Hamilton on fight with Verstappen: "You just have to be very, very wary"

The two drivers have already clashed a few times this season, including Silverstone and Monza and most recently in Brazil. Hamilton gets asked the question by Autosport.com how he approaches someone like Verstappen. "You just have to be very, very wary. More wary than ever before."

The seven-time world champion is often the one who goes out of his way to avoid a collision, as we saw in the first corner in Imola and Barcelona where Hamilton chose to go wide. According to the Brit, this is not a sign of weakness. For the team, he always wants to avoid ending up in the wall with his car.

Hamilton compares Silverstone to Brazil

"If you're on the outside of a car, backing out is the sensible option pretty much all the time, in order to see the end of the race", Hamilton explains. "At Silverstone, for example, go and look at the footage: my front wheel was alongside his front wheel, so it wasn't like my wheel was next to his rear wheel going in. And in that scenario, if I had taken the approach (Max did) for example [in Brazil], just stayed on the gas and gone off track and then kept position, what would the scenario have been there? Would they have looked into the rules there?"

Hamilton continues: "I am not too big or too successful to back out to fight another day. I know that is sometimes the route you have to take. You have to be the smarter one. Sometimes you lose points in doing that, for sure, but it's not just about me. I have 2,000 people behind me and, through that selfish decision, I could make - 'No, I'm going to hold my ground' and don't finish - that costs all my team potential bonuses at the end of the year, all the hard work they have to do, the damage of the car. I am conscious of those things also."