Lewis Hamilton has hailed Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff for unlocking his potential as a businessman.

Over the years since joining Mercedes, and under Wolff’s guidance, seven-time F1 champion Hamilton has become much more than just a racing driver.

Hamilton has undertaken numerous business ventures, whilst he has also been given licence to make the sport more accessible for all via initiatives such as Mission 44 and The Hamilton Commission.

Given the friendship that has developed between Hamilton and Wolff beyond that of employee and employer, has allowed the Briton to pick the business brains of the Austrian.

“Toto and I are in contact every week, all the time,” said Hamilton. “We’re good friends, very, very good friends, we’re team-mates.

“We do a lot of talking about cars, we hang out when I’m back home, we have lunch.

“I’m always trying to learn from Toto as a businessman, and he’s always massively supportive. You’re going to see some things shift over the next couple of months, into next year maybe.

“You’ve already seen my progress, and he has been such a huge part of that, being open-minded and allowing me to be who I am.

“Together we’ve unlocked so much, and we’ve done so much more than I think any other partnership that you’ve seen in this sport on many levels.”

For the second successive race, Wolff was absent after undergoing knee surgery.

In between the Singapore and Japanese GPs, Wolff had an operation to repair the anterior cruciate ligament damage in his left knee, ruling him out of the race at Suzuka, before he decided to also sit out the event in Qatar.

Although not at the tracks for those two races, Hamilton confirmed Wolff remained heavily involved, not missing a beat, albeit declaring him “devastated” he was unable to be there in person.

“Toto’s in every meeting,” said Hamilton. “And he’s on the comms, just like the guys back at the factory are on the comms for strategy over the weekend.

“He’s still 100 per cent fully a part (of the team). He’s just not physically there in the country.

“He’s worked incredibly hard to set up this team to be where it is today, and he should be able to have weekends off without a problem. He’s the boss.

“Shoot, if I owned the team, I’d definitely take weekends off. That’s your prerogative. It’s not that he’s taking the weekend off but you know what I mean.

“He has the right to if he wanted to, but it’s just because he’s recovering.

“I just always tell him, ‘Don’t worry, you’ve set up a great team, and we’ll try and do you proud this weekend’, and that’s what I do.”