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umlewis · 6 months

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Lewis Hamilton Is Changing Lanes

He's got one last season with Mercedes, and then F1's winningest driver will join Ferrari. But he's looking far beyond that, toward the moves he'll make when his racing career ends.

Preparation for the Afterlife

Often in the in-between moments of his eighteen seasons in Formula 1, Lewis Hamilton has found himself in rooms with legends, some from other exotic industries: movies, music, fashion; all worlds Hamilton has felt increasing affinity for while becoming the winning-est F1 driver in history, and many from other major sports. What he'd noticed was that eventually, particularly with these aging athletes just on the other side of retirement, the conversation would loop around to the subject of preparation for the afterlife. Not death, exactly, but life after sport. "I'd spoken to so many amazing athletes, from Boris Becker to Serena Williams, even Michael Jordan," Hamilton, now 39, says. "Talking to greats that I've met along the way, who are retired, or some that are still in competition, and the fear of what's next, the lack of preparation for what's next. A lot of them said, 'I stopped too early' or 'Stayed too long.' 'When it ended, I didn't have anything planned.' 'My whole world came crashing down because my whole life has been about that sport.' Some of them were like, 'I didn't plan and it was a bit of a mess up because I was really lost afterwards. There was such a hole, such a void, and I had no idea how I was going to fill it and I was in such a rush, initially, to try and fill it that you fill it with the wrong thing and you make a few mistakes, and then eventually you find your way.' Some people took longer. Some people took shorter. But it just got my mind thinking about, okay, when I stop, how do I avoid that? And so I got serious about finding other things that I was passionate about." Hamilton, whose parents split when he was a toddler and who started racing at eight, spent the first half of his life impelled by one thing: "Being the only black kid on the circuit, struggling at school, really always my big drive was acceptance. If I win the race, I will receive that acceptance in this world."

That single-minded intent, for a working class kid who grew up on a council estate north of London, led him to inconceivable heights within motorsport. His seven individual world championships in F1 tie him for most ever with Michael Schumacher. His eight team titles with Mercedes and his 103 frand prix victories put him in a class of one. But it wasn’t until later that Hamilton finally felt comfortable directing the part of himself that he'd suppressed while pursuing racing full-time toward other creative arenas; pursuits that, rather than detract from his racing career, might actually enhance his performance on the track, set him more purposefully toward the second half of his life, and ultimately enliven his soul. "When I first got into Formula 1," he says, "it was wake up, train, racing-racing-racing. Racing, nothing else. There's no space for anything else. But what I realized is that just working all the time doesn't bring you happiness, and you need to find a balance in life. And I found out that I was actually quite unhappy." The fixation was flattening. "There was so much missing, there was so much more to me, and it was crazy because I was like, 'I'm in Formula 1, I reached my dream and I'm where I always wanted to be, I'm on top, I'm fighting for the championship.' But I was just not... It was not enjoyable." During that period, he started dating someone in Los Angeles and was exposed for the first time to creative people in creative industries. "It’s almost like being in a snow globe. That’s the racing world," he says, "and there's so much more outside of it that you just don't have time to explore. I think if you go to an office every day and do the same process every single day, eventually you just zone out. You have to find something else that can soothe you, can keep your mind going." Those trips to LA planted the seeds for what else might be possible and ushered in a new wave of self-expression and creative experimentation, through, first, his hair, tattoos, and jewelry, then through music, fashion, and filmmaking. For the next decade, Hamilton steadily pushed against preconceptions of how a racing driver might present himself, and what else a racing driver might do while winging around the world for a global racing series. "My mind is always moving," he says, sitting across from me in London. "I have really, really vivid dreams; I have to wake up and write them down. I'll have visions of something I'm designing, or sometimes it’s music. Sometimes I have a song playing in my head. I'll get up and go downstairs, play it on the piano, record it, and it becomes a part of something that I’m doing." Hamilton lives for the songwriting camps he sets up at least a couple times a year during his summer and winter breaks, when he gathers a team of producers and songwriters to help him pull together the many samples, threads, and lyrics he collects and noodles on throughout the season. He's just returned from one when we meet up in February, and it's left him on a high. "Music keeps me alive," he says. In the years since those seminal trips to LA, Hamilton has become the most prominent member of his sport, possibly even the most prominent athlete in any sport, to mess around this much and this seriously with so many sidelines in creative industries. The idea of Hamilton indulging his interests hasn't always been welcomed.

"As I explored my creativity and also how to express myself," he says, "I experienced a lot of pushback in the media." Commentators who questioned Hamilton's "distractions" off the track. "People just judging me: 'This is not how a racing driver behaves.' 'This is not what a racing driver does.'" Hamilton's rise coincided with a moment when the sport was maturing globally and corporate money was flooding into F1. As a result, the rougher edges of the sport were sanded away and the hard-partying, death-defying racers of previous eras were replaced by a cadre of safe characters who evinced limited personality off the track. "I actually feel for some of the drivers just before us, in the early 2000s," Hamilton says. "There was clearly more to them, but they weren't able to show that. But if you look at our world now, there's drivers expressing themselves differently. Bit by bit, I've had to work overtime to outperform,' he says, in order to shift people's mindsets. The motivation for Hamilton to keep pushing his sport forward on this front is twofold: Yes, to continue to break F1's often conservative, conventional expectations, but also to set himself up for the second half of his own career. "I went through this phase of understanding that I can't race forever," he says, prompting him to cultivate those other passions. "Because when I stop, I'm gonna drop the mic and be happy. The difficult thing is, I want to do everything," he says, laughing. "I'm very ambitious, but I understand that you can't do... Actually, I take that back, because I don't believe in the word can't. To be a master at something, there's the 10,000 hours it takes. Obviously I've done that in racing. There's not enough time to master all of these different things." So what's the one that's gonna take the place of racing. I ask. "Well," he says, "I think it's gonna be film and fashion."

