The best we can hope for is Hamilton making a massive blunder by assuming he can dictate his demands to Mercedes and sign yearly contracts in an attempt to squeeze ever more demands out of them, just to find out that they simply replace him with Russel the first chance they get.
This won't happen, though, Hamilton is a woke fool, but he knows that he can't overstretch like this. He'll sign a 2 year contract this month and we'll be stuck with his ugly tooth gap for the foreseeable future. If Mercedes gets one season like Ferrari has now, he might leave, but as long as they keep winning, he won't.
From Mercedes point of view, they don't really care who rakes in the victories and they certainly have no investment in Hamilton's personal legacy. If they hired Mahaveer Raghunathan and he dropped one record-lap after the other, showing that literally anyone can win in this car, they wouldn't give a shit how bad this made Hamilton look - to the contrary, it would elevate the position of their own engineering (and I would not be surprised if there were a couple engineers a bit salty about how Hamilton is paraded around as this wonderkid, when the car is the most significant factor in his records).
And on that note, Russel has a contract for next year with Williams, but given how much cheaper his contract would be in comparison to Hamilton's demands (not to forget: Russel doesn't want to abolish the meritocratic work ethic that made Merc what they are), Mercedes could easily pay Williams a wad of cash to free Russel.
The only thing holding back Mercedes is the fear of bad publicity, if they abondoned Hamilton. He'd raise a stink and make it a race issue (cause that is literally the only thing he knows how to do), so there's that. And now I wonder if one of Hamilton's demands would eventually be to give his cockpit to another black driver...
The amount Hass will be making from that contract I think they'll be cool with it. Mazepin SR is in with Putin being a former president of Gazprom and now basically owning all the chemical companies in Russia (also some dodgy deals in tinpot African nations). Haas hasn't had a good time with sponsors the last few seasons (crazy energy drink company anyone). Gene could well even be seeing this as his way to cash out now he's discovered F1 isn't as easy to just win at as the American motorsports.
I'm sure he'll soon calm down, a lot of young drivers seem to pull that sort of shit in the lower series but they soon get it knocked out of them in F1, don't forget Vestappen had a flare for the ridiculous defensive moves for a while. He got 2x5s penalties for his moves and 2x2 penalty points (bringing him to 11) so ended up finishing 9th overall.
Plus an additional final thought I had after submitting this. Pulling that shit at Hass will end up in a frank discussion with Steiner, probably not what you want to be doing.
Yeah, Kvyat was like that, too and he had to eat shit for his behaviour. I mean, he rammed Vettel 3 times in two races and his boss slapped himback into the Alpha Tauri (wouldn't surprise me if FIA had a hand in this as well). Any young driver doing this shit is severely punished and Yuji Ide lost his super license over a really stupid move. If Mazepin attempts to run someone off the track at an F1 race one too many times, they might just tell him to stick with Gokarts. I somewhat assume that Mazepin will give new appreciation to Stroll, if he does shit like this, though.
edit:
One of the more unusual onboards of this weekend so far.
