This Sunday, for their last race together, Lewis Hamilton and his race engineer Peter Bonnington reactivated an old tradition. The duo who won 83 races together, with 'Bono' missing out on just one victory for Hamilton, launched the seven-time world champion's famous 'hammer time'.
“I noticed that too, when he told me, I thought I don't even remember the last time he said 'hammer time' to me.” said Hamilton, who requested this code name from Bonnington in his first season at Mercedes F1. “He has been one of my closest friends for many years.”
“And that's something I didn't expect to have because he worked with Michael Schumacher and other great drivers. But he supported me. For an engineer, staying with someone can be very frustrating and painful at times, but he supported me every day without fail.”
The Briton had a particularly difficult season: “It's not that I need to have confidence, I've always had confidence in myself, but it's really good to finish with a hard fight. No mistakes, solid driving. The year has been very eventful, probably the longest of my life.”
“I would say we knew from the beginning that we were going to leave, and it's like a relationship, when you told your partner you were leaving, but you live together for a whole year. There were a lot of highs and emotionally low, but we finished on a high note.”
Hamilton admitted that he had to give everything and make no mistakes to beat a formidable George Russell: “He was driving very well, obviously he started a lot further than me, so catching up to 14 seconds was difficult, but he was doing good laps so you had to be perfect.”
“In Vegas I was catching up for a while and then I stopped, so I tried to make sure I kept closing the gap, and I didn't catch up until the last turn, and I told myself it was now or never, and I waited for it.”
