Hamilton won the F1 world championship last Sunday in Austin, clinching his third title one year after the double-points showdown in Abu Dhabi. Last year Rosberg was gutted; this year Hamilton ran it back and finished the title race with three rounds to spare. Multi-year dominance, same Mercedes team, same relentless engineering-and-pace system, now with a third star. Post-failure iteration is the whole sport. It’s the whole job, too.
(Leicester City are still winning games, so the Back to the Future timeline is off by one sport, but the timeline survives. BttF Day itself was a global nostalgia festival: Pepsi Perfect, self-lacing Nikes, hoverboard demos. The 2015 we got has no hoverboards but it does have a car that updates itself, which honestly Doc Brown would respect.)
Around the horn: Web Summit relocated to Lisbon amid drama; the Star Wars Battlefront beta broke EA’s servers (thundering herds remain undefeated, drink); and our platform crossed a milestone worth a floor-wide email, so I introduced the new team to the error-page-cake tradition, recreated from a photo, same artwork, same typo. It’s heritage now, and heritage survives job changes.
TIL: institutional memory as competitive advantage. Mercedes kept the engineering and driver lineup together on purpose. Team continuity compounds. Retention is architecture.