There’s a surreal air in the Mercedes hospitality area this weekend. Upstairs the other night a video played over and over again on the roof terrace across from the trackside W Hotel with its distinctive shell, then illuminated after 8pm.
The reel showed Lewis Hamilton as a boy karter, a kid dreaming his dreams, and ended with David Croft’s Sky commentary hailing the Briton as a seven-times world champion.
Lewis wasn’t up there with the sesame-coated chicken wings and truffle-chip scoffers; he was quietly going about his business as he usually would. He talked to his engineers; quietly and thoughtfully digesting their information, and as likely as not firing off emails as ideas occurred to him through the night.
Lewis, at 39, would still rather spend time hard at work with Peter ‘Bono’ Bonnington, his long-serving race engineer, the 49-year-old Englishman who relays information during races over the team radio.
Bono is Hamilton’s closest aide in the racing team, the one individual on whose loyalty he can count most. And after a season of struggle, and of recurring self-doubt, Hamilton and Bono are this weekend working on an unlikely final miracle together ahead of the season-concluding Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Namely, tilting at Hamilton’s 85th win for Mercedes in his 246th and last race for the team after 12 years, a task made harder by his qualifying a distant 18th.
‘I’m pretty calm at the moment,’ claimed Hamilton on arrival here. ‘But in the briefings we’ve had, you are sitting there and realising that these are the last moments with the team.
A video played at the W Hotel showing clips of Lewis Hamilton as a boy karter, a kid with dreams
But the seven-time world champion instead was quietly going about his business as he usually would
Hamilton is preparing for his 246th and last race for Mercedes after 12 years on Sunday
‘I have not been at my best in handling my emotions this year. You’ve seen the best and worst of me, and I’m not going to apologise for either because I’m only human, and I don’t always get it right.’
Whatever his downturn in form — which led him to say last week in Qatar that he is ‘definitely not fast any more’ — his deeds at Mercedes are unparalleled anywhere.
On the journey to his last six world titles between 2014 and 2020, he won a staggering 53.28 per cent of all races. Those 84 wins followed his one title and 21 victories at McLaren. Of his 104 career poles, 78 came as a Silver Arrow. It made him a knight of the realm.
Even Mercedes’ past masters are usurped: Rudolf Caracciola, a serial winner in the 1930s before war rationing of petrol curtailed him; Juan Manuel Fangio, who clinched two world titles in the 1950s; and Stirling Moss, who carved a legend on the open roads of Italy with victory in the 1955 Mille Miglia at an average speed of nearly 100mph.
And to think many considered Hamilton mad when he left McLaren for an uncertain future at Mercedes, who had no recent story of Formula One success.
Actually, he assessed the situation sagely. He had fallen out with Ron Dennis, who once characterised his mentoring role as Professor Higgins to Hamilton’s Eliza Doolittle. That fairytale had soured to such an extent that one pointed absentee at his driver’s leaving party in Brazil was Dennis.
Main sponsors Vodafone and engine partners Mercedes were leaving the Woking team. It was time for a change, and Hamilton opened clandestine talks with Ross Brawn, then team principal of Mercedes, at his mother Carmen’s house in Knebworth, Hertfordshire.
Money was a potential stumbling block. Bernie Ecclestone, then the sport’s all-powerful puppeteer, remembered this week: ‘I intervened at one stage. I think it was Singapore in 2012. He wanted £35million. But Mercedes were only willing to go up to £30m. I said if there was a problem, I’d pay the difference. I thought the move would be good for Lewis and good for the sport. They sorted it out in the end.’
His Silver Arrow will start in 18th in his final race as a Mercedes driver at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
Bernie Ecclestone revealed that he offered to pay the difference for Hamilton to join Mercedes
Niki Lauda, who was to grow into a major influence on Hamilton as Mercedes’ no-nonsense non-executive chairman, also had a persuasive word in Hamilton’s ear out in Singapore the day after the race, and the deal was soon done. Hamilton would be joining Nico Rosberg for the 2013 season as Michael Schumacher’s replacement.
Hamilton was desperate for the freedom his move would allow him. At McLaren, he would always have to play the grateful and compliant boy they had nurtured. It was a place of corporate rules and Hugo Boss suits. At Mercedes, he could be his own man.
It was time to express his fashion sense, his outlandish wardrobe slowly transforming drivers’ arrivals in the paddock into a catwalk over the next decade. He could fight for diversity in sport and society with growing zeal, spending £20m of his own money on his Mission 44 charity to this end. Formula One’s first black driver was a pioneer again.
Early on, he brought his bulldogs to the track. Murray Walker, a canine lover, did not approve. In what for him were censorious remarks, the Voice of Formula One once told me: ‘Dogs shouldn’t be near that noise. Anyone who thinks otherwise should be drummed out of the Brownies.’
Another vignette: Hamilton and Nicole Scherzinger holding hands across the table in the Mercedes paddock home as they said grace before lunch. Their relationship was on and off until it ended after eight years in 2015.
From 2014, and the new turbo-hybrid era, Hamilton was handed a rocket ship of a car. Mercedes had aced the regulation change, and nobody could live with them. If this advantage flattered Hamilton’s statistics, it should be noted that his own standard of performance was breathtakingly good.
