Lewis Hamilton 'grateful' for Rosberg duel and now wants Mercedes' rivals to step up

World Championship leader Lewis Hamilton has welcomed the prospect of Mercedes' hegemony being challenged for the first time in 2014 at this weekend's Monaco GP.

"There are different types of laps you can do. When I was at McLaren I had a car that wasn't the fastest, you are pushing beyond the limit so the chances of crashing were higher. As opposed to when you have a car that you don't have to be in the window of being one of the quickest, so you can be smoother and you can be more accurate. In actual fact sometimes it could be faster. "To get a real good lap it's just all focused, utilising all the braking zones, a combination of getting your brakes and tyres up to temperature and just being on it from the first moment you brake into Turn One. "It's scary, when you start that one single lap you want to get everything from the braking zone - you don't want to know you could have braked five metres later. If you finish and you know that maybe 'I could have braked half a meter later' you'd be happy with that. But having that confidence to attack that first corner is amazing." And asked about the challenge of a qualifying lap around the tortuous circuit, Hamilton added: "Generally every lap I do in qualifying is exactly the same, it is all done on instinct. Your braking is done on instinct, your turning point is done on instinct. There's not race where it's more than another, that's what gets me the pole positions I have."