Lewis Hamilton: My Story

CHAPTER

5

CLIMBING

‘There was a point where I asked myself, “Am I going to be able to do this?” I remember sitting with my dad in the car telling him that I wanted to stop…he just said, “Yeah, okay, we’ll just stop.” He didn’t really mean it, but I was doubting myself, not feeling that I was the man at all.’

I REMEMBER IT SO CLEARLY: me on the passenger seat of this old camper van and my dad driving, the two of us singing together: ‘We are the champions, we are the champions’…At the end, the song goes ‘of the world’ but we sang ‘of England’, or ‘of Britain’, or something like that. It was a great day. And it was just the start…

In the early karting years, when I was between eight and twelve years of age, it was all great fun – the travelling, the competitions, meeting different people in different places and just generally having good family time together – but it started to get pretty serious when I won my first British Cadet Kart Championship in 1995 at the age of ten.

The year before, I’d experienced the real dangers of motor racing for the first time. I remember it was early May and I was at Rye House. I had just finished a race and my dad, quietly, came over to me and said, ‘Lewis, Ayrton Senna’s just died…He’s had a terrible crash at Imola…’I remember how I did not want to show emotion in front of my dad because I thought he would have a go at me and so I walked round the back, where no one was looking, and I just cried. I really struggled the rest of that day. I could not stop imagining what had gone on. I was only nine years old. The man who inspired me was dead. He was a superhero, you know, and that was him…just gone.

In 1996 I won the McLaren Mercedes Cadet Champions of the Future Series and the Sky TV Masters title. After that, we moved up into Junior Yamaha in 1997. There was a lot of talk about which was the best standard and category to be in. We chose Junior Yamaha because we thought it was a better career path than Junior TKM, the rival series. People would say we were avoiding TKM because it had fiercer competition but we knew where we were headed and what we wanted to learn from our racing and it wasn’t to be found in Junior TKM, although it was also a great series.

That year I won both the McLaren Mercedes Junior Yamaha Champion of the Future series and the British Super One Junior Yamaha Kart Championship with a round to spare. That was also the year when I was invited, by Ron Dennis, to go to Belgium, to the Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps as part of the prize for winning the championship.

In 1998, I was invited to be a part of the McLaren Mercedes Young Driver Support Programme. This was a golden opportunity to be supported by a major Formula One team and car manufacturer. My dad was delighted. As I have said, we were not exactly rolling in cash and, although we were getting by, the McLaren contract certainly provided us with the financial comfort that all young budding racing drivers desired.

I also raced in Europe for the first time, helped by the recommendation of Martin Hines to the Italian Top Kart manufacturer and racing team. I had my first European race in Belgium and it was not a great race, but it was just good showing up. I impressed the people from Top Kart and we got another chance to race for them, in Italy. I did my first race in Parma and in the same race was this kid called Nico Rosberg, now a Formula One driver with Williams. I remember we had this awesome race where I was behind him, both of us miles in front of the other guys. I just sat on his tail the whole race, played it cool, and then on the last lap I overtook him on a straight and won the race. That was the day Nico’s father, Keke Rosberg, the 1982 Formula One World Champion, came up to me and said, ‘That was an awesome race, well done’ and that’s when my relationship with Nico started. From then on, we became best friends, hanging around with each other all the time throughout our teenage karting years.

A few months later we went to Hockenheim for the German Grand Prix. Keke, Nico and I sat down with Ron Dennis. He said to us, ‘I’m planning to put together a team. Are you two going to be able to stay friends if we have this team and you’re competing against each other?’ We said ‘Yes’ without hesitation and Keke created our own kart team called Team MBM. We never really found out what the MBM stood for but I assumed it meant Mercedes-Benz McLaren. We raced together in 2000 and had a fantastic year winning nearly every major race in our class. That was one of the most amazing years of my career: I won the European Championship and the World Cup in Japan. I especially remember one weekend, in the European Championship, at a place called Val d’Argenton in France, for very special reasons.