His modus operandi was punishing. James Allison, Mercedes’ technical director, is not in Abu Dhabi this weekend. He is back at the team’s factory in Brackley working on next year’s car. But he has been a close-up observer of the Hamilton psyche and delivered this verdict as he zoned in on his seventh title: ‘In addition to Lewis’s sublime talent for handling a car is a personality that leaves him just as unquenchably keen on winning as when he was a boy.
‘When we look at people like him, who have clearly shown the entire world that they are better at doing what they do than anyone else, it is difficult to understand what compels them to come back to do it over and over again.
Niki Lauda would grow into a major influence on the seven-time world champion at Mercedes
Hamilton’s relationship with pop star Nicole Scherzinger was on and off until it ended after eight years in 2015
‘He has a profound need to show himself, first and foremost, and others, very much second, that he can drive a car like nobody else.
‘He does not spend time reflecting on his achievements. He is only ever worrying about the next race and winning it, so he can string enough victories together to win the championship.
‘The brief time he is at one with the world, at temporary peace, is when he is spraying champagne having just clinched a victory.
‘As soon as that is over, he’s focused on the next race, with a mixture of excitement, anxiety and a surprising amount of self-doubt. It is one of his strengths because it whips him to do it all over again.’
Titles flowed in 2014 and 2015, though his relationship with Rosberg, his former karting team-mate and friend, became embittered. They are cut from different cloths. Hamilton came from poverty in Stevenage, his father taking on three jobs to fund his son’s early career. Rosberg grew up in Monaco as part of the Euro elite, his father the 1982 world champion Keke, though in temperament and style taking after his German mother Sina.
Rosberg prevailed in 2016 by leaving no stone unturned. He even gave up riding his bike to lose a couple of pounds of leg muscle for a fraction of extra pace. Five days after winning the title, knowing he could never summon the same total mind-warping commitment to beat Hamilton again, Rosberg retired. Hamilton said he knew Rosberg would quit there and then. I put that to Nico once, little believing in Hamilton’s telepathy. ‘You know what,’ Rosberg responded, ‘I bet he did know that. He knows me very well.’
With Valtteri Bottas as a more docile No 2, Hamilton ripped through the records, holding off the threat of Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel as and when required. He eclipsed even Schumacher’s 91 wins, a total once thought so high as to be beyond human reach.
We wondered if his celebrity lifestyle would catch up with him. He claimed that, on the contrary, his red-carpet calls away from the track kept him fresh on it. I vividly remember him arriving in Singapore in 2018 on the back of a busy social diary to produce perhaps the qualifying lap of his life.
Hamilton tore through the record books at Mercedes and even surpassed Michael Schumacher’s previous record of 91 wins
He produced perhaps the lap of his life to out-qualify Seb Vettel in 2018 at the Singapore Grand Prix
Under 1,500 light bulbs, on a track that was meant to favour Vettel’s red car, he went three-tenths quicker than anyone, including a coltish Max Verstappen, who described his own lap as his best yet. ‘It felt like magic,’ said Hamilton, almost bamboozled by his own conjuring trick.
The big disappointment, perhaps the fulcrum of his career, came in Abu Dhabi in 2021, when he lost what would have been his record eighth world title to Verstappen in that infamous night of the rogue safety car withdrawal. He conducted himself with magnanimous dignity in defeat.
But the wounds never healed, leaving a scab for ever. He seriously considered quitting. His father Anthony and stepmother Linda travelled to the States to spend much of the winter comforting him. For the first time in his life, he did not want to talk about motor racing.
As January 2022 wore on, there was still no guarantee he would return to the cockpit. He eventually did, but had neglected training and made a sluggish start in a car that was nothing like a match for the Red Bulls. Mercedes had not grasped the new ground-effect regulations, and nothing has ever been as rosy since.
Should he have retired in 2021, claiming the moral high ground as he exited the stage? No — that would have been impossible for him. Yet his failure to win in both 2022 and 2023 only deepened his fears and gloom.
And then to the bombshell at the start of the year: his £60million-a-year move to Ferrari next season on a two-year deal. This was suddenly going to be a long goodbye.
It took him 10 races to reach the podium this year. But, finally, 945 days after his last victory, he triumphed at Silverstone in July. Relief abounded. In an emotional address to the team from the factory floor the following week, he admitted how deeply he had questioned himself in the longest and darkest tunnel of his career.
What has gone wrong?
The defeat in Abu Dhabi three years ago left a mental scab and he genuinely considered quitting
He was pipped on the final lap by Max Verstappen in controversial circumstances back in 2021
Ecclestone offers this theory: ‘His talent has not gone but it drains your reserves when for years you go aeroplane to hotel, hotel to track, track to aeroplane — and then go again.’
Others see age looming ever larger in his rear-view mirror. Michael Schumacher, for example, was four years younger than Hamilton is now when he won his last title in 2004.
Or are Mercedes pulling for his 26-year-old team-mate George Russell, their future, at Hamilton’s expense? They deny that, but there is inevitably a sense of a baton being passed.
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff points to a technical explanation. ‘One of Lewis’s strengths is the way he’s able to brake late and attack the corner, and this car can’t take that,’ the Austrian reasoned last week, apologising to his star turn for providing inadequate machinery.
Nobody knows the answer for certain. Not even the man himself.
Hamilton’s final hope is that Ferrari will act as a reviving tonic. But for now, he says of his Mercedes marriage: ‘Naturally, I mostly remember the good bits.’ And, whatever his current woes, they flowed in torrents.
