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‘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.
I really liked playing football. I started in midfield and I would go into a tackle and go in so hard that I risked breaking my leg. I did not deliberately foul people, or go in with studs showing or anything like that, but I would give it a real sliding tackle and if I got the ball I would go charging off and do the best job I could with it. My problem was that I always kept my head down. I was always looking at the ball instead of where I was going and so would end up being tackled or run into another player. I always thought I did twice the amount of work of any other player on the field but for half the result! But I knew, at least, that I did the best job I could.
In general, I liked competitive sports – I didn’t want to read about the rules or go and watch it; I just wanted to do it because it was good fun – but motor racing was different. I read, studied and knew all the rules.
I was relatively good at most sports: I played for the cricket team, the basketball team, the footy team. I was on the athletics team and I did javelin, discus and the 800 metres and won the occasional event on school sports days.
Nic also loves competitive sports but is unable to compete in most. Still, he tries and he tries and he never gets down or depressed about things. If he fell over, he would get straight back up and get on with it even if he was in pain. He made such a big impact on me and on the way I think about things. Nic is blessed in so many ways.
Even now, I am sometimes quite hard on Nic about small things, I just want to help him learn and not to take anything for granted. Most importantly, I want him to do well, even better than me, in his education and exams and so I keep on top of him about this. He always tells me I am the best and he never really talks to me about my driving. He is so sensible.
CHAPTER (#u07a38290-86b7-5a08-a7fb-998b8303b195)
4 (#u07a38290-86b7-5a08-a7fb-998b8303b195)
STARTING OUT (#u07a38290-86b7-5a08-a7fb-998b8303b195)
‘My dad would always stand on the inside of the circuit at the hairpin. He watched to see where the best drivers were braking…“You’ve got to brake here, at least a metre later than the other competitors.”’
MY DAD HAS ALWAYS BEEN MY MANAGER and my adviser. I remember years ago, when I was about twelve, in Junior Yamaha and at a race track giving an interview. I said, ‘My dad gives me advice on what to do on the track, but I don’t listen to it because he doesn’t know what it’s like out there.’
I regret saying that because it’s not true. I remember I was angry at the time because things were not going so well. Dad’s got a much wiser head on his shoulders than me so he knows a lot of the stuff he says is true. He’s always right. It got to the point where I took bits out of what he was saying and then added my own bit – what I thought should be right. I think that’s why we work well as a team. We gel together.
At a young age, he was very hard on me and now that I am older and a little bit wiser I fully understand and appreciate why. I can probably guarantee that he was harder on me than any other driver’s father was on his son. I don’t just mean in life at the track – I mean in life generally. He brought me up to appreciate people and to appreciate general values: you know, be polite and always say thank you, always have a smile on your face, do not be rude – all those things. If I made a mistake in that sort of area, where I wasn’t polite, I was made aware of it. I’m easy to get on with. I’m just as normal as any other driver, or any other person. When I started karting, my dad did a kind of deal with me. He said that he would support me going racing, but only if I worked harder at school. I remember my dad had to work three jobs just to make ends meet and to keep his end of the bargain. During the day he worked for British Rail – as it was back then – as a computer manager, having risen through the ranks over 14 years from an admin clerk. When he arrived back home he would go straight out again and erect ‘For Sale’ sign boards in his suit for a local estate agent. I think he only used to get 50 pence a board but it all helped and every penny counted. In any other spare time, my dad used to knock on doors trying to book double-glazing appointments for his friend Terry Holland’s business. It was not a job he enjoyed but he still did it.
The first time I sat in a go-kart was when we all went on holiday to Ibiza. It was in August 1988, and I was three years old. I had not really been anywhere abroad before then for a summer holiday, so I remember it pretty well. Both my dad and Linda were working for British Rail and they were located at King’s Cross. I remember they were living in a small one-bedroom flat in Hatfield. We stayed in a mobile home camp in Ibiza and we travelled one way by plane and one way by train as this was all they could afford. The plane journey was something they saved up for, while the train tickets were part of a concession through working for the railway. A big group of us went on that holiday. The real highlight for me in Ibiza was the trip to the kart track.
They had little electric kiddie karts and the track was very small. It was less than a hundred metres long, probably only about sixty metres, but I loved it. I got in a kart and straightaway I knew I was going to enjoy it. I remember thinking I was Ayrton Senna, it just felt natural.
After that, nobody gave it a second thought. My dad was just a railway worker and I was just a kid. We went home and I thought that was it, but my dad remembered how much we had all enjoyed it, especially me. We thought nothing of it until a couple of years later.
