Lewis Hamilton: My Story
That is why religion is not an issue for me – any more than race is an issue. I am Roman Catholic; I was baptized when I was two and for a lot of my life I always thought there was something there. Sometimes, if I was in trouble I would pray, but I was never hardcore into it – but then neither was the family, although we all believe. I have always felt very much that I have been gifted and very much blessed – I have a great family, a talent which many people don’t either get to discover or experience, and I really do feel like there is a higher power and that He has given me something. Whether it is to send a message out, or to use, or just to have fun, I do not know. I think everyone has got talent and gifts, but not everyone discovers them, and people can occasionally be misled. I am fortunate that I have not been. I feel everyone is put here for a purpose and all the individuals that do discover things in their life are able to make a change and make a difference.
Some people think race, or skin colour, is an issue; some think religion is. Putting it simply, I do not like to see anyone treated badly. I do not like people who do not behave well, who are not polite or who do not show respect when they should. I guess it comes from my own younger days when I had to do things and I didn’t find it easy. I had a bad time at school because there were some bullies around who were probably jealous of me going karting at weekends; either that or they just didn’t like me. I tried to deal with that by defending myself, so I learned karate. That is my way of sorting out my problems. I try not to get entangled, I prefer to rise above them, but sometimes you need to be able to stand your ground, don’t you? I believe in doing things right and doing them properly.
I had a lot of other experiences when I was young, some good, some bad, but from each of them I learned something. In 1997, when I was thirteen, I went to my first Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium. My dad and I were having a great day as guests of McLaren Mercedes. I remember walking around with my dad and we saw Eddie Irvine and decided to go and ask him for his autograph. I stood there in admiration of him, waiting for him to sign my book, but he looked at me and just walked on. It may well have been that Eddie was incredibly busy and did not have the time to be distracted or that he was just having a bad day. There are numerous reasons why this episode could have happened. At my age at that time, however, I didn’t think of any of that but know what it’s like now. I have never forgotten how that made me feel.
Someone else showed me how different it can be. That was David Coulthard. I also met him at Spa. I was standing at the front of the McLaren garage when David came in and walked straight past me and my dad. I called out, ‘Alright, David?’ and he turned round and, two seconds later, he said, ‘Alright, Lewis?’ He knew me…what a feeling that was! He had come to see me karting and he remembered me. I really appreciated it. So, always, I have huge respect for David. He is a real gent and he taught me something good – that it costs nothing to say ‘Hello’.
I can say now that these two experiences certainly made me determined that if, or when, I reached the top and anyone ever asked me for an autograph, or a piece of my time, I will try to give them my time with good grace and respect. That is why I work hard to look after my many fans. I appreciate that’s not always going to be easy or possible, but that’s what I aim to achieve.
Actually, it was not until Formula Three that I realized that I had fans, people that admired me for what I did. When they wanted to come over and talk to me, it was just a pleasure for me. All of them were polite to me, and I was no one as far as I was concerned, but they were always there supporting me. I was not used to that, but I learned from it. I have got some great fans all over the world, including those who come all the way from Japan, just for a weekend, to watch me race! I always try to make time for them because from past experiences I know how important it is to make time for others.
When I got to GP2, I noticed that my time was getting more precious – but I made sure I had enough of it to go around and say thank you to everyone. When I reached Formula One, it got more and more difficult, but I knew to expect this, so when I went to my first Grand Prix, in Australia, I said to myself that I must make time for the fans. I worked out that if I planned to get to the track at eight, and that I had a meeting starting at half past eight, then there was not enough time, in that half an hour, to start signing autographs. So I said to myself, ‘I’ll get there at 7.30 and use that extra time to sign autographs.’ What a great feeling it was to make others happy; that’s a bit more energy in my energy bank. But I remember one day at Albert Park when I was just trying to juggle all the different events that were going on – I had a tyres briefing, an engineering meeting, and several other meetings and then I had to rush back to the hotel to do a HUGO BOSS and a Mercedes-Benz event, or something – and I was panicking. It all got to me. I didn’t know how to judge it. I didn’t have time to do autographs at the exit gate, where everyone was waiting outside the paddock, and I just walked on, and I kept walking. It was not a good feeling ignoring the fans, doing the one thing I promised I would never do. That was one of the single most distressing experiences I have ever had and it played on my mind all night.
So, next day, I made sure that I got a load of photos and posters and I signed about a hundred posters or more. I put ‘Sorry’ or ‘Thank you’ or something like that on them, and then the following day I went in early and signed a load of autographs as well and gave each person a poster. It felt good – I got all my energy back. A lot of fans who get the opportunity to come up close are sometimes physically shaking with nerves and I remember feeling it was incredible that I could make anyone feel that way. I’m only human. I’m not this big superstar that you see on TV. I am nothing special. I might be a Formula One racing driver, but that does not make me any different. As far as I am concerned we are all on the same level. I want to take time out of my schedule to sign an autograph if it is going to make someone’s day. Making people happy is what makes me happy.
