Hamilton not expecting help from Bottas amid Ferrari threat

Lewis Hamilton says he does not expect any help from Mercedes Formula 1 teammate Valtteri Bottas amid a renewed challenge from Ferrari during the second half of the 2019 season.

Ferrari has won each of the three races since F1’s summer break, with Hamilton and Mercedes’ last victory coming at the Hungarian Grand Prix in July. Ferrari has made significant progress with its car and turned in an impressive performance in Singapore to shock its rivals en route to a first one-two finish of the year.

Hamilton sits 65 points clear of Bottas - who remains his nearest title rival - and is 96 points ahead of third-placed driver Charles Leclerc. He insists he does not want a repeat of last year’s Russian Grand Prix, a race in which Bottas was instructed to give up the lead to help the Briton’s title bid.

Asked if he feels he needs his teammate to play a supporting role amid the threat of Ferrari, Hamilton replied: “I don’t personally think so, no.

“It’s just never been my philosophy. I want to do the job on my own. That’s never what I’ve asked for and even looking back at last year, I hated that experience and wished that I wasn’t in that position.

“I don’t think I need help from anybody to do the job that I know I can do, except for obviously my team in terms of doing a better job altogether throughout the weekend.

“But currently I’m fighting Valtteri for the world championship, so I don’t expect a second of him to move that around. I think if it was for the win at the last race it would be a lot different.”

During last weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix, Bottas was told to back off to ensure Hamilton retained his position ahead of the Finn, but Hamilton stressed the call was simply to secure the strongest possible team result, and not because of any favouritism.

Speaking about the incident, Hamilton explained: “Firstly it was nothing to do with me. Neither me or Valtteri had any input into the strategy.

“If you look at the scenario, the team ultimately had the wrong decision, we were going from second to seventh and looking at a seventh and a fourth, which is worse for the team, so the team took the decision to make that choice to have a fourth and fifth, which is better for points.

“I don’t know if I got to see Valtteri after the race, so I’ve not personally had time to talk to him.

“I think we had a quick debrief and he raised his concern with it but there’s nothing I can really do about it necessarily.

“But I think Valtteri knows it was nothing of choice or anything to do with favouritism within the team because we’ve never had that.

“It’s not a situation we wanted to be in but we will harder to try and make sure we are not in that position again.”