‘Nobody else has a tale like his. He is extraordinary’
He has six world titles, millions of admirers and almost as many haters – but who really is Lewis Hamilton? Those who know him best reveal all to Oliver Brown
‘Lewis never beat me,” reflects Niki Richardson, over a late-afternoon coffee in Basildon’s town square. “We had a few on-track scraps, but I often went past quite quickly.”
Accustomed as we have grown to the dominance of Lewis Hamilton, it is striking to discover how, back in those carefree karting days, Richardson was the one rival of whom he seldom had the measure. In the 25 years since they duelled as children, their paths could hardly have diverged more sharply. One has just become a six-time Formula One world champion, arriving in Brazil for this weekend’s penultimate grand prix of the season as lord of all he surveys, while the other makes his living as a driving instructor here in the heart of Essex.
A year ago, just after securing his fifth world title, Hamilton took his admiration for Richardson public: “As an eight-year-old, I looked up to Niki. He was so quick, I thought, ‘I’ve got to be better than him somehow’. My dad would stand where he was braking, move several metres down and tell me, ‘This is where you have to brake’.”
Watching from home, 5,500 miles away, Richardson was both staggered and touched by the name-check. He confirms, too, that the story is true.
“In 1992, Lewis came on to the scene at Rye House, our home track in Hertfordshire. He was causing a lot of problems. He was out-braking himself, spinning off, smashing into people. It was all rather dangerous. Anthony, his father, asked us lots of questions about our set-up. It was cheeky, in a way, as they were our rivals. But Lewis would study my braking zones, trying to work out why he was crashing so much. It is one of the reasons he is such a late braker now.”
Hamilton has likened his odd-one-out status in karting to a scene from Cool Runnings, the 1993 film about Jamaican bobsledders’ implausible appearance at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. Where he and his family would pitch up to races in a clapped-out Vauxhall Cavalier, with a box trailer on the back, a more established competitor such as Mike Conway, who later finished second in the Le Mans 24 Hours, was arriving in a £140,000 motorhome.
There was, to be sure, a Caribbean wildness in his blood. In Grenada, Hamilton’s paternal grandfather, Davidson, had acquired a reputation as the quickest man on two wheels, tearing along mountainous roads on his BSA motorbike, once reputedly completing the threemile journey from his home in Grand Roy to Gouyave, the nearest town, in five minutes.
As a racer restless to make an impression, the young Lewis showed similar heedlessness in the face of danger.
We are familiar by now with Hamilton’s vast body of work in F1: his 83 wins and 87 pole positions, his crushing of every challenger in the turbo-hybrid era and his supreme poise in the wet. Less well known is the fact that his first victory of any kind, at the bucolic Kimbolton circuit in
Cambridgeshire, came tinged with tragedy.
“It was 1994, and Lewis and I were close by then,” Richardson recalls. “We would go fishing, and I stayed over at his place in Stevenage a few times. He introduced me to peanut-butter sandwiches. He was a really relaxed lad.
“That day when he won, one of our friends, Daniel Spence, had a terrible accident. He overtook a backmarker, went the wrong side of him and shot up the back wheel. His feet were caught up with the pedals, so he got flung with the car, suffering a punctured lung. There were no paramedics on scene at the time, and he died soon after.
“I remember it vividly. Mum was telling me, ‘Congratulate Lewis’. I said, ‘No, I’ll make sure Daniel is OK first’. It was one of the worst days of my life, seeing my mate get killed in front of me. He was 10.”