I do not believe in doing anything wrong to succeed. Never. In my family we are all competitive and nobody likes to lose. I would say my dad’s the worst. He taught me how to win and lose but even he would admit that losing is not a nice experience to deal with – it does make your desire to succeed even stronger, though I can see how difficult he finds it sometimes. It shows in his face, of course, even after a game of pool at home. And I can see it sometimes after races. We are alike, too, in that we stick to the same way of doing things. As I said earlier, we believe in the basics – honesty, loyalty and trust – and that is why we all found the politics in Formula One this year so hard to handle. As I said at the time, politics sucks. Everyone knows about the controversy with Ferrari and, well, the last thing any of us wanted was to be landed in something like that in the middle of my rookie season.
I suppose it is to do with honesty that I want to do things properly…in an open way. I compete to win, but I always do my best and try to do things the right way. Maybe I am sometimes very highly charged and very determined, but I would never ever cheat to win. Never at all. That is why we all felt so much emotion when there were so many allegations being made against the team, against Vodafone McLaren Mercedes, this year. It was wrong. I never once believed any of the rumours or stories and I had complete belief in Ron Dennis and the team and the values they stand by.
In my own way, the only thing to do was to rise above it all, concentrate on the racing, continue to do my best and, most important of all, keep a smile on my face which, with everything kicking off, had been difficult. All my lessons in life, my dad’s and my family’s advice and encouragement and examples of how to live and how to behave, have stood me in good stead. When you have been through some of the stuff I went through as a kid, and when you have seen life through a really normal pair of eyes in Stevenage, in London, in Grenada and other places – all of that on top of my racing career gave me the right kind of grounding to cope with it. So I just did my thing.
Being able to control yourself, redeem yourself, is important. When I play computer games with Nic I always try my best to beat him. I never let him win. I never let anyone win at anything, at home or anywhere. I am always the same. I am just that competitive. I have to win at everything, but I would never cheat. I just love knowing that I won fair and square or that I tried my best.
Mental strength is so important. On the surface, it may look like I am pretty cool most of the time, but underneath I am a very emotional person. That is why these things matter. I love being at home with my family and the equilibrium that gives me. We are all emotional people in my family – that is part of our nature – but in this business, in Formula One, you have to be a bit cold and a bit selfish. I suppose we are all a bit selfish in our own lives and that comes out sometimes in all of us. But I find I can balance it all if I am around my family.
Racing takes up most of my weekends, so any weekends I do have off are so important and valuable to me, and, going back to square one, returning to my own home and occasionally going to my parents’ house, the power station – that is important, too. It is where I do all my mental preparation and feel good. My strength is in the family, wherever we all are, as long as we are together.
There are loads of places where you can get mental strength and energy, but again there are loads of places you can lose energy! For me, the problems are energy-wasters. And it is my dad’s job to make sure that he helps me with that – he absorbs all of the negative energy when it happens. It is too easy to be sucked into things and just find you are drained by it all.
This whole thing about changing negative energy into positive energy is not rocket science. It is just about trying to look on the positive side and turn this or that mistake, or whatever, into something positive. I cannot do it with everything. Sometimes it is just too big to put through my small generator. So, that is when my dad absorbs it; or I put it onto someone else – I might call my mum, or a best friend, telling him about the problem – and then it’s their problem! As long as I keep the same set of principles, I will be fine.
I have been racing since I was eight years old and I have learned what works for me. I always try to remember to appreciate the opportunity I’ve been given and I always give 100 per cent. I always say, ‘Keep your family as close as possible.’ These are the things I believe in and they have done me well.
In my career, it is the same. McLaren and Mercedes-Benz have been incredibly loyal to us and, hopefully, we will be loyal to them and I’ll see out most of my career with them. For me, loyalty matters. In terms of friendship, it means being someone others can trust. And that works both ways. I am the sort of person who tells it all and can be quite blunt. Sometimes I do not realize that I may have affected someone, for worse or better, but it is just me being honest.
I know I am a lucky person. I have a good life, I have been given a talent and I have enjoyed myself very much, for most of the time, in my twenty-two years. It is never easy though. No way. Not for me, not for my dad and not for my family. We have had some extremely hard times and some extremely good times. But – and I think this is the most important thing – we have learned from them all.
CHAPTER
3
CONFIDENCE
‘My racing career may not have started properly until I was eight, but it had in fact been part of my life much earlier. As a teenager, sadly my enthusiasm was not shared by all and my career nearly ended before it had started because of a case of mistaken identity by my school.’
