For more than a decade, Peter Bonnington's voice was the soundtrack of Lewis Hamilton's race weekends. After the Chinese Grand Prix, the same Mercedes race engineer found himself toasting a maiden Formula 1 victory with a 19-year-old in Hamilton's old seat — and his old number-one driver standing one step lower on the same podium.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli took pole at Shanghai and converted it into the win, with Hamilton claiming his first Ferrari podium behind. For Bonnington, the symbolism was hard to miss.
"It's pretty good. I can't complain," he said after the race. "Just to have Lewis there with Kimmy. Yeah, it was a hell of a moment. It's one that I'll cherish. But yeah, felt like it was getting the band back together, but not the band. I don't know how the analogy is there, but yeah, it was really, really nice, really touching. And Lewis, yeah, is a great sportsman as ever."
The day-to-day reality of the change has been less neat. Bonnington was unusually candid about the gulf between calling races for one of the sport's most decorated drivers and engineering for a teenager in his second F1 weekend.
"It's chalk and cheese. It's chalk and cheese," he said. "With Lewis, I knew what he was thinking. I knew that he didn't need to be told. Whereas when I started with Kimmy, it was a case of I don't know what he doesn't know. So I'm having to re-remember loads of stuff that I took for granted."
Bonnington's view on Antonelli's ceiling, however, drew on direct comparisons with the very best he has worked with.
"It's one of those things — I read a book about the 10,000 hour rule many, many years ago and I sort of started to really strongly believe it, thinking, oh, if we all had enough practice we'd be good enough," he said. "And then I met the likes of Michael, I met the likes of Lewis, and then you realised — no, actually, no. There is the extra step, that extra tenth or two. And that's what Kimmy's got. He's got that extra tenth or two."
His message on what comes next was a study in restraint. "That's going to take endurance. We've got two fewer races, but it's going to take a lot of endurance. To win one is great. To win a championship — it's exponential, the effort that goes into it. I think it's taking it a step at a time. Follow the procedures. Just think about the process. Don't get ahead of yourself. Don't worry, it will come. If you tick all the boxes and you get all your ducks in a row, it will come to you."
Toto Wolff offered a similar caution from the team-principal podium. "He will make mistakes and he will have great days like today," he said. "We shouldn't be carried away now with world championships."
For Mercedes, the early evidence is unambiguous: the partnership works. Whether it can carry a championship is the next question.