The week before, I had fallen off my bike and hurt my wrist. I tried to hide the swelling because I was really worried about what my dad would say but the pain was so bad I eventually had to tell him what had happened. My dad called Ron Dennis and asked for his help. Ron called the then Formula One doctor Professor Sid Watkins and a friend who put my wrist in a special cast. So, we travelled over to France and took part in the race weekend. I won my first two heats, then suddenly someone complained to the Clerk of the Course about my plaster cast. The next thing I knew, I was excluded from the event. Naturally, with the European Championship at stake, my dad pleaded with whoever would listen but eventually he contacted Ron to explain what had happened. Ron was actually at the Austrian Grand Prix but he spoke with a Senior Member of the FIA who intervened and I was reinstated. I missed one of my heats and therefore started lower on the grid for the first final but still managed to win both feature races, the second one ahead of Robert Kubica, who is now racing for BMW in Formula One.

I had a bad year in karts in 2001 when Nico and I thought we would move up to the final karting class – Formula Super A as it was then – and try to win the championship. It didn’t go well at all. We were developing our own chassis with Dino Cheisa our Team MBM manager and it was tough but it was something we wanted to do for Dino and his team. It was a good learning experience.

At the end of the year we went to single-seaters. McLaren arranged for me to have a test with Manor Motorsport in their Formula Renault car. It was always going to be tricky, never having been in a racing car before, and I crashed after about three laps, taking out the right rear corner of the car. It did not put them off too much though, and after they fixed the car I got straight back in and did okay. I started my first year of the British Formula Renault series in 2001 with Manor Motorsport. Moving on from my fantastic years in karting to single-seater racing was something I had been looking forward to for some time. I had my first race at Donington Park in November. I had qualified fifth. I remember all these cars shooting past me at the start. It was like I had never raced before – well, I hadn’t in cars. I couldn’t believe just how different it was in cars as opposed to karts. In karting I was a king, but now in single-seaters I was back to basics. It was so aggressive on that first lap it was unreal, and I was like, ‘Shoot, I’m going to have to pull my finger out!’ It was not like karting, where you could just roll around the paddock and have some fun, get in the kart and drive. You had to be there paying attention to all the data, working with the engineers and all that stuff.

In 2002 I had quite tough times through the Formula Renault days and there were moments when I would come home and my dad was on at me for one thing or another. I was having problems keeping up at school, I was struggling. Actually, there was a point where I asked myself, ‘Am I going to be able to do this?’ I remember sitting with my dad in the car, telling him that I wanted to stop. My dad is very emotional about my racing and, being peed off, he just said, ‘Yeah, okay, we’ll just stop.’ He didn’t really mean it, but I was doubting myself, not feeling that I was the man at all. But things changed: from that low point in my life I got myself together, won some races and then came third in my first full year of Formula Renault.

The next year, 2003, I had a slow start before something just clicked, and then I just blew everyone away. I won ten races out of fifteen that season. I came second in two of them and third in one and because I had won the championship, I did not have to race the last two races. It was such a great year with Manor Motorsport’s Formula Renault team that I decided I wanted to stay with Manor and move up into the British Formula Three series with them for a couple of end of season races. From the first time in the car I was quick and setting the pace but I had much to learn. Although my pace was good the races didn’t quite finish as I expected. I had a huge shunt at Brands Hatch where I had the misfortune of being involved in someone else’s accident but, that aside, I had a fantastic time.

For 2004, the team decided to move from the British Formula Three series to the Formula Three Euroseries with me as their driver. I did okay but it was the absolutely worst year of my racing career both because of the car and my relationship with the team. It was obviously difficult for the team as it was their first year in the championship and neither they nor I had ever raced on most of the European circuits before. It was a huge learning curve for us all, but I did feel that I was the one being blamed for poor results. It did cause quite a lot of tension between the team, me and my dad. In what I felt were very challenging circumstances, I won one race and finished fifth overall. This was a very frustrating period. Towards the end of that year, I had a really, really difficult time when we fell out of contract with McLaren. We were unhappy about the year we had just had and this was part of the reason that we had a disagreement over where I should race in 2005. I wanted to move on but McLaren recommended that I stay another year in Formula Three with Manor. This was not what I wanted. I had given it much thought over the previous few months and had also discussed it with my family and I eventually decided that I was prepared to give up my contract with McLaren rather than stay for another year. McLaren couldn’t see it at the time and told me to go away at the end of 2004 and analyse my next move.

