“You Can Trash It, You’re a Ferrari Driver Next Year”: Lewis Hamilton Egged On to Crash $177,000 Mercedes Beast

The Mercedes trio of Lewis Hamilton, George Russell, and Toto Wolff participated in an exciting Heart Rate Monitor challenge by Sky Sports F1. The challenge involved each of them driving a Mercedes AMG GT car at Silverstone alongside one of the Sky presenters, namely Simon Lazenby, Natalie Pinkham, and Naomi Schiff. Amid this challenge, Lazenby egged Hamilton to trash the car if he wanted, given he is leaving Mercedes for Ferrari in 2025.

Per the YouTube video of the challenge by Sky Sports F1, Lazenby was quite excited to see the seven-time champion swerve the car down the main straight at Silverstone and take it close to the wall. Apparently, this was to increase the F1 presenter’s heart rate as per the challenge parameters.

Nat’s face here says it all during our heart-rate challenge with @MercedesAMGF1 pic.twitter.com/lxB32CpHop

— Sky Sports F1 (@SkySportsF1) July 6, 2024

However, Lazenby jokingly said, “You’re gonna take the mirror off? Doesn’t matter. You can trash it, you’re a Ferrari driver next year.” This definitely got a chuckle from Hamilton as he continued to drive erratically as Lazenby enjoyed instead of panicking.

Each of the cars was a Mercedes AMG-GT Coupe, which is worth $177,000 approximately. Russell had the company of Pinkham, while Wolff had Schiff in his passenger seat.

Just like Hamilton, both were having fun to boost Pinkham and Schiff’s heart rate up. However, Wolff took it quite far to almost crash it into another AMG-GT to try and raise Schiff’s heart rate.

Wolff almost crashed the Mercedes AMG-GT but failed to win the challenge

As Schiff is a former racer herself, she is quite used to the high speeds in a race car. Thus, erratic driving in a passenger GT car may not affect her heart rate that much. As a result, the Mercedes boss knew he had to do something extraordinary to catch Schiff off-guard.

Wolff did so by trying some braking maneuvers that almost made Russell crash into the back of his car. Later on, the Austrian also braked late to almost crash into the back of Russell’s car which made Schiff scream a bit louder.

So nearly DISASTER for Toto during our heart-rate challenge with @MercedesAMGF1 pic.twitter.com/Tv9neB17qu

— Sky Sports F1 (@SkySportsF1) July 6, 2024

However, it did not help Wolff win the challenge as Russell had an easy win courtesy of Pinkham being quite scared even before they started driving on the wet Silverstone track.

Pinkham’s heart rate was the highest among the three Sky presenters and thus Russell won the challenge. Meanwhile, among the passengers, Lazenby won courtesy of having the lowest heart rate in Hamilton’s car.