BERNIE ECCLESTONE has called on Mercedes to offer Lewis Hamilton a ‘take it or leave it’ contract. Negotiations over the world champion’s seat in the coming season continue to rumble on. Ecclestone, 90, ran the Brabham team in the 1970s and 80s before heading F1 itself for a number of decades and he set out how he would approach the Hamilton talks. “Either you take what we offer you now – or you leave it. Ecclestone recalled a similar negotiation with multiple world champion Nelson Piquet at Brabham in the mid-1980s. Ecclestone continued: “In 1983 we became world champion with Nelson Piquet. We had an extremely good test with a young Brazilian driver called Ayrton Senna.

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