PRIME TIME
Finally, Lewis Hamilton is enjoying himself and the bad news for his F1 opponents is that the much-criticised star says his best is yet to come...
AWHITE Mercedes Maybach glides past the gleaming buildings and over the small bridge and comes to a halt outside. Britain’s greatest-ever racing driver climbs out and strolls inside. He gets a coffee and comes to the office of Toto Wolff, Mercedes’ executive director, who is away on business. He takes off his trilby and shakes hands. When he sits on the sofa, his knees peep from his ripped trousers.
He talks unhurriedly and evenly. He thinks about his answers but is not defensive or guarded. The man who was once Formula One’s wonderkid is 31 years old and he has relaxed into the prime of life. He talks like a man who has embraced his maturity. He seems like a man at ease with himself.
He is criticised for the clothes he wears but he wears them well. He is criticised for travelling too much but he has won two world drivers’ titles in two years.
He is criticised for being a playboy, which makes him laugh. It makes many of us with longer memories laugh, too. We’re bored of automatons in sport, aren’t we? We want sportsmen who attack life with zest, don’t we? We yearn for the days when Graham Hill danced on the tables at Rosie’s Bar in Monte Carlo the night before he climbed into his car and won another Monaco Grand Prix.
He is criticised for his taste in music but why should he apologise for it? Why should he apologise for any of this when all he is doing after years of acceding to the protection of his father, Anthony, or to the mania for control of his former team, McLaren, is allowing himself to be the man he wants to be? The time for acting the way others wanted him to act has passed. The emancipation of Lewis Hamilton is complete.
Hamilton’s transformation from being a shy, bullied kid who struggled at school into a confident, selfpossessed man acknowledged by many as Britain’s greatest active sportsman is one of the most inspiring stories in modern sport.
Hamilton smiles when he thinks about it. His closest friends are still the friends he made at school. So when people say he has forgotten his roots, that is not true, either. Even when he dedicated his victory at the Canadian Grand Prix to the late Muhammad Ali earlier this month, he was thinking about the way he once was.
‘Ali was the greatest sportsman of all time in terms of the aura that he had and what he stood for and what he was,’ says Hamilton. ‘The way he would go in and say: “I’m going to whoop your ass” and then he would go in and do it, that was amazing. I always wanted to have that.
‘I was pushed around and bullied at school. For young kids, it’s like a plant blossoming: if you keep it in the shade, it doesn’t grow as much. I saw Ali and I always wanted to have that confidence. The time when I opened up and blossomed was delayed. I wasn’t going out with my friends on the weekends. I was karting.
‘I went to karate in order to defend myself when I was six because I was being bullied. It was great but I wasn’t confident enough to be able to defend myself until I was 13, 14 or 15 and I was a black belt.
‘Some people never fully blossom and come out of the little pocket they’ve created, the comfortable corner they’ve created.
‘What I’m doing now isn’t about having my youth. It’s being able to be me. Dress the way I want to dress and be who I want to be. From the moment I got into F1 with McLaren, there was an expectation: “Dress like this, this is how all the other drivers dress”. I said: “But this is who I am” and it was not accepted at the beginning but now I can say: “You have no choice”.
‘That’s really why I am in a more comfortable place now. I am comfortable in who I am and what I do and the life that I live and just because it’s different.’
Hamilton is not the same as the others. He refuses to conform and sometimes that makes people feel uncomfortable. Particularly in a sport like Formula One, where teams are big businesses used to exercising control over their drivers, over their look, what they say and do.
His success causes resentment, too. Hamilton’s three world titles put him level with Jackie Stewart as the most decorated British driver of all time. The fact that he has won 45 races, more than any one bar Michael Schumacher and Alain Prost, and that he has set 43 pole positions, more than anyone bar Schumacher and his great hero, Ayrton Senna, sets him apart.
Sometimes, it is said Hamilton holds himself apart from the other drivers. Sometimes, it is said he is aloof.
‘I’m not one of the boys in F1,’ he says. His only interest on grand prix weekends is to race and to win. ‘I don’t know how to yap to everyone,’ he says. ‘I am generally relatively quiet. I don’t start a conversation with someone for no reason.’
Hamilton is also out of step with some drivers on track safety. It is not that he is blasé about the dangers of the sport. Far from it. But he is old school. Part of the attraction for him is the danger.
‘That’s why it has excited me,’ adds Hamilton. ‘Of course, I don’t want to crash and get injured but that’s a part of it. In the drivers’ briefing, all these guys are talking about is the track being smooth. They want it to be smooth. They don’t want to feel any bumps. They want the biggest run-off areas. They are talking about the safety walls.
‘I do feel like I’m a little bit more old school. Safety is something we have to work on and F1 has got to a safe place, but in Baku last week they wanted to open up the pit lane entry and make it easier. They were saying: “It’s so fast and dangerous” and I thought: “It’s not dangerous”. It was tricky to navigate but that is how racing should be.
‘I like facing the danger and respecting it. It’s like sitting in front of a cobra and it’s going to bite you. If you sit close to it, the danger is it’s more likely it’s going to bite you. But if you sit by Toto’s desk, you can wave at it and do what you want. In F1 when I grew up, the cobra was up close and the way they are pushing it, it is going further away.’
It is his relationship with one driver, in particular, his Mercedes team-mate, Nico Rosberg, that always comes under the fiercest scrutiny. The two men fought out a bitter contest for the title last season and battle has been joined between them again this season. Rosberg opened up a commanding early lead but he is now only 24 points ahead with 13 races still to go.
The two men come from very different backgrounds. Rosberg is the son of former F1 world champion Keke Rosberg, who grew up in a life of advantage. Hamilton came from a broken home with a dad who had to work two jobs. There are signs that their rivalry is entering a new phase.
‘It’s actually really good with Nico at the moment,’ says Hamilton. ‘Really, really good. I would not have expected it to be where it is. The respect that we have talked about is bigger than it has ever been.
‘So, now we generally just discuss things. Whether we are unhappy about something or not, we discuss it face to face. If I have a problem, I knock on his door and ask if I can speak to him. We never address it in public or in front of the team. We say straight up: “Hey man, I wasn’t cool with that”. And he does that to me as often as I do to him.’
Hamilton talks about kids a lot. He talks about what he will try to say to his kids when he has children, the lessons he will try to impart, the life he will encourage them to lead. After the Canadian Grand Prix, he flew to visit the sister of his exgirlfriend, Nicole Scherzinger, and her young family.
‘Her kids are still like family to me,’ he says. ‘I will always be uncle Lewis. I feel like I can be a kid with them. I can act a fool and do stupid stuff and not care. I like that.’
Hamilton struggles with the idea of the advancing years. But he does know how he wants to feel when age finally creeps up on him.
‘I hope that I don’t look back and say these are the best years of my life because I hope the best years are still ahead of me,’ he says. ‘When I am old and grey, I want to be able to think: “What a life this has been”.’