I had been at Manor Motorsport for three years and thought it was a good time to move on. I wanted to go some where else and learn from other people. I thought I could do that in GP2. McLaren disagreed. So we came out of contract.

My last two races of 2004 were to be in Macau and Bahrain and, as I was now without McLaren, I had to find my own sponsorship money to get there. I was going through a tough time with everything in my life. The team I had always wanted to be a part of had cancelled my contract because of a disagreement about the next step in my career. My dad and I then set about finding sponsorship money. My girlfriend at the time, Jodia, said, ‘Hey, my dad owns this company in Hong Kong, and he would love to sponsor you.’ I told her there was no way I wanted her to do that, but she went and sorted it out anyway. Basically, Jo’s dad paid for my racing in Macau. It was a last attempt for me to make an impression in the world of Formula Three. So I went to Macau and won the first race with Jo’s dad’s company livery on my car but unfortunately crashed out on the second lap of the main race having started from pole position. It was one of the most disappointing races of my life. I thought the whole world had folded in on me and that was it – the end.

My dad was devastated because here we were with no McLaren Mercedes-Benz contract, no money, and no takers. The following weekend we were in Bahrain for the Formula Three Superprix, which was the last race of the year for Formula Three. The Manor Motorsport team actually funded this race which was much appreciated and pretty incredible considering the tough year we’d had until then and I remain grateful to all the guys at Manor Motorsport. In qualifying, I made a huge mistake. I ended up twenty-second on the grid after damaging my rear floor on the kerb. It was a really low point. My dad was unhappy that I had possibly just blown a great opportunity to shine after the disappointment of Macau. We were both devastated but my dad in particular because as usual he felt responsible for everything, the loss of McLaren, the situation we were in, and he was worried about where he would find the money to keep my career going and to fund the following year’s racing. He was so depressed and worried that he booked an early flight home so that he could make better use of his time making calls and focusing on getting help. I know he was really feeling the pressure because I had no sponsor and at that stage not enough good performances to attract new ones. Before he left, he made sure I knew all about it, leaving me to kick myself for the rest of that day and all night.

I woke up in the morning with a fresh head and feeling more determined than ever. For the Sunday race, my dad had the team stick his company name on the side of the car. The company was called Hedge-Connect. Hedge-Connect was a disaster recovery business and it was incredibly appropriate as I eventually found out. I started the first race twenty-second on the grid and finished eleventh. In the second and main race, I started eleventh and finished first. I couldn’t believe it – from nothing I had triumphed. It was awesome. Afterwards, I called my dad and he was stunned. No one could believe it – I had come from twenty-second in the first race to win in the main race. The racing magazines called it my ‘Bahrain Transplant’ and a transplant it certainly was. From a bad weekend in Macau to winning unexpectedly in Bahrain, everything had changed instantly, as it can do in motor racing. In karting, I had won from the back many times, but to do it in a single-seater…it just does not happen. I stayed in Bahrain that night with my team and it was great. The next thing I knew, Martin Whitmarsh from McLaren came on the phone to congratulate me and said, ‘We’ll discuss where we can go from here.’ That was typical of Martin and Ron, they were always there somewhere in the background keeping an eye on me. They really cared and wanted to help but also wanted us to learn the hard way.

Throughout my time supported by McLaren Mercedes, a lot of people, and not only some of my competitors, disliked me for the fact that I had this McLaren contract at such a young age. Some people wanted what I had and thought it was easy for me because my racing was fully funded. But keeping a sponsor like McLaren, the biggest company in Formula One, was not exactly easy. Imagine having Ron Dennis call you, having that pressure…I knew if I had any problems at school or if I did not keep performing, I would lose the opportunity. Everyone said I would be nothing without McLaren – but I did not have McLaren for those two weeks in Asia. In fact, I did not have McLaren for the first five years of my racing career but I had still won championships. After a difficult weekend in Macau, I then went out to Bahrain and proved I could win even when times were bad. I had turned things round as I had to and it was a most pleasurable feeling. I do not think for one moment that coming out of contract was just a bluff; at the time I really thought I had lost McLaren.

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