Hamilton warns of F1 title write-off if Mercedes development stops

Lewis Hamilton has warned Mercedes that failing to upgrade the W12 throughout the season will lead to repeats of the loss seen in Styria and hand Max Verstappen and Red Bull the F1 titles.

Mercedes was comprehensively outperformed at the Red Bull Ring on Sunday, with Hamilton lagging 15 seconds behind Max Verstappen even before a late second stop to clinch the fastest lap bonus point.

At the conclusion of the race, team principal Toto Wolff stated Mercedes would cease to develop its car for the remainder of the season due to the 2022 change of regulations taking precedence.

Asked if he was accepting of Mercedes being out-developed by Red Bull, Hamilton responded: "Well, I don’t accept anything. I think we’ve still got many races ahead of us and we’ve got to keep pushing.

"We’re world champions and that’s what we can, definitely, improve if we put our minds to it."

But then Hamilton added: "If we’re not going to develop and improve our car for the rest of the year, this is the result you’re going to see.

"They’ve really eked out performance in these last few races, wherever it’s been, whether it’s been in France with the engine or the new wing, whichever it is.

"But there’s another TD [technical directive] coming out for the wings. I don’t know if they’re stopping the bendiness or not but maybe that will level the playing field. We will see."

Hamilton "won't question" Mercedes "logic"

Red Bull's recent domination is threatening to end Mercedes' seven-year monopoly on F1 since turbo-hybrid power units were introduced in 2014.

On whether he agreed with the developmental direction, Hamilton insisted: "I’m not going to question the team’s logic and how they go through with their process.

"As I said, I would love to have… give us an upgrade, we would love an upgrade, but I don’t think it’s in the pipeline at the moment. We’re down on a few areas.

"It’s been close at the beginning of the season and if we both – Red Bull and us – had the same performance as we did in those first four races then perhaps it would be a little more exciting.

"But as I said, they’ve taken a decent step forwards. We will work as hard as we can to manoeuvre around it but in terms of baseline performance, this is what we’ve got.

"We did a decent job [on Sunday] but it’s probably going to get harder if Sergio [Perez] has a better weekend, but we’re going to keep pushing."

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