Toto Wolff has spoken of his relief that Lewis Hamilton‘s move to Ferrari spared him an awkward conversation about the seven-time champion’s retirement.

The Mercedes team principal said that he had been contemplating the “shelf life” of 39-year-old Hamilton, and the prospect, at some point in the future, of having to tell him that his contract would not be renewed.

His comments are reported in Mercedes’ new all-access book Inside Mercedes F1: Life in the Fast Lane, which follows the team throughout its troubled 2023 season, and for the first part of 2024.

That includes Hamilton’s bombshell announcement that he would be leaving Mercedes at the end of this year and joining Ferrari for 2025 and beyond. But while the departure of the team’s talisman was seen by many as a grave loss, Wolff saw an upside.

“I absolutely had it on my radar that Lewis would go,” he tells the book’s author Matt Whyman. “I just 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 any time to react, I had to emergency call our partners, and I possibly missed out on negotiating with other drivers who had signed contracts a few weeks earlier like Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris.

“[But] I like the situation,” he continues. “It helps us because it avoids the moment where we need to tell the sport’s most iconic driver that we want to stop.”

Hamilton’s partnership with Mercedes has been one of the most prosperous in F1 history. Since joining the team in 2013, he has won 82 grands prix and earned six of his seven world titles aboard a Silver Arrow.