Ever since announcing his shock move to Ferrari in 2025, Lewis Hamilton has been asked multiple times about his desire to obtain results for Mercedes this season. Following this, the Briton has added how he is committed to Mercedes, to maximize their results before leaving the team.

Following Lewis Hamilton‘s disappointing race in Japan, wherein he finished P9, he was asked whether he was jealous of Ferrari’s performance, as they seemed to be progressing very well with their car in comparison to Mercedes. The Briton seemed very upset with this question and stormed out of the interview.

Ferrari has managed podium finishes in every race so far this season.

Do you have any better questions?

Lewis Hamilton during the post race interview
https://t.co/UIXs26Ttyj

— Mercedes-AMG F1 News (@MercedesNewsUK) April 7, 2024
With Ferrari drivers Carlos Sainz finishing on the podium, and Charles Leclerc finishing in fourth place at Suzuka, the journalist may have asked this question to rile up Hamilton. The Briton will want to bounce back from his horrible string of results during the upcoming Chinese GP weekend.

The result that Mercedes obtained at the Japanese Grand Prix will be a hard pill to swallow. After qualifying P7 and P9 courtesy of Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, the pair couldn’t make any further progress and ended up finishing outside of the top five positions.

Following the disappointing result, Toto Wolff spoke to Sky Sports F1 about the reasons why Mercedes struggled to make progress through the field. He added how their decision to move to the hard tires following the red flag in lap 1 due to Daniel Ricciardo and Alex Albon‘s crash led to an abysmal first stint, wherein they couldn’t compete with cars ahead of them.

We ended up where we started and it was just very difficult, We need to find out what it was, was it too hot, were we overmanaging. I think it was the right thing to do at the beginning because it looked pretty stable in terms of lap times, They were not pulling away too much, the direct competitors, but then it suddenly dropped like two seconds a lap and two and a half second per lap. In that moment it was clear it wouldn’t last.

Toto Wolff during the post race interivew with Sky Sports F1
The Austrian added how the sudden performance drop-off from the W15’s hard tire was unexpected and that led them to lose their chances at a podium. Mercedes will want to try and improve their performance and sort out the issues if they want to fight at the extreme north end of the grid in China.