“Definitely proud of everyone in the team, and also, I'm definitely proud of myself for digging myself out of the place that I was in,” Hamilton told reporters at the Hungaroring on Thursday.
“One day when I do my documentary I'll tell you all about that weekend and what led up into it. But to come from there, even coming into this week I felt a lot from last week, and I arrive world’s away from where I was last year.
“Really grateful for where we've developed as a team. The pieces to the puzzle that I knew would come together, and now we come here with a great car, with a great package as a whole, that we can fight with.
But Hamilton is taking nothing for granted and labelled Mercedes as the team to beat.
“Every weekend the goal is to try and extract the most from the weekend,” Hamilton said.
“I would say we had a couple of really good weekends, and we got to Silverstone and started out strong and one step in the wrong direction that kind of took us away from competing for a win.
“Same thing last week, so that just shows how it can sometimes go in this sport. But I'm still grateful that we've had the consistency, and still score on points. Normally Kimi is so fast he pulls away, and he wasn't ballistic like he normally is, and we were a lot closer than we had thought.
“So to go to two circuits that we thought that we would be quite far behind and be as close as we were, have Charles win the Grand Prix, and second I think is a real good showing that we're moving in the right direction.