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Atop the Mercedes hospitality unit at the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi, cooled by nearby fans working hard in the midday heat, Lewis Hamilton sat at a table with his race engineer, Peter Bonnington, for some pre-race weekend planning.
It was a routine they’d been through plenty of times before — 245 times, in fact — but the 246th time carried a little more emotion. After 12 years, 84 race wins and six world championships, marking it the most successful driver-team partnership in F1 history, this was the last race weekend for Hamilton as a Mercedes driver.
Hamilton’s conversations with Bonnington, affectionately known as ‘Bono’ and someone Hamilton has likened to a brother, remained as professional as ever. They knew there was a job to do. But speaking a few hours later, the seven-time world champion admitted these chats involved an extra degree of emotion.
The ‘last dance’ for Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes has been ten months in the making. On Feb. 1, Hamilton announced he would move to Ferrari for 2025, securing the 39-year-old a last blast in F1’s iconic red cars to end his glittering career. Abu Dhabi was always going to be a significant grand prix.
But at the end of a taxing year on the track, filled with the highs of victory at Silverstone and Spa to the late-season lows, both Hamilton and Mercedes are committed to ending with a celebration.
Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal, had an inkling of what was coming when Hamilton arrived at his Oxfordshire home for their pre-season catch-up.
For these words to be uttered by a seven-time world champion might seem fanciful. But there was a degree of resignation as Hamilton digested a difficult Friday of practice for the Qatar Grand Prix, where he couldn’t feel the car giving him back the kind of performance he needed. It continued a season-long trend.
Whenever Hamilton hangs up his helmet and calls time on his enormously successful career, this period with Mercedes will be the lasting, most definitive part of his racing legacy.
On the entrance to Mercedes’ garage for this weekend at the Yas Marina Circuit are two large pictures of Hamilton, one from Hungary 2013 — his first win for Mercedes — and the second from Silverstone this year, arguably the most emotional of his record 104 victories. Across it reads the message: “Every dream needs a team.”
Even the challenges of this year and the difficulty of a year-long goodbye will not diminish what Hamilton and Mercedes built together.
“Nothing is going to take away 12 incredible years with eight constructors’ and six drivers’ championships,” Wolff said. “That is what will be the memory, and after next Sunday, we’re going to look back on this great period of time rather than a season or races that were particularly bad.
We will stay with the good memories.”
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