Lewis Hamilton is happier fighting other teams for the Formula 1 championships than against his Mercedes teammates.
This season is set to see the closest battle between two teams for the title in the hybrid era as the seven-time world champion and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen go head-to-head.
The dynamics of this year’s battle are certainly very different to when Mercedes had to manage Hamilton and Nico Rosberg between 2014 and 2016, while this duel is becoming increasingly more intense than that had with Ferrari in 2017 and 2018.
And team boss Toto Wolff admits it is tougher when you have more factors out of your control.
“Well, both have interesting aspects,” he said comparing intra-team vs inter-team battles.
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“The intra-team battle, which we had for quite a while, is obviously easier to handle because the drivers are part of the team, they are in the same car.
“While fighting with another team, you don’t really know where the performance advantages and disadvantages are and you can see that swinging.
“That’s difficult because you are dealing with imperfect information, many variables that you don’t know, but both are equally enjoyable for me.”
As for Hamilton, he admits finding it much easier when the whole team can be on the same page against a rival compared to the possibility of problems building within.
“If I’m honest, it feels very similar to what we had with Vettel and Ferrari,” Hamilton said of this fight in an interview with Formula1.com.
“It’s much more enjoyable than when you’re having an internal battle because this sport is it’s different to other sports, right? If you look at football, everyone’s working towards the same goal.
“This sport is kind of confused because you have to drive two championships; you have a team championship, where the two drivers are hired to score points for the team to win the championship and then individually, you have the two drivers that selfishly want to win the championship.
“So you’ve got this, this battle of tension. When you’re working against the guy opposite you, it’s much different to working with that person and fighting another team.
“That’s what makes…I feel that that makes better racing. That makes the championship more exciting when it’s a team against team rather than internal.”
Red Bull also had to deal with their own internal strife between Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber during their four-year reign between 2010-2013.
For that reason, team boss Christian Horner agreed with Hamilton.
“I think it’s much more straightforward having a competitor in the garage next to you rather than two competitors within your own garage,” he said.
“You have a natural conflict of interest within your team there, within your own engineering team etc, whereas having the competition as the garage next door is much more straightforward and I think it focuses everybody’s mind and motivations.
“I think [the battle] is healthy for the team and healthy for the sport. It’s been a long time coming.
“We’ve obviously seen seven years of total dominance, and I think the biggest winner is F1, to have two teams and two drivers every weekend slugging it out.”
