“You may be the worst car I’ve ever driven”: Watch Lewis Hamilton prevent $15 million Mercedes W13 catch on fire

Lewis Hamilton made sure his Mercedes W13 did not catch fire after a first-lap collision with Fernando Alonso ended his Belgian GP. 

2022 has not been a great year for Hamilton or Mercedes. The Silver Arrows dominated the sport for eight years, but Red Bull and Ferrari finally have the better of them. They are massively lacking in pace to the top two teams and it has affected their performance in terms of results.

The W13 is a car that Hamilton has not been comfortable in. Towards the beginning of the season, he was miles off the pace compared to teammate George Russell. Since then, he has slowly closed the gap and towards the last few races leading up to the summer break, it looked like he had finally found his mojo back.

Mercedes had worked on quite a few developments over the three-week break leading up to the Belgian GP. In spite of that, Hamilton was 1.8 seconds slower than Max Verstappen at Spa-Francorchamps, which shocked him and the team.

During Sunday’s race, he suffered a collision with Fernando Alonso due to his own mistake which ended his race.

Also read: When 7-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton practiced pit-stops for McLaren

Lewis Hamilton puts out fire in his Mercedes car

The regulation changes of 2022 have hit Mercedes hard. Mercedes’ W13 is quite possibly their worst car in years, and team principal Toto Wolff joked that the team’s museum won’t have a place for this $15 million car. In spite of the car underperforming, Hamilton does not want to let it burn!

On Sunday, the 37-year-old was initially able to continue with his race after being launched into the air by Alonso’s Alpine. After just a few moments, however, his race engineer Peter Bonnington asked him to stop.

When he got out of his car, we could see smoke come out of it. This suggested that the car had suffered from significant damage and there was chance of it catching fire. Hamilton immediately got hold of a fire extinguisher and made sure to put the fire out.

The Brit evidently did it only to make sure that his team does not struggle to repair damages ahead of next week’s race in Zandvoort. F1 Twitter on the other hand, joked that even though the W13 was so bad, ‘Hamilton would not just let it burn’.

Also read: 103 race winner Lewis Hamilton responds to Fernando Alonso’s harsh comments through a subtle social media post