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Team boss Toto Wolff says he thinks Niki Lauda “was ever given enough credit” for bringing Lewis Hamilton to Mercedes.
On numerous occasions, Lewis Hamilton highlighted the important role former Mercedes non-executive chairman Niki Lauda played in his negotiations with the team.
During his appearance on the ‘Beyond the Grid’ podcast, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff said he doesn’t think Lauda was “given enough credit” for bringing the Briton to the team.
“Without Niki, there wouldn’t be any Lewis with Mercedes,” Wolff said.
“I think Niki was so persistent in trying to convince him to join Mercedes and, particularly, he just scored the goal with him on that Sunday night in Singapore, where Lewis DNF’d with the McLaren, and convinced him to join the team.
“Everything else just followed suit. I’m not sure Niki was ever given enough credit for that. [He] took no prisoners – ‘what’s the salary you want?’ – and [he] convinced the board of Mercedes to do this.
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“Niki was always a very good liaison between the team and Lewis in the first few years because he was talking as a three-time World Champion and had the respect of Lewis.
“Eventually it became the three of us and the whole team became one.
“We sometimes call drivers contractors: they come, you pay them well, if they don’t have the right car anymore and they’re getting paid well somewhere else, they leave.
“Lewis changed from a contractor to team member and that was because everybody else just embraced the notion of the team that we had then,” the Austrian concluded.