MY START IN LIFE WAS PRETTY NORMAL. I was born at the Lister Hospital in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, on 7 January 1985. I was named Lewis Carl Davidson Hamilton. My dad’s middle name is Carl and Nic also has Carl as a middle name. The name Lewis was just a name that my parents liked at the time. The name Davidson is taken from my granddad.
Stevenage was one of the ‘new towns’ built after the Second World War and is a typical commuter town with both local and international business facilities and good rail and road links to London, in the south, and to the north of England. Thousands of people travel from Stevenage to London and back every day on the train and my dad was one of them. He worked for British Rail while my mum worked in the local council offices. My mum and dad lived in a council house in Peartree Way, on the Shephall Estate, in Stevenage. My mum had two daughters Samantha and Nicola – from a previous relationship before she met my dad. Sammy and Nicky were about two and three when my dad came into their lives. It was not a luxurious or a privileged neighbourhood, but it was also not as bad as some.
My first school was just down the end of our road, the Peartree Spring Nursery School. My second primary school, Peartree Infant and Junior School, was a five-minute walk around the corner. For my secondary school I chose the John Henry Newman School, a Roman Catholic secondary, before completing my education at the Cambridge Arts and Sciences College. I have to say it was not as straightforward as it sounds, and there were a few ups and downs along the way. My interest in karting and motor racing, which took me away a lot at weekends as I grew older, did not always fit in with the strict thinking of some people. At school, I used to keep my interest in racing to myself.
My racing career may not have started properly until I was eight, but it had in fact been part of my life much earlier. As a teenager, sadly my enthusiasm was not shared by all and my career nearly ended before it had started because of a case of mistaken identity by my school.
To this day, I find it difficult to talk about this because it nearly destroyed my faith in the education system. But I think it’s important to set the record straight on a few things in my life that have been reported inaccurately in the last year or so. I wish it could be forgotten forever but some things just need to be said.
It was 2001, I was sixteen and a few important months away from sitting my GCSEs at John Henry Newman School. In January of that year there was a serious incident at the school involving a pupil who was attacked in the school toilets by a gang of about six boys. I was accused of kicking the pupil. This was not true. I, like many others, had been hanging around waiting for the next lesson to start and had entered the toilets around the time that the attack was taking place. I was not involved in the attack but knew the boys involved.
The headteacher thought differently and wrote a letter to my parents advising them that I was excluded from school along with six other pupils and stating the reasons why. I couldn’t believe it. I was so upset. I didn’t know how I was going to explain it to my parents. I walked around in a daze, not really knowing where I was going for a while, I even considered running away and then eventually I went home. When I gave the letter to my dad and step-mum Linda they were obviously extremely disappointed and really mad – not so much with me but with the headteacher – although I remember my dad said to me, ‘Congratulations, you’ve done something that I never managed to do!’ I knew that I had done nothing wrong so this made it all the worse.
We decided to go back to the school. I went with Linda and my mum to speak to the headteacher. When they arrived at the school, the headteacher was not sympathetic to anything they said to him and he maintained that I had kicked the pupil and that I was correctly excluded. I knew I was innocent but he did not appear to be interested. Subsequent letters to the local education authority, our local MP, the Education Secretary and even the Prime Minister, were of no help. No one appeared to listen – no one either wanted to or had the time. We were on our own and I was out of school.
I found it very frustrating and upsetting, with everyone seemingly against me except my family, some true friends, and McLaren and Mercedes-Benz. I could not understand how I found myself in such an awful situation.
We launched an appeal to the Governors’ Discipline Committee of the school, but the appeal failed. We then appealed to the Local Education Authority where the matter was considered by the Exclusion Appeal Panel.
From the very beginning I told my dad that I was innocent and he did everything he could to prove this. It was just typical of my dad: when something is wrong he will go to the ends of the earth to find out the truth.
Anyway, it took weeks to resolve (although it seemed so much longer at the time) with documents going backwards and forwards. I was still out of school and having private tuition paid for by my family until our appeal could be heard. My dad had gone through the evidence and meticulously studied all the documents and witness statements and he thought he had a pretty good case prepared.
At the hearing, the Exclusion Appeal Panel concluded (after a thorough investigation including hearing oral evidence from witnesses) that my appeal should be upheld and that I should be fully reinstated to school. The panel concluded that I was not guilty of kicking the pupil. They also found that in fact there had been a serious case of mistaken identity, or, as they put it, ‘unfortunate confusion’ with another pupil who was said to be one of the individuals involved.
While the matter should have been resolved at that stage (the beginning of April 2001), the battle was not over as the school refused to reinstate me back to my class. It was the same for some other pupils who had successfully appealed. Instead, I was offered segregated tuition. All this was going on just before I took my GCSEs, so it was really bad timing. My dad arranged for alternative private tuition and exams. In the end I sat the GCSEs in different locations. It was not ideal as I had missed crucial weeks of education but I did my best given the circumstances. Some exams I sat back at the school, but they wouldn’t let me go back to my class so I had to sit on my own. The rest I sat at other local schools.