For my fifth birthday I got my first remote control car. I remember them putting the batteries in this little car. I drove it up and down the hallway and tried it outside, too. I really liked it. I suppose that was the beginning, or at least the beginning of the beginning. I was consciously hooked on cars from that point.
A few months later my dad brought me an even bigger and better 1/12th scale electric remote control car and spent days building it up from all the bits in a box when he came home from work. I loved it. I was always pestering him to keep recharging the batteries. Eventually my dad thought enough’s enough, if we are going to muck around with this car then let’s do it properly and join a club. So we did just that. We went down to our local model shop Models in Motion, in the Old Town in Stevenage, and we joined the racing club and went remote control car racing every weekend on Sunday mornings. It was great fun for us both. There were like fifty adults racing and just two kids – and one of them was me. I found I was really competitive. My dad loved it and pretty soon he was helping me with everything. I guess that is when he became my first mechanic.
We used to go to the shop and get all kinds of new parts, and paint, and try to improve the car. We went racing at a village called Bennington with my electric remote control car packed in the back of Linda’s car – a white Mini Metro that cost my dad £100. In my first year I came second in the club championship, having beaten the adult who had been racing for years. They were a great bunch of people from what I remember and the camaraderie was brilliant. They didn’t mind me, a little kid, joining in their fun and beating them at it. It was through the hobby shop Models in Motion that I got my chance to go on BBC television’s Blue Peter. I was just six years old. At the end of my first season the club gave me a special award for the most impressive driver – so with this and ending up on television, what more could a kid ask for!
The next step came when we moved up from electric remote control cars to a 1/8th scale petrol-engined car called a Turbo Burns. I still have the car to this day. I remember it cost my dad a whopping £250 to buy second hand from someone at the track. I was still living in Peartree Way then, with my mum, but my dad and Linda had by that time moved to Shearwater Close in Stevenage where they bought a small three-bedroomed house with its own garden. It was our house. It was when Linda was expecting Nic, so they needed more space. Dad bought the house in Shearwater Close and let the flat in Hatfield. He couldn’t really afford to keep either but somehow he just managed because he had to. It meant we were now living in Stevenage closer to my mum and that was good for me. Nic was born the following year, in March 1992, and that summer, when I was seven, I went to Rye House at Hoddesdon, in Hertfordshire, for my first ride in a real go-kart on a real kart track. My dad took me for a day out following what we thought was a successful year in remote control car racing. We knew absolutely nothing about kart racing but we were just having fun. I went out on the little circuit at the back of Rye House – I mean the little one that no one else would dare go on – and I had a really good time. I got the bug for karting from that moment. That was it, that was all I ever wanted to do. It was wicked and my dad was now in trouble!
A few weeks later, there were some pretty strange goings-on in the shed at the back of our house. My dad used to sit most nights in the shed preparing my remote control cars, a job he had done for nearly eighteen months, when suddenly he built this extension to the shed from wood that he bought down the local DIY shop. The shed door used to be located on the side of the shed but now it was transformed into a pair of front double doors. I got my first go-kart that Christmas. I remember I was at my mum’s for the morning on that Christmas Day and then I went to my dad’s house. My mum was just dropping me off and my dad wasn’t in. I looked through the letter box and I could see down the hallway and onto the table. And there, I saw something really big in wrapping paper. I guess I ruined the surprise. I remember I was walking backwards into the house trying to act like I hadn’t even noticed this big monster of a present on the table! Eventually, I got to open it after my dad strung it out and pretended it wasn’t for me. You know what: they had given me the best gift that I’d ever had in my life up to that point.
They had also bought me a pale blue driving suit and matching race gloves, and a red FM helmet. I had the biggest smile ever on my face. We went out and I drove it on the street. We lived in a quiet close so it was okay, plus it was Christmas Day so why not? It turned out that this kart was a tenth-hand, rickety old thing when dad bought it, but he worked night and day to rebuild it in his purpose-built extended shed. He did everything to make it as good as new: completely re-sprayed it and polished everything that could be polished. That way, I would fit in with all the other kids whose parents could afford brand new presents. I was truly thrilled. I was buzzing. Of course, I wanted to try it out properly and, on my birthday two weeks later, we took it down to Rye House in the back of my dad’s Vauxhall Cavalier, with boot open, kart hanging out – what a sight we were – but we didn’t care; we were going karting. I had my first run on Saturday, 9 January, two days after my birthday. I was eight years old. And the rest is history!
