Lewis Hamilton signs £100m Mercedes deal until 2018

Defending F1 champion Lewis Hamilton has become the highest-paid British sportsman after signing a mammoth new deal with Mercedes, worth £100m over three years.

The announcement came on the eve of the Monaco Grand Prix and ties Hamilton to the German manufacturer until the end of the 2018 campaign.

Hamilton said: "Mercedes is my home and I couldn't be happier to be staying here for another three years. This is a company filled with real passionate racers, from the board room to the factory floor, and an incredible hunger to win.

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"The Mercedes car I am driving right now is the best I have ever had in my career; it's just so much fun to be out there every weekend, on the limit and fighting to win at every track."

Hamilton had been in talks with Mercedes since January, after splitting from Simon Fuller's XIX Entertainment agency, reports the Daily Telegraph. "The delay in signing prompted speculation that Hamilton had been toying with a move to Ferrari, but he has insisted throughout that sorting out a new contract with Mercedes was a mere formality," says the paper. "The wait for confirmation instead came from the Mercedes board having to sign off the lucrative 80-page document."

Under the new deal, Hamilton will earn £641,026 a week, says the Daily Mail, which breaks it down still further to an eyewatering £91,575 per day. It also means he will be paid more than £1.5m for every race.

Hamilton is already Britain's richest sportsman, according to this year's Sunday Times Sport Rich List, with a fortune of £88m - more than Steven Gerrard and Rio Ferdinand combined, and £16m more than Wayne Rooney in second place.

However, the Daily Telegraph claims Hamilton sits a lowly ninth in the list of the world's highest-earning sportsmen, with the likes of Floyd Mayweather, Christiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi above him. Although very few of his contemporaries command anything like the same salary as Hamilton (Roger Federer and Phil Mickelson pulled in a mere £3m each in winnings last year) they earn far more from endorsements and sponsorship.

But Hamilton could soon start to rocket up the list. Last year Forbes claimed that Hamilton's move to Mercedes would allow him greater freedom for his personal brand than he had at McLaren, meaning that he could now increase his income even more with lucrative sponsorship deals.