Can Lewis the ‘racer’ drive away as easily from life on track?

SO Lewis Hamilton contemplates retiring from racing, does he?

“I have days when I wake up and feel groggy,” he expostulated this week.

“I don’t feel motivated to work out. I feel, ‘Jeez, where are we going? What’s next? Should I continue racing?’”

The first thought that came to my head on hearing those somewhat throwaway remarks was a conversation I had with Nico Rosberg, the one man who has beaten the great champion over a season that means anything. I asked Nico how retirement suited him.

“Fine,” he said. “But, you know what, Lewis will find it hard?”

I do know what he meant. Rosberg was a product of his family, a father who was motor racing champion of the world.

He grew up

in Monaco

with

aplatinum spoon in his mouth, and he had a wife and a couple of kids, and he could take his pleasures elsewhere.

That is not how it is for Hamilton. He is defined by racing. Yes, he has other interests, well documented. He is into fashion and music, hinterlands of culture that will give him solace when he takes the long march into the rest of his life. But, unlike Rosberg, he is a ‘racer’, a definition Sir Stirling Moss differentiated from being a ‘driver’.

It carried with it, as well as a distinct attitude on the track, a view of life – an outlook that separates Formula One greats. There are those who can take it and leave it, and there are those who can’t.

Hamilton is 35 and some day in the next, what, five years he will have to leave the stage.

He is making the transition to life via fashion and music. But he knows, I think, that it will never be as fulfilling as the one calling he was born to answer.

Sebastian Coe, for example, was a brilliant frontman for the Olympics in London. But his essential genius, the defining characteristic of his existence, was not as an athletics administrator. It was for his sensational gifts as a middle-distance runner that we shall always celebrate him.

Hamilton may make some decent music, or not, or design some good T-shirts, or not, but his brilliance as a motor racing driver is what marks him out.

He will not give that up lightly, because he will never know such nourishment again.