but I'm sure we'll sit down at some stage and talk about the future.
"But again, just with our team, I always want to continue to be building. It's one thing having races, but it's also continuing the work that we do outside and doing more, which I think Mercedes and us can always do more, and we will."
Though he was unable to fulfil Hill's prediction, he came pretty close, and Hamilton is adamant Mercedes is making progress.
"I definitely do," said. "Whilst we didn't have the pace of the lead cars, we... You know, this is an incredible result for us, for George and I to be here. George did a great job today as well.
"This is progress, even though we're not necessarily closing the gap as such in race performance, in actual qualifying performance, but this is great points for us.
"And this is my 300th Grand Prix. Obviously, it was mentioned at the beginning of the weekend and I didn't really think much of it. And this morning, I woke up just feeling incredibly grateful, just thinking about all the people that have been with me along the way, you know. For Ron and Mercedes giving me the chance when I was young. Martin Whitmarsh. Mansour Ojjeh. Toto, Niki, just Markus... Who am I missing? Dieter... Just all these incredible people that have supported me since I was 13.
"To then have this just incredible journey with them, every race powered by Mercedes. And so very, very proud to be up here representing them, alongside George and yeah, we've just got to keep pushing. Every weekend we're hoping that we're going to get a little bit closer. This weekend, we somehow weren't as close as we hoped, but he was only 10 seconds up the road so that's a positive."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Le Castellet here.