Full speed
Lewis Hamilton may be the world champion Formula One racing driver for team Mercedes-Benz, but he is also a man who loves fashion and music. People said he would be arrogant. He isn’t. He is thoughtful, grateful, dedicated, yearning, restless and an ever-
“IF YOU’RE NOT EXPLORING YOUR OWN ABILITIES, YOU’RE NOT MAXIMISING YOUR LIFE. TIME IS PRECIOUS”
It’s the day after the Australian Grand Prix and Lewis Hamilton is already back at work. No lie-in for him, even after such a big race, and all that it brought – the epic Alonso-Gutierrez crash and then his own comeback from sixth position to second. Exhausting, yes, he concedes. “It’s because you’re full of emotion. When you drive, it stresses you in a way that you can’t imagine.” Mental energy required is massive, focused, intense. But he likes fashion so he’s here for this shoot. It’s fun, the flip side. He likes Christine (Centenera), too, and Vogue. Our world. Creativity. He likes designers, front rows and clothes. We’re being filmed for Vogue.com.au as we speak and his people are filming our people. He’s filming everything. It’s like being in an episode of Entourage. There is a well-edited rack in the Melbourne studio: new Gucci, embroidered with flowers and suede; Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton denim; Boss; Prada; Dries Van Noten. It’s not your regular line-up of dark suits, instead it reflects the current seismic shift in menswear that’s going on: it’s loose, descriptive and as such nicely dangerous for the 350-kilometres-per-hour racing driver. He lives on the edge. And these Formula One men are showmen, after all. Although he is aghast when I suggest that I’m surprised he has a piano in his hotel room and not girls and champagne. Horrified even. Formula One is a serious business, he says seriously. Werk, werk, werk.
But Lewis has music, it’s his escape. He listens, he learns and he plays the piano. A piano has been moved into his Melbourne hotel room as Madonna left for Sydney. He has been tinkling away on it, no Madonna though. Piano playing has been on his to-do list since he was 16. “I have a list of things that I want to do and I’m 31 now and still have things I haven’t done,” he says. “I’m never going to be a spectacular player, but as long as I can play something. I could be anywhere, on the plane, boarding a plane … I play something and I just record it and I try to see if I can learn it, from different genres, you know? Sometimes I put my phone on Spotify to see what new songs are out and randomly you come across Sam Smith, or it could be a Kanye track, or it could be a Kendrick track, who knows? And you just try and once you learn those different keys, which takes some time, then you mix it up and make your own things up with it.” A music career the next step, perhaps? “I don’t see it as a future; I see it as the now. It is my escape right now. I think music is really the key to the soul, I think it transcends in all of us. So for me it is a part of my life. I don’t go anywhere without music. It gets me into the mood when I’m training, when I’m racing.” Although he isn’t allowed to listen while racing as yet, he’s working on it, on piping it into his helmet. Daft Punk, perhaps.
He has watched Kanye work. “He’s a genius.” Lewis is a fan. “He sits there and dissects. He’s got such a great ear for all these different sounds, and says: ‘I’ll use that later on for that sound and I’ll use that.’ He chops it all up and then comes out with one of the best albums that I think he has done.”
Lewis admires the craft. The writers, the lyrics. Adele. Sam Smith. He loves writing, too. “It’s a long process but rewarding when you get it right.” He has been listening to Anti, Rihanna’s latest album.
He loves challenging himself, digging deep, releasing the Lewis that plays, perhaps dances around his hotel room and laughs. He is curious. Hungry. Has an insatiable thirst for creation. Restless. “I love being creative. I feel it’s boring if you’re not being creative. If you’re not exploring your own abilities, you’re not maximising your life. You only have one chance. Time is precious. Explore. Find out what you’re good at. Find out if you can get better at things you’re not good at. I try to dabble in everything I can get my hands on. The good thing with Kanye is, with his music, he was also put in a box, like – ‘you’re a musician, you can’t do fashion, what are you talking about?’ Now he is a fully fledged fashion designer as well. So even though he has gone through difficult times, he keeps pushing with it. And he’s my friend, my friend who is wearing his Yeezys now, all weekend,” he says, laughing.
So Lewis is exploring this world full of possibilities. Fashion is something that he’s always wanted in on. “I think at a young age, and particularly with racing, it was only racing. There was nothing else till I got to Formula One and even in my first Formula One years nothing else was allowed in my life but racing and training. I had no social life. And fashion was always something I really wanted to get into, so I was buying magazines and I’d buy like literally 10 magazines for a flight. I would be going through ripping pages out and drawing, sketching out in terms of: ‘I want this outfit, how can I find it?’ So recently I’ve been going to fashion shows, which I love. I love seeing other people and standing back – it is a different world to mine. No-one knows me. I get to see different creative people. Stella McCartney or Vivienne Westwood are completely different people but both geniuses in their own way. I love to see that and that’s why I go.”
