Lewis Hamilton has unique plan to take fight to F1 rival Max Verstappen

Lewis Hamilton has been chasing Max Verstappen for the past three seasons and ahead of his move to Ferrari, the seven-time F1 world champion is plotting to beat the Red Bull star

Lewis Hamilton has revealed that he pictures himself being further ahead in a race and imagines chasing his own car down in order to stabilise his mindset.

The seven-time Formula 1 world champion hasn’t won the title since 2020, with Red Bull star Max Verstappen dominating the grid. Hamilton, 39, will swap Mercedes for Ferrari at the end of this season and hopes that the move can put him back in championship contention.

With Verstappen likely to be the favourite, and if not Ferrari’s own Charles Leclerc, Hamilton is ready for ‘the hunt’ in order to get his hands on a record-breaking eighth title, having been part of Mercedes’ decline in recent years. The Brit prefers to be chasing, too, as he revealed while appearing on an episode of the hit YouTube show, Hot Ones.

“I think it’s easier to hunt,” Hamilton told host Sean Evans while tasting increasingly spicy pieces of chicken. “If you’re chasing and you make mistakes, you fall two steps back but you can regain or work your way back.

“But if you’re leading and you have a car failure, it’s just so much more nerve-wracking. I much, much prefer chasing. But I got to a point where I learned how to maintain the chase – so what I used to do is I just used to picture me further up ahead and so I was just chasing myself. That seemed to keep me on the straight and narrow.”

In the same interview, Hamilton made a thinly-veiled dig at current team Mercedes over their W15 car, claiming that he’s in conflict with the machine at ‘every moment’ of the race. Team principal Toto Wolff had promised to make ‘fundamental’ changes following the team’s disappointing 2023.

After Hamilton finished seventh at the Monaco Grand Prix, two places behind team-mate George Russell, Wolff explained: “You just got to chip away performance by performance.

“With McLaren, the sensational step last year from one race to the other. They kept adding performance on a concept that functioned. Ferrari has been doing it step by step by step when you look at where they were last year.

“And the same, this is where I see ourselves – that we just gotta bring us into a position that we can fight with the guys in front and that we can fight for wins, that we can fight for podiums. And that’s something that we have absolutely as an objective in the short-term as well.”

Mercedes are now preparing for this Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, where Hamilton won his first race in Formula 1 back in 2007 and has claimed victory a further six times. The 39-year-old only betters that with his eight wins at both the British Grand Prix and Hungarian Grand Prix.