Q: Lewis, you spoke about the national anthem sung below you. What was the feeling with your new Italian Bono [Carlo Santi] beside you?
"Yeah, it was great to have him up there. I think, you know, him kind of substituting this year, jumping in and diving in deep with me. We didn’t know each other, we’d never spoken and I didn’t really know much of… I didn’t know anything about him. And we met and I think got on straight away."
"But it’s great to be able to connect with an engineer other than what I used to have. You know, I had it for such a long time and then you kind of lose that feeling because Bono’s now doing it with Kimi. It’s really great to be able to share that experience with him on that stage, and also probably, like, he’s very, very quiet. You could tell it’s hard for him to express his emotions. He’s just smiley and, you know, I’m giving him these big hugs and pulling him in, saying thank you. I like to think that this has probably reignited the love that he has as being an engineer as he has done for me as a driver."
Lewis Hamilton: "I'm only human so there's moments where I see the stuff (negative media narratives and social media), for sure there's moments where I allowed it to get to me and penetrate deeply."
'Hamilton is adamant that Fred Vasseur deserves great credit'
"If I see something that I don't think is right I push very very hard and I am relentless with it. It is not easy to be on the end of that when you are juggling a whole organisation. It is very, very tough. He continued to believe, be a good friend, a great ally and really supportive. Ultimately he really listened at the end, I really asked for some changes and he enabled them to happen."
- Lewis Hamilton
At 41, Lewis Hamilton stands on the podium as the first driver in Formula 1 to win 106 races. The first Formula 1 driver to achieve 206 podiums, and the first Formula 1 driver to win a race for McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari.