Lewis Hamilton agrees new mega deal with Mercedes

The 30-year-old reigning world champion says his talks with the team are now complete, and the deal is merely being finalised by lawyers prior to signatures.

Hamilton has been handling negotiations with team bosses himself, an unusual situation in modern-day sport, but he and appears very content with how the process has developed.

The Brit, who won the opening race of the season in Melbourne but could not match Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari in the second in Malaysia, has been poised to sign the new deal for a long time.

But finally it appears that the contract is to be secured with Hamilton committing his future to the team, who dominated the sport last season.

"It should be done this week,” he said. “There is no reason it shouldn't.

"Honestly, it's 99.6% done. There's no negotiating left, it's just legal stuff."

Hamilton, who joined Mercedes in 2013 after six years with McLaren, will earn $31m (£20.9m) plus extensive bonuses, according to the BBC.

What will dictate exactly how much Hamilton earns from the deal will be dependent on how many races he wins and whether he becomes world champion again.

If Hamilton meets his bonus targets per season, his annual earnings should be comfortably over $40m (£27m).

If, as is being reported, Hamilton picks up £27m-a-year with Mercedes, his earnings will equate to a staggering £1.5m a race - and considering that each race lasts around 90 minutes, that's an effective pay rate of £1m per hour.

Even taking into consideration the time spent testing, practice and qualifying - 19 race weeks, plus a month or so for testing, assuming 35 hours a week - his pay comes out at £33,540 an hour.

The new deal, if confirmed this week, would be a timely boost for Hamilton after he felt that poor balance and strategy were partly to blame for Ferrari and Vettel outdoing Mercedes in Malaysia.

"I don't know whether or not if I stayed out with (Vettel) if that would have made much of a difference," said world champion Hamilton who started on pole.

"They were probably just as good if not a little better in terms of tyre degradation, so it would have been very close," he told reporters. "Naturally, after the first stop, I just had so much ground to catch up, it was pretty much impossible," he added.

"All day I was struggling with the balance, I had a lot of understeer so I couldn't really look after tyres. I was doing everything with the controls but couldn't find a good balance."

Team boss Toto Wolff described the race as the “wake-up call” that the team needed.

"It is going to make us work harder and concentrate even more," he said.

£27m-a-year is far from extraordinary in the world of F1 - indeed, Ferrari star Sebastian Vettel is rumoured to be on almost double that with a reported £50m-a-year pay deal.

And it's hard to argue that Hamilton isn't providing decent value. Not only are his driving credentials unimpeachable, he is also for most casual fans the face of F1 - an extraordinary achievement given Vettel's four crowns to Hamilton's two. In a sport where PR profile is critically important, Hamilton delivers both on and off the track.