Fellow Englishman and F1 world champion James Hunt was celebrated for his outrageous public statements and love of fast women and booze in the 1970s. But Hunt was the last flowering of a less professional age. F1 today is a multi-billion pound, global industry – some would say only masquerading as a sport – meaning most of its practitioners are bland PR mouthpieces, out of necessity.
In May, after Hamilton finished second behind Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg in Spain, Damon Hill, a former British F1 champion from the more traditional mould, felt moved to criticise Hamilton’s jet-set lifestyle.
“The impression Lewis gives is that he wants to enjoy life,” said Hill, whose father Graham, a two-time world champion, was the epitome of the dashing racing driver back in the 1960s. “But his first task is to win races. It’s whether you want to dedicate yourself to that task and play afterwards.”
But Hamilton paid no heed. The hobnobbing with fashionistas, musicians and film stars continued, as did the piano playing, the spins in his beloved Shelby Cobra and surfing holidays in Miami, all meticulously catalogued and disseminated on social media. But still some sneered, because, well, this isn’t really how a racing driver – and a British one at that – is supposed to carry on.
“He can be more of a pop idol than a racing driver,” Sir Stirling Moss, often described as the best driver never to win an F1 world championship, told the Telegraph last year., external “He was one of the racing crowd before, and now he’s whatever you call those superstars. That’s not really the way we English go.”
But others in F1 think Hamilton is exactly what the sport needs. As Hill has also pointed out, F1 “exists in its own bubble, more so than it did in the past, making it more difficult for drivers to appeal to the public”. And a phrase often bandied about is that F1 is “a sport for people who don’t really like sport” – in other words, “car people”, people more turned on by engineering than other human beings.
As such, Bobby Epstein, the man in charge of the United States Grand Prix, believes F1 should do more to promote itself as an entertainment industry, making personalities such as Hamilton, rather than hunks of metal, its main selling point.
“People pay attention to celebrity and fans relate to human beings, not metal,” Epstein told BBC Sport. “Lewis is crossing that line into mainstream appeal and doing us all a favour.”
Allan McNish, a former F1 driver and BBC pundit, agrees with Epstein while disagreeing with Hill’s assertion that Hamilton’s break-neck schedule could prove detrimental to his driving.
“Hamilton is living a motor racing life in a different way and breaking the mould of what a European F1 driver is supposed to be,” says McNish. “But it’s a pressure release valve for him. Some drivers are focused and dedicated on that one thing but if Hamilton doesn’t have that balance, he can get unstable.