Revealed: What ’emotional’ Hamilton wrote to Antonelli after Mercedes promotion
Lewis Hamilton left a handwritten note in his driver room to Mercedes successor Kimi Antonelli to welcome the Italian to the team earlier this year.
Antonelli was chosen by Mercedes to replace Hamilton in 2025 when the seven-time world champion will make the switch to Ferrari.
The announcement was made at the Italian Grand Prix – Antonelli’s home event and the final leg of the European season.
Throughout the European rounds, Mercedes use the same motorhome that features a driver room, which offers the competitor an area of privacy during race weekends.
Speaking on the Beyond The Grid podcast, Mercedes race team coordinator Stephen Lord revealed Hamilton became emotional when he realised in Monza it would be the final time he would use the room.
“It’s quite an interesting insight into the Lewis that perhaps people don’t see,” Lord said.
“Lewis had finished engineering. I think the engineers had left, so Lewis was upstairs in the room on his own. I popped up, grabbed a couple of bits, came back down the stairs and Lewis came down the stairs, ready to leave and head home.
“He got to the bottom of the stairs, and he stopped, and then he turned around and he went back upstairs, I thought ‘oh, he’s forgotten something.’ I didn’t think much of it.
“He came back down about 10 minutes later, and he grabbed a guy that works for the team, Carlos, who’s our head of race team logistics.
“You could see that Lewis was really quite emotional, and he grabbed Carlos and he said: ‘It’s only just occurred to me, I’m never going to see that room ever again’.
“And he said, ‘I’m really emotional’. He said, ‘I can’t leave. I feel kind of sad to walk away from that room because I’ve been in that room for so many years and I’m never going to see it again.’ He was really quite touched that he was leaving it behind.”
Hamilton’s final motorhome message
Hamilton joined Mercedes in 2013 and has formed the most successful driver-team partnership in the sport’s history.
The pair have won 84 races, 153 podiums and six championships in collaboration together.
With Antonelli stepping in to kickstart a new era for the Mercedes squad, Lord revealed Hamilton left the 18-year-old a handwritten message with words of advice.
“I went back up to the room to pack his last few bits of driver kit and grab the helmets and everything,” Lord said.
“I walked into the room and on the wall there was quite a long, handwritten note on the wall, and it was a note to Kimi. It was basically welcoming him to his new room.
“It was wishing him the best of luck, saying some really nice things about the team and how if you care for them, they’ll care for you, because they’re a great team. And I thought, ‘Wow, what a nice thing to do’.
“So I went and grabbed Carlos and showed him, and he said, ‘Wow, that’s incredible’. And actually, now we’ve had glass cut, it’s now covered in the room so it will be there forever.
“Carlos went off, I thought ‘I’ll just go into the bathroom and make sure that everything’s been packed away and we’ve got all we need’, so I walked into the bathroom, and next to the toilet, above the toilet roll holder, was ‘Lewis was ‘ere’ with a big smiley face.”
