Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has revealed that Lewis Hamilton’s exit from the team prevented him from signing two top F1 drivers at the beginning of this year.

It was announced in February that Hamilton would leave Mercedes after 12 years with the team to join Ferrari from the beginning of 2025.

The Silver Arrows spent much of the current season deciding on Hamilton’s replacement, with Carlos Sainz, Alex Albon and even three-time world champion Max Verstappen linked with taking the vacant seat.

In the end, Mercedes elected to promote junior driver Kimi Antonelli, with the 17-year-old having impressed during his first full season of F2.

He has signed a contract which covers the 2025 season, and he will drive alongside Hamilton’s current team-mate George Russell.

Although many F1 fans might have hoped or expected Hamilton to drive for the Scuderia before the end of his F1 career, the move – and its rather sudden timing – came as a shock, and it seemingly caught Wolff off guard as well.

In a new excerpt from the soon-to-be-released book ‘Mercedes F1: Life in the Fast Lane’ (via Daily Express), the German has revealed that he ‘couldn’t understand’ why the seven-time world champion was leaving the team at that particular moment, and the timing of the decision meant he couldn’t negotiate with two potential replacements.

Wolff explained: “I had it on my radar Lewis would go.

“I couldn’t understand why he’d change to another team before we knew if we were going to be competitive.

“It also didn’t give me time to react. I possibly missed out on negotiating with other drivers who signed deals a few weeks earlier, like Charles Leclerc or Lando Norris. But do I take that personally? This was just a business decision.”

The possibility of bringing Norris to Mercedes may not have been too far-fetched 12 months ago, despite McLaren’s improvement towards the end of 2023.

The Brit signed a new ‘multi-year contract‘ with the team in January that keeps him at McLaren until at least the end of 2026, but he had been linked with a potential move to Red Bull to team up with Max Verstappen before that deal was agreed.

Such a move would be off the table now, of course, with McLaren having overtaken Red Bull in terms of overall pace in recent months.

And with Antonelli now locked in at Mercedes, Wolff will be hoping the young Italian can draw inspiration from Hamilton’s incredible rookie season in 2007 – albeit with a four-year age gap between the two at the time of their debuts – in achieving major success.