Ex Spice Girls manager almost axed Hamilton to Mercedes move after Lauda call

Lewis Hamilton’s decision to leaving front-runners McLaren for a Mercedes team in transition must go down as one of the greatest decisions in sporting history.

Hamilton won his first F1 title in dramatic fashion in 2008 and looked set to stay with the Woking team, which gave him his big break in the sport, for life. But sensing McLaren were in a downward spiral, and with drastic new engine rules on the way, he decided to jump ship to Mercedes.

It was seen as a huge gamble. Many seasoned observers questioned the logic of his decision, swapping a race-winning car for a team had flattered to deceive in three seasons since Mercedes had bought out Brawn GP following their shock title win with Jenson Button. But Hamilton’s decision has been totally vindicated as he has scorched to six world titles since first stepping into a Silver Arrows car in 2013.

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However, the path to signing Hamilton was far from straightforward. For the start, the Mercedes hierarchy in Germany were not initially keen and were instead keen on Nick Heidfield, a German, to get the seat made available by Michael Schumacher’s second retirement.

And then there was the question of Hamilton's enormous salary of around £30million a year. Then Mercedes CEO Nick Fry, who along with Ross Brawn, had helped save the team from oblivion following Honda’s withdrawal from the sport at the end of 2008, led the pursuit of Hamilton. And he had a welcome ally when Niki Lauda joined Mercedes the team as non-executive chairman.

Fry recalled in his book ‘Survive. Dry. Win’: “I told him where we had got to with Lewis and Simon [Fuller, Hamilton's manager at the time] and about the logjam with Mercedes. Niki, a no-nonsense Austrian who always spoke his mind and who was all-or-nothing about everything he did in life, simply said: ‘Nick, go and do it and I will ask Mercedes for forgiveness later.’ I thought: ‘That’s brilliant. Thank God for Niki’, and immediately set to work to try and make it happen.”

Poop Idol creator Fuller was used to dealing with big names having managed the Spice Girls and David Beckham, among others, during his career. Negotiations were at a delicate stage when Lauda, according to Fry, made an unwelcome intervention by calling Fuller.

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He recalled: “For reasons only he knows, maybe through a misunderstanding or a misguided effort to move the deal along, Niki took it upon himself to call Simon in Los Angeles some days before all the loose ends were tied off, and told him the deal was done, assuring him that Mercedes had delivered the money.

“The problem was that Simon knew full well that the money had still not been confirmed and the internal Mercedes negotiation was still ongoing, because he was talking to me on a daily basis. Simon was furious. I had never experienced him losing his temper but that night he rang me in Singapore and he was screaming down the phone. ‘Tell Lauda it’s off. And you can tell them all to f*** off – the deal is off!’ he thundered.

“Simon was apoplectic because he thought Niki had misled him. It also didn’t help that Niki had pulled him out of an important dinner party to do it. While tempers were cooling, I managed to finally nail down all the financial arrangements when waiting to board my plane back to London from Singapore.

“I had left before the Grand Prix started, which was not unusual, but I was far more interested in getting this piece of business done than in what happened on the track. We had a good chance of getting Lewis Hamilton in a Mercedes for at least three years starting in 2013. It was a seriously exciting prospect.”

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