Despite losing his Driver’s Championship lead to Mark Webber when he was forced to drop out of the Hungarian Grand Prix with transmission problems last weekend, Lewis Hamilton isn’t backing down from the chase for a second world championship. On his website, he called the current title chase with five drivers within 20 points of the top spot “exciting” and said that he has “dug deep” before and that he and his team can do so again.

“We’ll resume as if it’s the start of the year, with everything to play for,” he said. “None of the top three teams are really behind on points. That’s exciting!”

One thing that isn’t exciting for Hamilton is the summer break, with the series off until the Belgian Grand Prix on August 29 and all teams closing up their shops for vacation. Hamilton told Autosport.com that the break comes at the wrong time for McLaren as they attempt to close the speed gap between them and the Red Bull cars of Webber and Sebastian Vettel.

“Of course [reliability] is a concern, but there’s nothing I can do about it – so it’s best just to focus on doing the best job I can with what I have,” he said.

“There’s nothing I can do, everything shuts down. They [Red Bull] are in a good position where they can go on holiday with a good car already, then they can come back and their car will be the same. Whereas we would of course love to improve our car over that period of time, but we won’t.”