Lewis Hamilton left Kimi Antonelli a long handwritten note in his driver’s room at Mercedes to welcome him to the team, a senior staff member has revealed.

Mercedes race team co-ordinator Stephen Lord had taken on some of the weekend duties left by Hamilton’s former physio Angela Cullen, and he revealed the seven-time World Champion left the teenager some words of wisdom upon his arrival to the team.

Lewis Hamilton leaves Kimi Antonelli handwritten note in Mercedes driver room

Hamilton admitted previously to feeling emotional after the last European race at Monza, with Mercedes’ motorhome that travelled around those circuits having had the same driver room for him through his time with the team.

When it dawned on him that he would no longer be in the room where he has been able to gain some privacy on a race weekend for the past 12 seasons, Lord explained the seven-time World Champion became “really quite emotional” at that moment.

After a brief interlude, the race team co-ordinator packed up his final things from the Italian Grand Prix weekend, and found two things Hamilton had left for his Mercedes successor in the team’s European ‘race base’.

“It’s quite an interesting insight into the Lewis that perhaps people don’t see,” Lord said on the Beyond the Grid podcast when asked for his favourite anecdote while working with Hamilton, which so happened to come from this season.

“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.’ Didn’t think much of it.

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“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. And you could see that Lewis was really quite emotional, and he grabbed Carlos, and Carlos’ job, he is responsible for all of the trucks, the race base in Europe. He oversees the build and the transportation of these so Lewis knows that it’s Carlos’ thing.

“I was stood there, 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.’ – And he was really quite touched that he was leaving it behind.

“Anyway, so off he went. I went back up to the room to pack his last few bits of driver kit and grab the helmets and everything.

“I walked into the room and on the wall there’s quite a long, handwritten note on the wall, and it was a note to Kimi, and it was basically welcoming him to his new room, and 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 Carl and showed him, and he said, ‘Wow, that’s incredible’. And actually, now we’ve had glass cut, and it’s now covered in the room, so it will be there forever more.

“So Carl 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. And I thought, ‘Okay, I like that.’”

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