Culture
Lewis Hamilton’s final F1 lap with Mercedes: A year of challenges, a decade of triumphs
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — 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.
“You’re sitting there, and you’re realizing these are the last moments with the team, which is … it’s hard to describe the feeling,” Hamilton said. “It’s not the greatest, of course, but I think mostly I’m just really proud of what we’ve achieved.”
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.
“It’s a really beautiful journey you go on together,” Hamilton said. “And being that it was so long, the emotions run so deep.”
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.
Fred Vasseur, Ferrari’s F1 chief and a close friend of Wolff’s, hadn’t replied to a text asking if he was “taking our driver,” and the father of Carlos Sainz, who Hamilton would replace, had tipped off the Mercedes boss that something might be happening.
Looking back on Thursday, Hamilton admitted to it being an “awkward” meeting with Wolff to break the news that their partnership would end. Only eight months earlier, they’d agreed on a contract extension that appeared to reaffirm their commitment, one Hamilton had previously envisaged lasting long beyond his time racing in F1 was over. Their joint work on campaigns to assist long overdue change concerning diversity and equality in F1 is a legacy that means more to Hamilton than his racing achievements.
It also made for a year he admitted that he “massively underestimated” from an emotional point of view. “It was straining on the relationship very early on; (it) took time for people to get past it,” Hamilton admitted. “And then just for my own self, it’s been a very emotional year for me. And I think I’ve not been at my best in handling and dealing with those emotions.”
Lewis Hamilton and Toto Wolff talk on the grid at Lusail International Circuit on Nov. 30, 2024. (James Sutton – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images)
Hamilton has always worn his heart on his sleeve, evidenced by the tears that flowed after ending his two-and-a-half-year win drought at Silverstone. The intimacy of his relationship with Mercedes permits a brutal honesty that has survived significant disappointments — like his 2016 title loss to teammate Nico Rosberg or, more controversially, what happened in Abu Dhabi three years ago when he missed out on a record eighth world title.
Wolff has always liked to prod at any open wounds, knowing that is often the only way to understand how to make a situation better. He felt that Hamilton and Mercedes had “done a good job” handling the emotions of this year.
“When he took the decision at the beginning of the season to go, we knew it could be a bumpy year ahead,” Wolff said in Qatar. “He knows he’s going to go somewhere else. We know our future lies with Kimi (Antonelli). To go through the ups and downs and still keep it together between us, that is something we have achieved.”
“I’m just slow.”
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.
For much of the year, the Mercedes W15 car hadn’t gelled to his driving style or allowed him to extract the kind of pace that he’d needed, particularly over a single lap. Through 23 races this season, Hamilton trails George Russell 18-5 in their qualifying head-to-head and is 24 points behind in the drivers’ standings.
The day after Hamilton made that comment, when he’d qualified sixth in Qatar while Russell was P2 and almost half a second quicker, he was asked to expand on it. Did he really mean that he’s lost the edge? Is this a sign of the decline most elite drivers and sports stars encounter as they near their forties?
“I know I’ve still got it,” Hamilton said. “(It’s) just the car won’t go a bit faster. I definitely know I’ve got it still. It’s not a question in my mind. (I’m) looking forward to the end.”
Lewis Hamilton enters his final race with Mercedes seventh in the drivers’ championship. (Mark Thompson/Getty Images)
It wasn’t the first time Hamilton had given such a bleak outlook. After the race in Brazil, where he’d lagged to 10th in rainy conditions while Russell had been in the mix for victory prior to the red flag, he admitted he “could happily go and take a holiday” instead of doing the final triple-header. In Las Vegas, when the W15 came alive in the cold and allowed Mercedes to sweep to a 1-2, Hamilton seemed downbeat that he’d not been the one to lead it home after qualifying down in P10 while Russell was on pole.
“These last races, maybe even the whole season, was clearly not what we expected,” Wolff said in Qatar. “That car is a handful to drive on its worst days.”
But how much of that has hurt Hamilton in a way that it has not for Russell? Wolff put part of it down to Hamilton’s driving style. “One of his strengths is how he’s always able to brake late and attack the corner, and the car can’t take it,” he said, adding that when the grip kicks in the slow-speed corners, the problem worsens. “Then if the car slides more and it lacks grip, that contributes to (him) probably suffering more than George.”
In Qatar, Vasseur said he was “not at all” concerned by the form of his incoming star signee. “Have a look on the 50 laps that he did in Vegas, starting P10 (and) finishing on the gearbox of Russell,” Vasseur said. “I’m not worried at all.”
The progress made by Ferrari this year, recovering from its mid-season slump to put up a late fight to McLaren for the constructors’ title, will also encourage Hamilton that he can rekindle more of his old form. He stressed on Thursday that while his focus remains on Mercedes for his final weekend, there was a natural excitement building about the next chapter.
“It really sparks motivation,” Hamilton said, “and it’s a dream scenario for any driver to have an opportunity like this. I don’t take that for granted.”
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.
When he decided in 2012 to make a shock move away from McLaren, then consistently one of F1’s leading teams, it was scoffed at as a mistake: a step into the midfield, away from the team that had brought Hamilton up to F1, and into the unknown.
It proved to be the right move at the right time. McLaren was about to start a decade-long decline, while Mercedes was on the verge of starting a record-breaking F1 dynasty with Hamilton as the centerpiece.
The move also allowed Hamilton to become himself. His evolution from a 27-year-old one-time champion into one of F1’s elder statesmen, on the cusp of his 40th birthday with seven world titles to his name, with interests and a celebrity status stretching far beyond this paddock, has been impressive.
Mercedes’ British driver Lewis Hamilton sits on his car, posing for a group photo with his team ahead of the Abu Dhabi GP. (Andrej ISAKOVIC / AFP)
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.”
Good memories. Historic memories. So heavy in emotion that, when the checkered flag drops for Hamilton on Sunday night and he hoists himself out of a Mercedes F1 car for the final time, they will surely come flooding back.
Top photo: Chris Graythen/Getty Images, Clive Rose/Getty Images; Design: Meech Robinson/The Athletic
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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