The rest were arranged thus: Isack Hadjar, who drives the second Red Bull car, placed ahead of Charles Leclerc, who was fourth; Hamilton fifth, Russell sixth, in a field, as they write, remarkably tightly packed. The Ferrari men, who had looked the favourites on Friday, fell away on Saturday after their custom; their tyres are said to have failed them at the decisive moment. Hamilton explained the matter simply: his car had felt very good, so the others must simply be faster. Leclerc fears the changes of temperature; a few degrees more or less of heat on the track, he says, make as much difference as between day and night; yet he remembers that the last time he started fourth at Austin, he won. Fifty-six laps will be run this evening on an uneven track, and most, they say, will depend on the start itself and the first bend after the steep climb.

As I read this I remembered the old letter I once wrote you about the races in the Circus. Everything has changed, machines for horses, Texas for the Circus Maximus, and yet nothing has changed in the minds of the spectators. They follow the red Ferrari cars with the same passion our people gave the Reds; and I have no doubt that what I wrote then is still true: "now they cheer for a cloth, they love a cloth, and if in the very running, in the middle of the contest, this colour were carried over there and that one here, their zeal and their favour would cross over with it." If this happened only among the ignorant, I should wonder less; but it happens among certain serious men, who discourse more gravely on the heat of tyres than on the affairs of the state.

Still, I found two things in this report that I am glad to praise. First, Toto Wolff, the head of the Mercedes stable, asked how his people had come from nowhere to first place, answered candidly that if he knew, he would say; for now he could say only that the driver was a special one. Rare modesty in an owner, to admit he does not know the cause of his own victory; most men credit to their own judgment what Fortune has given them. Second, Max Verstappen, who is his rival, said that it was a pleasure to fight him, that he deserved this year's success and would be a deserving champion of the world. I value this more than those two tenths of a second; for a machine can supply speed, but only a man can supply humanity. My uncle, were he alive, would not have noted down the young man's grin, but would have inquired into the cause of his speed; on that, however, the report is silent, and so is the owner himself.

This evening, while others shout, I shall read; and if someone afterwards tells me who took the first bend first, I shall thank him and ask no more. I wish that young man well, and this above all: that so much glory won so early may not spoil his character; for a chariot is steered more quickly than a man's conduct. As for me, as I said then, "I take some pleasure in the fact that this pleasure does not take me." Farewell.