Christian Horner has revealed he helped Mercedes sign Lewis Hamilton after holding early discussions with the British driver's management to join Red Bull. Hamilton left McLaren to join Mercedes at the start of 2013 but in Horner's new book, 'Drive ', which will be on sale from this Thursday, he says Hamilton showed interest to join Red Bull. Senior figures at Red Bull, including co-owner Dietrich Mateschitz, were not keen on the move that would have seen Hamilton replace Mark Webber and become Sebastian Vettel's team-mate from 2013.
Vettel had won the last three drivers' titles at the time and Horner explained the situation on Sky Sports' The F1 Show Podcast. "As a team principal, it's your job to understand what is the driver market. Naturally, when you've got the fastest car, the best drivers want to drive in the best cars," said Horner.
"It's only natural that Lewis was interested in that stage. We had a totally dominant car and he was managed at the time by Simon Fuller, who managed the Spice Girls. "I remember Simon telling me that he and I could do the biggest sport deal that sport had ever seen, which would inevitably mean Red Bull paying a lot of money.
There wasn't an enthusiasm to do that within the team. We had a winning driver in Seb, did we really need to upset the apple cart?" Three-time F1 world champion Niki Lauda, who was Mercedes' non-executive chairman at the time of Hamilton's negotiations with other teams in the second half of 2012, is often credited for signing Hamilton to Mercedes for 2013. But, Horner says he told Lauda to sign Hamilton after Red Bull decided to retain their driver line-up of Vettel and Webber.
"Mercedes, who had only just bought the Brawn team, was struggling. They had a few years with Nico [Rosberg] and Michael [Schumacher], and it wasn't really coming together there," he said. "When Nikki turned up at Mercedes, it felt like, do you know what, why don't you go for Lews, who was inevitably becoming frustrated at McLaren?
And Nikki persuaded him to go there. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player "I remember, I think the crux time was around the Singapore Grand Prix [in September of] that year, where Lewis was in the lead, and he had a gearbox failure. That was sort of the nail in the coffin, I think, for McLaren.
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