Brazil — McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton had to fight back tears as he discussed his impending departure from McLaren.
BBCSport
Hamilton’s last race with the team which has supported him since he was 13 is today’s Brazilian Grand Prix. He joins Mercedes for 2013. Asked how he will feel after the race, the 27-year-old said: “I might have to keep my helmet on.
“It’s going to be tough. It’s my family and I’ll be going elsewhere. It’s best I don’t talk about it too much.”
Hamilton’s eyes then welled up. He said of his girlfriend Nicole Scherzinger: “My missus is always telling me every bit of time is precious and I’m going to maximise the time I have this weekend.”
The 2008 world champion said making the decision to join Mercedes, which he did while on holiday in Thailand after the Singapore Grand Prix at the end of September, had been a weight off his shoulders. “It started getting more and more intense with the questions every weekend — when are you going to do this, where are you going to go?” he said.
“Every weekend and then the last month or so was horrible. “I had that pressure on and in my personal life when I’m stressed I don’t know how to get it out of me, and I was very stressed and then I had to do my job.
“I had to still perform, and also my auntie passed [away] which was really the toughest couple of weeks, three weeks we had as a family because we hadn’t had anything like that happen to us before. It was just a really horrible period of time.
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“And when I finally sat down, I was sitting down in Thailand. And I’d gone there to go for the week with Nicole, but it didn’t work out that way, and I went there for literally a day and I was just sitting by the pool thinking about life and I was just able to release, and it was: ‘This is what I want to do.’”