I didn’t enjoy school that much anyway before the incident, except for my friends and the sports, of course, but when this happened I thought that everything I had worked for was going down the drain. I was worried, too, that I would lose my racing career and opportunity with McLaren because Ron Dennis, just like my dad, had always told me, ‘Lewis, you’ve got to work hard at school.’ Well, I wasn’t the perfect student, but I did the best I could and did what I had to in order to get by.
Following this bad experience, and the unnecessary stresses and strains brought upon my whole family, my dad decided it was time that we moved away from Stevenage. We relocated fifteen minutes away to a lovely quiet village where no one knew us at the time. When I look back, I think what a shame it was that the end of my Stevenage school years was spoiled for me. Although the Local Education Authority has admitted it was all a mistake, neither I nor my family have received an apology, private or public. It is much too late for me now but it would be good for me to know that something like this could never happen to another pupil. One thing is for sure: without my dad’s attention to detail I would have been lost. It has given me a completely different perspective on school life.
After that I was glad to eventually leave John Henry Newman School. I moved to the Cambridge Arts and Sciences College. CATS, as it is known, was a fantastic place. The teachers were professional and the pupils too. I got the train most times until I passed my driving test and then I would drive there. It was a really good experience. I had the opportunity to stay at the College, but I did not want to share dorms with people who I did not even know and I thought I would miss my family. To be honest, looking back now, I should have boarded because it would have been good to live on my own and to spend time with people of my own age who were not from the motor racing world.
There were people of all backgrounds: wealthy kids and not-so-wealthy ones. It was a real mixed bunch. It was a pleasurable experience for me. The staff were really nice: they spoke to you on the level and not as if they were above you. I also felt more fulfilled and began to value myself differently. I was happier. I liked design, technology and music, but my dad wasn’t keen on me taking music and recommended that I do business studies. He thought that it would be more useful and relevant in motor racing and that it would give me a better chance at a decent job should I ever need it to fall back on.
I didn’t think business studies was right for me – which is probably the reason I didn’t do so well in the exam. I was not even slightly interested and if you’re forced to do something you don’t like, you’re not going to do as well in it. I was into music. I played the guitar and I also wanted to learn the drums. I always wanted to be like Phil Collins – he can play everything: guitar, drums, piano, bass guitar…Music was something I enjoyed and wanted to do at college, but in the end I listened to my dad. I still didn’t like business studies and, for that matter, some other subjects as well.
But I really enjoyed CATS and the city of Cambridge itself. Before I went there, I just thought, ‘I’m going to be a bum!’ I never said to myself, ‘I’m going to be a professional racing driver’ or anything like that. It did not cross my mind. Once I went to college, I realized that I could enjoy more things and I bucked up my ideas a lot. I felt like I really wanted to do well. Something clicked for me. It was a much smaller class and I got on well with my teachers. Bar a couple of really smart girls and maybe one smart lad, I was one of the top students in my class. I was even learning and understanding my science studies! But I am the kind of person who wants to be able to do everything. Aside from music, I particularly wanted to do French. It turned out to be my best subject. I almost aced French.
I spent some of my teenage years kart racing in France and Italy and so found it relatively easy to speak French with a French accent and Italian with an Italian accent. I speak more confidently in Italian than in French, I don’t know why. But when I go to France it all comes back to me. I want to be able to really speak it fluently, although I can’t comprehend it well. I don’t know how anyone can! How can they store all that information? Then again, I don’t really speak good enough English, let alone another language…
It got tough for me as time went by, though. My college days were Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and I had to work hard to catch up on the work I missed, because the Formula Renault single-seater testing always took place on the same days. So I took extra lessons, just as I had done when I was at secondary school when we had a tutor to help me. I had to get there an hour earlier or work later. I worked some really long days to make sure I caught up. It was the first time in my life in my academic work that I actually thought to myself, ‘I can do this and I can do well in exams.’
When I went to CATS, they were willing to give me time. They were totally open to my racing. They didn’t even ask about it. They were just…‘This is what you have to do, if that’s what you want to do then go and do it…’ They never said, ‘Oh, Lewis, you shouldn’t be taking this time off.’ They never questioned it. Instead it was, ‘Well, how can we work around it?’ And that’s why it was so good. They worked with me.
In fairness there were also some good memories from my Stevenage schooldays. I was reminded of them when Ashley Young, now a very successful professional footballer, was picked to play for England. We were in the same year and we used to play together in the school football team. From what I remember of Ashley, he was a very good football player and a nice guy.