Seriously, it was a real big thing in my life. It was when I started my karting career. I began racing at the then Hoddes-don Kart Racing Club, Rye House which was run by Alan Kilby and Harry Sowden. I raced in the Cadet Populars class as a novice and was instantly on the pace. If you are a new driver, you have to wear black plates for your first six races so that all the other drivers know you are a novice. Over a number of weekends, I brought home six first-place novice trophies from various circuits.
I was now ready and qualified to go on to yellow plates and start racing with the bigger, more experienced, drivers. I took part in my first ‘yellow plate’ race on 2 May 1993, I think at Clay Pigeon Kart Club down in Dorset, and I won against all the odds.
In my first year of cadet karting I was quite often quicker than some of the older and more experienced kids and occasionally if I overtook them on the circuit they would come up to me off the track and warn me off. It happened to my dad also, their dads would warn my dad off. I was already learning karate and so my dad decided to take it up as well, as we thought maybe this karting stuff is a bit more physical than we first thought. We both joined the local Stevenage Shotokan Karate Club run by Mike Nursey, a 6th Dan. I managed to get up to one grade short of intermediate black belt when I was ten. A lot of people have said I am black belt and I have not really corrected them as it has been easier to just say nothing. Although I was smaller for my age than most of my competitors, I was never scared to stand up for myself. My dad reached the same grade but we were away so much with karting that it was impossible to compete for our black belts.
We would go testing at Rye House occasionally during the week but mostly every weekend. My dad would always stand on the inside of the circuit at the hairpin. He watched to see where the best drivers were braking and he would go and stand there and say to me, ‘You’ve got to brake here, at least a metre later than the other competitors.’ Then, he would move a metre further and say, ‘You’ve got to brake here!’ So I had to brake later than the drivers who were braking late and doing well. And that’s how, and where, I learned how to brake late. I was pushing and pushing, and lots of the time I went off because it was just impossible to brake that late. And he would say, ‘No, you can do it, go on, you can do it.’ Eventually, it worked and I could brake later than any of my competitors and still keep the momentum in the kart. This was one of the keys to my success on the karting circuits.
I also had my first crash at Rye House on a practice day. I think it was Saturday, 30 January, the day before my first ‘black plate’ race day. It was getting close to the circuit closing time and we were just about to finish. We were on our last couple of runs and some dude came up on the inside of me and clipped me into the first corner. I didn’t even know he was there and he sent me off flat-out into the tyre wall. I went straight into the tyres – my kart was all bent and damaged and I had a bleeding nose. My dad charged up from the bottom end of the circuit fearing that I had hurt myself, but when he got to me the first thing I said was, ‘Can you fix it for tomorrow?’ I wasn’t bothered at all about me. I was just in a bit of a daze. My dad drove all the way to the other side of London to find the parts for my Allkart. Eventually he got the necessary parts from a nice man called Bruno Ferrari. Bruno used to tune race engines for Dan Wheldon and a few others at the time. Dan was then a huge karting star even though he was only about thirteen. Anyway, my dad got the parts and fixed my kart; we went racing the next day and I brought home my first trophy!
‘Fun on three wheels during a holiday…’
My first run in a kiddie-kart during a family holiday in Ibiza in August 1988, aged three.
An early photoshoot…
My brother Nic’s third birthday party.
Happy with another grade and certificate in karate.
My first kart, aged eight.
Preparing for my first race in my new kart and helmet.
Champions of the Future – a cadet race winner.
Me with Ron Dennis, at the Belgian Grand Prix in 1996.
Kart Masters – and another win!
Meeting Murray Walker at the Autosport Awards 1995.
Team MBM – alongside fellow racer Nico Rosberg in 2001.
Formula Renault with Nic in 2001.
Becoming 2000 Formula A European Champion.
Prince Charles came to the McLaren factory at Woking where we swapped a few tips on racing.
My dad has always been my manager and mentor – and also my chief mechanic when karts needed fixing.
You win some, you lose some – it can be a lonely place sometimes.
‘Meeting David Couthard at the McLaren Mercedes Young Driver Support Programme in 1998.’
Posing for the camera in the old McLaren trophy room.
Dreaming and hoping that one day…
Spending time playing pool with Nic.
Playing the guitar, and music in general, is one of my favourite ways of chilling out and relaxing.
