‘I cannot wait for Sundays to go to church’
Lewis Hamilton reveals that religion has become integral to his life and given him new dreams
One hardly has to look far for symbols of Lewis Hamilton’s religious devotion. An image of Pieta, Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Virgin Mary cradling the body of the dead Christ, is inked on his shoulder. Tattoos, though, are only the half of it.
These days, the four-time world champion’s faith is so integral to his life that he has become a regular churchgoer who prays before each meal.
“Every time I eat, I pray,” he says. “Everyone is talking and I say, ‘Sorry, one second’, and you just make the time. Sundays, I can’t wait, because I go to church. I go with a couple of my close friends and we leave feeling enlightened and empowered. It’s like a recentring. Most of the time you leave and think, ‘Wow, I know where I am going’.”
As he prepares to sign a threeyear, £120million contract extension at Mercedes, making him Britain’s richest sports star by a distance, Hamilton finally appears at ease with his future direction. There is talk of having children, of working on more music – he recently made his pop debut on a Christina Aguilera record, under the pseudonym “XNDA” – and of creating his own fashion line. The prospect of a record sixth British Grand Prix victory at Silverstone this weekend is but one branch of the burgeoning global corporation that is Hamilton Inc.
Hamilton has changed, in several fundamental ways, from the audacious prodigy who won his maiden world title for Mclaren a decade ago. Once, he reconciled himself to the dangers of his profession by explaining that at least, in the worst-case scenario, he would die doing what he loved. But just listen to him now. “I wouldn’t say F1 is worth dying for,” he says. “Your dreams, passions, ambitions and goals are worth dying for.”
By way of elaboration, he relates the story of one powerful encounter with a fan. “A woman ran up to me when I went to this musical one time and said, ‘I just wanted to tell you, in 2007 I was going through cancer and chemotherapy, and you got me through it’. ‘How?’ I asked. ‘Every weekend’, she said, ‘I saw you get in that car. The way you drove, the way you spoke, I was powering through it with you’.
“It’s hard to grasp that, and to imagine what she went through, but she grabbed on to something, and maybe it was the sight of this young kid coming from nowhere, facing adversity, and somehow fighting through it.”
To his detractors, this anecdote could come across as a grandiose assertion of his healing powers. After wrapping up the championship in Mexico City last year, Hamilton mentioned a teacher from his schooldays in Stevenage, who supposedly claimed he would never amount to much. He was widely accused of being haughty and belittling, but at the time the words were uttered without a hint of malice.
Perhaps Hamilton will always be misunderstood. Somehow, he thought it was a sound idea last Christmas to post an Instagram picture of his nephew, above the caption, “Boys don’t wear dresses”. The backlash prompted him to delete his entire social media output. Similarly, his build-up to Silverstone 12 months ago was hardly devoid of controversy, given his decision to swerve London Live, a huge F1 promotion in Trafalgar Square, in favour of a mini-break in Mykonos. Amid the hoopla, he still won his home race for the fourth straight year.
The stubborn criticism that Hamilton spreads himself too thinly, that he is too easily drawn to a lifestyle of posing on Met Gala red carpets and hanging out with LA models, is hard to sustain against the sheer consistency of his results. Prior to his mechanical failure in Austria last weekend, he had compiled an unprecedented streak of 33 points finishes. Besides, Hamilton is adamant that the eclectic nature of his off-track diary keeps him fresh.
“These different things that I’m doing are stimulating my mind,” he argues. “If I spend this week just training twice a day, sacrificing everything, I might physically be in better shape, but I am actually miserable. If you see my schedule, I am travelling here and there, I have different projects I am working on, my mind is challenged all the time. I arrive at the next race maybe with slightly less energy, but mentally I am buzzing. That is more powerful than having all the rest you could want. I have tried it multiple times and I turn up much better, in better form.”
With three more years in F1, Hamilton could yet put Michael Schumacher’s benchmark of seven championships under threat. Already, he boasts 75 pole positions, seven more than any other driver in history.
Come what may, he is likely to remain a restless soul. In his spare time, Hamilton has been seeking to master piano, insisting that he “could have been Grade Eight by now” if he had started sooner. In a telling remark to Beyond the Grid, F1’s latest podcast, he says: “Whenever my time is up, I’d like to imagine I would be at the Pearly Gates, thinking, ‘I didn’t get through everything I wanted to, but I gave it a good shot’. I did my diving test recently, because I love the ocean and I’m fascinated by sea life. I just love the thrill factor, and that’s never going to change.”