here is no better story in sport than a rookie who wins big. And Lewis Hamilton is winning bigger than any rookie in Formula One history. His task this season seemed enormous – to make his debut in the same team as the reigning world champion Fernando Alonso, the Spanish driver who beat Michael Schumacher to two world titles.
Speaking a few months before the season began in Melbourne in March, the 22-year-old Hamilton’s expectations were, therefore, sensibly realistic. “Having the strongest teammate is such a big positive,” he said, “because there’s so much you can learn from them and the more experienced they are, the more you’ll learn. He [Alonso] is the toughest driver in F1 at the moment so it will be an extremely tough challenge but I’m looking forward to it.
I love to make it hard for myself.” Instead, he has made it all look rather easy. Top-three finishes in all eight of his races to date, including two wins in the US and Canadian grands prix, mean Hamilton leads the world championship by 14 points ahead of tomorrow’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone.
Remarkably, the first-year driver has at times looked the most complete racer in the field. His victory at Montreal last month was a tour de force. In a remarkably complicated race – there were four safety car interventions due to drivers hitting the walls – Hamilton held his nerve, made no mistakes and steered through to a dominant victory, while Alonso trailed in seventh.
So far Hamilton has not only taken on his illustrious McLaren teammate, he has beaten him fair and square. The result is the best inter-team battle the sport has seen since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost were also with McLaren. That relationship was based on deep enmity, though, and while the tabloid media in Spain and Britain has done its best to portray the Alonso/Hamilton relationship in similar terms, the reality is that they have much in common and their relationship is amicable, albeit tinged with the awkwardness that comes from wanting to beat the other guy.
“We are both fighters,” says Hamilton. “Our relationship is growing. He is so relaxed, so easy to talk to.
He is very professional. We both want to win, simple as that. We have a lot of respect for each other.
“But it’s never a nice feeling if you are racing your teammate. You want to beat him but to be racing him into the first corner is not the best thing – you don’t want to make silly mistakes. It’s not a problem if it is a Ferrari because you want to beat them and so you do whatever it takes.
But with your teammate, you have to be a bit cautious.” However the rivalry develops during the second half of the season, Hamilton’s unprecedented achievement prompts a simple question: how is it possible for a rookie to do this? He has huge talent and a steely nerve but these are not unique in motorsport.
What is unprecedented is the level of preparation he has been given by McLaren. He has spent 1,000 hours on its driving simulator, which has perfect representations of every grand prix track. He has been given tutorials in how a grand prix weekend unfolds.
But even before that, McLaren’s management team of Ron Dennis and Martin Whitmarsh oversaw his development from a 13-year-old kart racer through to F1, a massive investment of time and money. The four-time world champion and former McLaren driver Alain Prost explains: “Ron Dennis fell in love with him,” he says. “To the point where everyone thought he was his nephew.
He has helped him, advised him and, above all, financed him, without knowing that he would get to this level.” The result is that Hamilton has been prepared to perfection for the challenges of F1. He is a driver of supreme self-confidence and technical ability who fears no one.
He is also a marketeer’s dream – young, handsome and extremely marketing savvy. He is consulted by TAG Heuer, a long-time McLaren partner, on its range and marketing ideas. Abbey is using him to publicise its takeover by Santander, another McLaren partner, while Vodafone, McLaren’s title sponsor, has based its whole “Make the Most of Now” campaign on the story of Hamilton’s pursuit of his F1 dream.
The first black driver in F1, he will create huge opportunities and bring in new companies to the sport. Financial experts believe he will earn in excess of £200m from the sport. But the marketing is an associated benefit of Hamilton’s accession to F1, it is his talent and racing potential that got him there in the first place.
Entrusted by McLaren to the ASM team of Frenchman Frédéric Vasseur and Nicholas Todt, Hamilton dominated the European F3 championship in 2005 and did the same last year in GP2, the final feeder category for F1. Vasseur has played a key role in preparing Hamilton for F1. “McLaren were very confident in him.
But when Lewis was with me in F3, they never told him that in three years he will be in F1,” says Vasseur. “They just focused on the next event and encouraged him to work hard to improve rather than dream, like 90 per cent of guys in F3, about being an F1 driver one day. McLaren has had a good attitude with him.
They put the pressure on him because you have to win but they never allowed him to think about F1.” McLaren’s physician, Aki Hintsa, was given the task of preparing Hamilton physically and mentally. Hintsa, who has worked with Olympic athletes, including Ethiopian long-distance runner Haile Gebrselassie, believes Hamilton “has the potential to be a great athlete, regardless of what sport he competes in”.
Vasseur also singles out Hamilton’s mental strength and determination. “His determination is at the basis of everything. If he has to spend two hours on something, then move on to the next thing, he can engage with it 100 per cent but then afterwards knows how to relax and enjoy himself.
He still comes to eat here, for example, with us in the F3 paddock. He spent three hours here on the Friday night of the French GP weekend among us. He has the ability to put barriers between different aspects of his life.