Eventually I competed in events all over the country nearly every two weeks. I remember going up to Larkhall, in Scotland, and staying in this weird hotel where everything was painted black. It was a real scary Addams Family type of place! And there was a place called Rowrah up in the Lake District way up north, where it seemed to rain non-stop. But it was all good experience, travelling out into the middle of nowhere just to race karts. The whole family used to go along in my dad’s red Vauxhall Cavalier with a little old box trailer that danced around all over the place behind us. We stuck all the gear in this little box thing, then we put the go-kart on top of it, with all these different straps to stop the thing from flying away. And off we’d go.
When I was nine, I entered my first British Cadet Kart Championship. We had sold our old Allkart and bought a new bright green Zip Kart made by Martin Hines. Martin owned the company and was a very successful figure in the karting business and he ran a team called the Zip Young Guns. We couldn’t afford to be in the Zip Young Guns team and so remained independent but with advice, help and assistance from Martin.
Eventually, we bought a larger second-hand box trailer with a roller door on the back, which was a huge improvement. But then the poor old Cavalier had to drag this heavy trailer around all the time. I remember we would travel up to Larkhall in the wind and the rain, and when we arrived most of the other competitors had camper vans or caravans, while we had a box trailer. Linda would have to bring the microwave and kettle from the kitchen and sit in the back of the box trailer during the cold and windy days with Nic, then aged two, on her lap. That was hard on everyone but they did it for me and we thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.
By this time, my dad had even got a Calor gas heater and put it at the back of the trailer. So Linda and Nic were in the back, jackets on, freezing cold, and then there was me and my dad, at the front of the trailer trying to prepare the kart. I remember Linda always brought a red flask along, full of chicken noodle soup.
After that weekend, my dad said ‘never again’ and somehow worked a few more jobs to buy a really old Bedford camper van that Linda named ‘Maureen’. Life started to get better. No more cold, damp soggy baps but instead we had toast in the mornings before a race – heaven!
It is hard for any family who have to find the money to race, particularly so in the case of my parents who just had normal day jobs. For those first three or four years, before we had backing from McLaren, it was probably a lot more of a strain for my family than it was for me, and especially for my dad. For me, it was just get in the camper, go to the racetrack, sign on, do my driver’s briefing and then go and race – and that felt natural. We didn’t always win; it was tough and I’d get grumpy like a spoilt kid. I just did not like to lose – and neither did my dad.
From these early days my dad has been my manager, with Linda in full support. It has really been a family team, Nic included. Occasionally our relationship has been strained by the pressures of motor racing but that is just normal. My dad has been the motivator and the strength that keeps us all going. To be father and manager can be tricky; it is not easy balancing both of those roles. Sometimes, I know I can be very cold and just treat him as a manager, but then I love him to bits for what he is and what he’s done for me – and he’s my dad! It’s not straightforward. You wake up and he’s the first, or second, person you see and so you’ve got that natural bond. Then you remember he is your manager too. But it works for us. And my dad, and my family, have made more sacrifices than you would believe.
I have proved him wrong at some points in my life, but, like I said, he is almost always right. Even though he is not the driver experiencing what I am experiencing, he is just as involved as me, if not more. He is just trying to do his best. It is a very strange relationship we have because he is so driven. He is so committed but never ever pushy. I said I wanted to race karts and he said, ‘Okay, if we are going to do it, then we are going to do it properly or not at all’ and that was it. It was either everything or nothing and that is still where I am today.
My step-mum, Linda, is fantastic. I was so young when my dad met Linda that I did not understand what had gone on between my parents. It tells you something about a person when they are prepared to take on the responsibility of looking after someone else’s kid: me. Ninety per cent of the people I know that have divorced parents and step-parents have a tough time because one does not like the other. Linda is Nic’s mum and what I love about her is the fact that she had Nic, her real son, but never ever treated us differently. My dad could not have picked a better step-mum for me. As I said earlier, Linda is the best step-mum in the world.
I honestly do not think I would be where I am today if my parents and step-parents had not worked hard together. With my brother, as we grow up, the bond is getting stronger and stronger. For me, it’s the most valuable thing I have in my life. My dad has been the main driving force for me. The way I am now is down to him. A lot of my friends did not have their fathers around and mine was there for me. So, respect to him for that. He has certain morals and there are a lot of important values that he has taught me. I know some people say he is overprotective, but he has always been committed to making sure that I maximize my opportunities to have a better life than he had. Dad is the one who started it all when I was just a boy. Without him, I do not think any of this would have happened at all.
CHAPTER (#u07a38290-86b7-5a08-a7fb-998b8303b195)
5 (#u07a38290-86b7-5a08-a7fb-998b8303b195)
CLIMBING (#u07a38290-86b7-5a08-a7fb-998b8303b195)
‘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.
