As you might expect of a man on the verge of his third Formula One title, Lewis Hamilton is in a good mood. Fresh from a trip to Miami and a brief stop in New York to walk his dogs.
As invited guests to a media day with Mercedes team partner Epson, ESPN finds Hamilton at a go-kart track talking to a journalist over the phone — his eighth interview of the afternoon. As he puts down the receiver, he jokes: “I feel like I’ve been working in a call centre.” A day of media duties is drawing to an end for Hamilton, but I’m happy to report the good mood remains as our cameras start to roll.
In truth, Hamilton has been in a good mood almost all year. His 2014 title campaign had very obvious low points before finally reaching the high of beating team-mate Nico Rosberg to win his second world championship in Abu Dhabi. This year has not been without its trials, but his form has barely fluctuated. To quote Mercedes’ technical boss Paddy Lowe, Hamilton has been at the “peak of his game”.
Our new weapons beneath the skins which formed
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.
