Lewis Hamilton says it is vital he and Mercedes Formula 1 teammate Valtteri Bottas maintain respect for one another as the 2019 title fight int♛ensifies.

Bottas and Hamilton engaged in a thrilling wheel-to-wheel battle during the🌟 early stages of Sunday’s Br﷽itish Grand Prix, as pole-sitter Bottas fended off a flurry of attacks from Hamilton to maintain his lead.

Hami𝓀lton briefly found a way past around the outside of Luffield but Bottas fought back to reclaim the lead by diving down the inside of his teammate at Copse, before a fortuitously-timed Safety Car enabled Hamilton to leapfrog his teammate and move into a lead he never relinquished.

“It’s no secret that Valtteri wants to beat me and I want to bea💧t him and that fighting spirit is stronger than anything, individually for all of us🅷,” Hamilton said.

“I t🎃hink it’s so vital though, to have a respect. I know how hard is it to get a pole here.

“He did a fantastic job yesterday I ๊know how hard it is to wake up and deliver every weekend, as do these⛦ other drivers, so the respect is there between us.

“I thin♌k we want to race wheel-to-wheꦍel and tough. When you’re racing with a team-mate it’s on a different level.”

A record sixth British GP victory fo🌌r Hamilton – and his seventh win of the season - has seen him extend his championship lead꧅ over Bottas to 39 points with 11 races remaining.

Hamilton said he was enjo🧸ying the scrap so much he wanted it to continue for the entirety of the race.

“If I were racing a🌼 Ferrari, you ꦏtake more risks,” he added. “Still respectful, but you can lean on them a bit more but as team-mates.

“We sit down at the beginning of the race, we talk about Turn 1 and how we’re going to respect each other, make sure we don’t collide, and even when I overtook him and he was coming back, I could have swept 🔯across the front and blocked 🍌him  – but that’s not the right thing to do.

“Ultimately it enabled him to get back past - but that’s racing. It was really faiཧr, and it was great. Honestly I was looking forward to maybe some racing later.

“He was doing some good times so the gap was🌠 growing, in terms of me coming out maybe one second, one-and-a-half seconds to two seconds, and I was trying to keep it as little as possible before I finally stopped so that, so that when I came out, I had the advantage on a new tyre and could finally catch him up and try to get past.

“Bꦑut the Safety Car camꦕe out and kind of intervened. But that was awesome.”