Even though he may not like to admit it, as a Formula One man he’s a magnet. And so he first bonded with Gigi Hadid and the millennial girl gang at the Met Gala in 2015. Then they all met up again a few days later in Cannes and then went to Monaco for the Grand Prix, for Lewis. “They said they were my cheerleaders for the weekend, and you really can’t get better cheerleaders than that,” he says with a big grin. (He has a great smile, by the way.) “Kendall works incredibly hard, she is always working, the same with Gigi, Hailey, all of them. But ultimately we are all just human beings, normal people who do normal stuff – laugh and go out partying and whatever it is. But they’re real, very much free spirits.” He needs free spirits even if they are under the millennial microscope. “They have the most incredible following, 60 million, 70 million followers, which is insane.” Lewis has just under 10 million followers collectively on his social media channels. Still, 10 million isn’t bad, I say. He never saw it coming. “You know, honestly, growing up, never in a million years … I never thought then that I would have people arriving at the race or wherever wanting to have a picture of me, you know, just smiling because they happened to have seen me or wearing my cap or my flag … so passionate about it. I appreciate that more than anything you can imagine. For me that’s a lot of energy I get from these people. So I have a very unique life as we all do, but I love to be able to share it and that’s the great thing you have with social media, and you can show every experience that you have because one day it’s all going to be gone, all this – the racing, the flying – and I’ll go back to the real simple life. Probably not in the country walking my dogs somewhere … but I’ll be in one spot for most of the year. Right now, I’m never home.”
He currently lives in Monaco, but home is the UK. “Naturally when I go to the UK, I do feel at home. Obviously it was where I grew up and all my family is there, my original friends from school, but I don’t know where I’m going to settle.”
He has built a house in Colorado. “It was actually built but I stripped it down and redid it and that’s my first real creation. My friends seem to love it …”
He loves architecture, travelling, taking pictures, and Paris particularly. “I love old buildings, and when I went to Moscow seeing those crazy building designs …” He also loves art. “I generally like young artists. I mean, I did look ages ago at a Monet. I was bidding with one guy, it was too much money for me.” He laughs. “He kept going and it was an exciting process but you have to set yourself a maximum that you’re going to go with and then, jeez, we started way beyond that and it just kept going. But fortunately I woke up the next day and I didn’t have it and I was really happy because I had that money in the bank.”
He never watches TV – no Netflix for him – only movies and documentaries. He loves action movies. Adrenaline junkie. James Bond. He could be a Bond perhaps. He has taken some acting lessons. “You can never beat Sean Connery.”
We talk skydiving and every adventure sport under the sun; he’s done it all. The thrill. The focus.
“I like the experience of losing control for a minute and then being able to control it. That’s why I love racing. You know, it’s not really about the speed, it’s about being on the edge and the edge of losing control because you have to go to that point before you find the edge.” Sex with no orgasm, anti-climax. “It’s just the most exhilarating thing you can do, 220 miles an hour down the straight breaking at this last-minute turn and it’s bumping, you know, shaking like crazy. The G-force, the compression, it’s down your back and your glutes. As you turn, your body wants to go the other way. All these things that come into it and also, it’s a fight, you know? It started when I was eight, struggling like hell in that moment. I guess I did my family proud, I stayed with it. Sometimes you drop the ball and that’s when you get emotional; all those hard years of work and you still bummed out.”
But Melbourne was good for Mercedes-Benz and Lewis. He finished. He powered up. There is a long way to go. “Now I’m driving better than ever and I feel good about it. It’s not even having confidence, it’s just I feel good within myself. I’m training, I know I’m fit, I know how to drive – been doing it long enough so I should. All you can ask for is that you give it your best.”
Next stop on the Formula One train: Bahrain, where Lewis placed third. “So all week, when I get there, I’ll work hard, I’ll train, do my exercise, we might chill from lunch and then I’ll be in the studio, probably from like two or three in the afternoon, and then we’re going to be writing every day, all day. And then the race weekend on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I’ll work during the day and go straight from the track to the studio. Track, Monday till probably midnight. Go home, get some sleep, arrive back at the track and drive the next day. So that’s what I love, that balance.”
The “studio” he mentions is a recording studio built for Michael Jackson. “Years ago, Michael disappeared and nobody knew where he went and he went to Bahrain and built this beautiful studio and then he left and it’s just sitting there. I use it every time I go.” Of course he does. If Hamilton ever disappears, you’ll know where to find him: in a studio, no helmet just headphones on, playing somewhere on the edge of thrilling and always, always doing his best.