is “cheating himself” by continuing to race<\/a>.<\/p>\nAfter joining Ferrari from Mercedes over the winter, the 105-time grand prix winner has endured an underwhelming and wretched start to life with the Maranello-based team.<\/p>\n
His despair at the situation reached a zenith at the recent Hungarian Grand Prix, chastising himself as “useless” and suggesting the Scuderia ought to “change driver” after qualifying a lowly P12.<\/p>\n
Such is the painful reality of his current situation, Ecclestone has called on Hamilton to stop taking the “risk” of racing in F1.<\/p>\n
“I wouldn\u2019t want anything bad to happen to Lewis,” the British business magnate said to Mail Sport.<\/p>\n
“He\u2019s not fighting for a world championship and is at a stage of his life when it wouldn’t be worth him spending two years laid up in bed with a broken back or anything else nasty.<\/p>\n
“He doesn\u2019t need to take the risk any longer. He\u2019s won seven world titles and that is quite enough.”<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tTwo highly-touted Ferrari options<\/p>\n
Ecclestone, who also believes Ferrari should buy out the remainder of Hamilton’s contract, went as far as to suggest some potential replacements for the 40-year-old.<\/p>\n
The former Brabham team owner zeroed in on two emerging young talents, both of whom have seriously impressed the F1 establishment over the first half of their rookie campaigns.<\/p>\n
“If I could steal him, I\u2019d take Isack Hadjar from Racing Bulls,” he added. “He has done super well in his first year and is a great guy.<\/p>\n
“I also rate our friend from Brazil [Stake driver Gabriel Bortoleto]. He is talented. Both of them are sensible, too.”<\/p>\n
The former has scored points in six rounds, including a point in the Spa-Francorchamps sprint, with a best finish of sixth in Monaco. He has also yet to be eliminated in Q1.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the latter is quickly coming into his own, taking sixth place at the Hungaroring and outperforming team-mate Nico Hulkenberg 8-6 in their qualifying head-to-head across the opening 14 rounds of the season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former F1 owner Bernie Ecclestone has cautioned Lewis Hamilton to walk away from F1 before something “nasty” befalls…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,827,817,830,828,831,829,826,813,816,823,825,824,822,85],"class_list":["post-50896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-daniel-ricciardo","tag-f1","tag-f1-calendar","tag-f1-live","tag-f1-results","tag-f1-standings","tag-ferrari","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-lewis-hamilton","tag-max-verstappen","tag-motorsport","tag-racing","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}