Lewis Hamilton->ke2220 knows better than to question a good thing. It's safe to say that last year's season went pretty well for him, resulting as it did in his second F1->ke190 World Championship. He is also, at the time of this writing, the points leader for this year's season. The second-place driver is his teammate, Nico Rosberg,->ke1587 who also finished second place in last year's championship. This should tell you a little bit how Mercedes-AMG Petronas has been doing lately, and why Lewis Hamilton has just extended his contract though the 2018 season.

Official figures weren't released and there has been a lot of speculation on exactly what the deal is worth, with some estimates putting it as high as $140 million over the 2016-2018 seasons. That's a lot of money, but success like this hasn't come around very often for Mercedes,->ke187 and team is evidently willing to pay to hold on to it. Just to give you an idea of rare it is for a Mercedes works driver to win a Championship, the last one was Juan Manuel Fangio in 1955. So this deal with Hamilton is advantageous for both parties.

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Why it matters

Mercedes is not completely without any post-1955 bragging rights. Lewis Hamilton's previous World Championship was behind the wheel of a McLaren->ke284 that was powered by a Mercedes engine, same goes for Mika Hakkinen's two championships, while Jenson Button won with a Mercedes-powered Brawn.

In fact, the past 20 years of F1 has been dominated by just three engine builders: Mercedes, Ferrari->ke252 and Renault.->ke72 The Mercedes-AMG Petronas cars clearly have good engines, but that counts for very little without good drivers, so we're very eager to see how the next few years of Formula 1 play out.

2015 Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 W06 Hybrid

Read our full review here.