When something goes wrong, he tries to solve it rather than complain about it.” This picture of a grounded and determined individual has its origins in Hamilton’s family life. His grandparents moved to Britain from Grenada in the 1950s and his father Anthony worked on the railways.
His parents divorced when he was two and Hamilton lived with his mother Carmen until he was 10. The family is based in the village of Tewin, near Stevenage, Hertfordshire. His father remarried and Hamilton has a half-brother, Nicholas, who has cerebral palsy and with whom he is very close.
As a boy, Hamilton began racing radio-controlled cars and appeared on aged six to demonstrate them. That same year, his father put him in a go-kart on a family holiday in Spain. “There was this really, really small track with three corners,” Hamilton says.
“It was so, so short it was incredible, but I loved it. I just had this feeling getting the car back up to power and everything, that it just felt natural.” Anthony took on extra jobs to pay for his son’s racing until McLaren agreed to fund the youngster after he impressed Ron Dennis at an awards dinner.
Hamilton says of his father: “From where he grew up [and] having a child at such a young age, it would have been easy for him to pack up and leave [after the divorce]. That’s what happened to the parents of most of my close friends . .
. Most people from our area were broke and they didn’t want the responsibility. He was a real man and stuck by us.
” Hamilton’s relationship with Nicholas, now 15, is also significant. It appears to be a constant reminder for him not to take his gift for granted. “When you have a natural ability, you have to nurture it,” he says.
“I look up to him even though I’m the older one. He’s quite inspirational because he’s got a lot of problems but he’s always got a smile on his face, he’s always positive and I’ve learnt a lot from him. As you know, disabled people are looked down upon the majority of time.
But at least now I can look after him if anything were to happen.” Another big challenge for Hamilton will be how he deals with the attention and fame his new-found success has generated. In four months, he has gone from being virtually unknown to becoming one of the most recognised faces in the world.
Will the real Lewis Hamilton be overwhelmed by the global media personality he has become? “My life has totally flipped upside down and I’m on a different planet,” he says. “All this popularity is something new to me.
I’ve had lots of letters from kids who say that they want to be a driver like me. When I’m away from the track, I try to just live my normal life, playing golf with my dad and playing video games with my brother. “I just get into the car and do my job and that’s that,” he continues.
“Being away from your family, not seeing your friends, doing media and marketing appearances, it all builds up more and more. It is extremely tiring but the key is to make sure that you are prepared well enough mentally and physically and I don’t have any problems with it.” Hamilton’s “normal life” may be quickly disappearing but it is clear he is enjoying the experience.
“There are millions of people who want to be in F1,” concludes Frédéric Vasseur, “and yet a lot of F1 drivers don’t smile. Lewis is different.” At the moment, that appears to be something of an understatement.
James Allen is the FT’s Formula One correspondent and ITV Sport’s lead F1 commentator Who will call Bernie Ecclestone’s bluff over the future of Silverstone? Will it be Robert Brooks, the suave new chairman of the British Racing Drivers Club, which owns the Silverstone racing circuit? Or maybe Gordon Brown will feel moved to tell Ecclestone, ringmaster of the Formula One circus, to take a running jump over his call for the UK government to stump up £25m for circuit improvements in order to keep a British Grand Prix on the F1 calendar?
Because, ultimately, Ecclestone wouldn’t really dump the British Grand Prix, would he? Not when Britain has been the spiritual and practical home of F1 since Big Ben was a wristwatch, with most teams still based in the UK. The problem for Silverstone, however, and those governments around the world busily financing grandiose new circuits, is that in any F1 poker game, Ecclestone holds all the cards.
For him and CVC Capital, the private equity group that now owns F1’s commercial rights but has left Ecclestone firmly in charge as chief executive, there is only financial gain to be made by dumping Silverstone when its contract to stage the race expires with the wave of the chequered flag at next year’s grand prix. New, government- funded circuits built or planned in the Middle East and elsewhere in the developing world are willing to pay two or three times the amount the BRDC has been handing to Ecclestone for the privilege of staging a race. And, in comparison with the developing world’s circuits, Silverstone, which held its first event in 1948, does look jaded and faded.
The Abu Dhabi grand prix complex is expected to provide potentially the most spectacular facilities of all F1 venues. The circuit will form part of a vast business, recreation and residential development, costing up to $40bn, on one of the largest islands that make up Abu Dhabi. The circuit complex and track will also have a theme park devoted to Ferrari and include a hotel, theatre and rollercoasters as well as driving activities.
Silverstone is not alone in having its arm twisted. Ecclestone has just warned organisers of the Australian Grand Prix that their event may be struck from the calendar unless they agree to a night race so that the big European TV audience can watch it live. Tony George, chief executive of Indianapolis Speedway, has similarly been told that even a US Grand Prix is “not vital” during negotiations on the terms of a new contract.
These developments coincide with the announcements that India, Russia and South Korea are also in line to host races. The fact that many of the new, government-funded circuits are struggling for live spectators is not seen as a concern. It is the size of the global TV audience that matters.
here is no better story in sport than a rookie who wins big.
News RSS