Film Lewis

Among the most prominent of Hamilton's current side projects is the major Hollywood film he's producing, alongside Brad Pitt and the team that made Top Gun: Maverick, including director Joseph Kosinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. It promises to be at minimum the most anticipated racing movie in history; at best, the most authentic, adrenaline-inducing racing movie ever. Hamilton says he was, like many, a movie fiend growing up, and much of his time in Formula 1 has been marked by surreal opportunities to meet the people affiliated with them. This Hollywood story, he says, begins, as many of the best Hollywood stories do, with Tom Cruise. Cruise, a racing fan since even before Days of Thunder, reached out unexpectedly to Hamilton about a decade ago to invite him to the set of his 2014 film, Edge of Tomorrow. "My assistant called me. 'Tom Cruise has invited you to the set.' I was just like, 'Shoot, yeah?! Cancel anything I have!'" After that day on set in England, Hamilton and Cruise built a friendship that consisted, in part, of encouraging messages from Cruise before and after races. "'Me and the team want to wish you good luck with the race', that sort of thing," Hamilton says. One evening, at dinner, Hamilton showed Cruise his watch that had a Top Gun logo on the back. "I said, 'Dude, if you ever do Top Gun 2,'" which had not been spoken of; there was no story yet, "'I will even be a janitor. Just let me be in it.’'" When the reality of Top Gun: Maverick came around, Cruise put Hamilton in touch with Kosinski, who offered Hamilton a role as one of the film's pilots, but he was in the middle of the 2018 title race, waging a dogfight of his own with Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel. Filming would have required a couple of weeks on set during the final months of the season. Despite having made admirable progress for drivers to fitfully explore their passions off-track, even Hamilton has his limits. "Firstly, I hadn't even had, like, an acting lesson," he says, "and I don't want to be the one that lets this movie down. And then secondly, I just really didn't have the time to dedicate to it. I remember having to tell Joe and Tom, and it broke my heart. And then I regretted it, naturally, when they show me the movie and it's... It could've been me!" He groans and laughs. "Oh, God, I'm still…."

And so a couple years later, despite the missed opportunity, Hamilton found himself on a Zoom, staring at a screen with Kosinski and Bruckheimer, who were asking him to get involved with a real-deal, big budget Formula 1 film. Hamilton glimpsed the potential pitfalls instantly. "My point was, guys, this movie needs to be so authentic. There's two different fan groups that we have; like, the old originals, who from the day they're born hearing the frand prix music every weekend and watching with their families, to the new generation that just learned about it today through Netflix." Hamilton signed on with an imperative to make the movie work for both. "I felt my job really has been to try to call BS. 'This would never happen.' 'This is how it would be.' 'This is how it could happen.' Just giving them advice about what racing is really about and what, as a racing fan, would appeal and what would not." Cameras were rolling on the production at last season's British Grand Prix, where the filmmakers shot live racing before a crowd of 150,000-plus at the famed Silverstone Circuit. One of the coolest experiences thus far, Hamilton says, was "being at Silverstone and just finding out that Brad is actually a racer at heart. He's genuinely got the abilities, the skills." Where does it come from? "I think he's always loved bikes, and so he's watched a lot of motor racing. When I was younger, I worked at a driving school to help pay my bills, just getting around to these races and stuff. Companies would come with seventy people and they're on the wrong side of the road. They're on the inside line, driving toward an apex of a turn. Just no knowledge. Brad knew what part of the track to be on." This understanding of Formula 1 racecraft, then, put actors like Pitt and Cruise in a rare class of American. Hamilton had seen the ignorance up close for years. He spent the first half of his career coming to the United States and Canada, shocked by having to just "continuously educate people." Here was this continent of massive sports fans who were somehow immune to whatever had made Hamilton mad for F1 all his life: "How has no one got the bug like me? How are they missing it?" I spoke to Hamilton once before, in late 2011, and asked him what has really been an open question since: What would it take to infect the American sports fan? He knew. It was gonna be a movie that did it. "I'd love to hear any ideas," he told me then, issuing an open call to screenwriters. Netflix's Drive to Survive proved that there was something to Hamilton's theory, that if only you could package up the speed and drama in a slick story, audiences might get hooked on the real thing. The still-untitled Pitt-Kosinski film-they could do worse than Top Gun: Formula 1-should be the ultimate test case. At one point, Hamilton and I discuss the slate of racing feature films that have come before. Grand Prix (1966), Le Mans (1971), Ford v Ferrari (2019), Rush (2013), and on and on. I ask him if he keeps up with new entries; which work, and which are way off the map. "I do watch all of them," he says, in part because he’s a fan, in part because he and his new production company, Dawn Apollo Films, need to keep an eye out. "But one thing I think you'll learn about me is I don't like to... We live in such a judgmental world, and having seen how, for everything, building something from scratch and creating takes so much time and commitment from so many people... So I never like to be someone to dog anything."

Still. Ferrari? "I loved it," he says. Encouraging news for Ferrari fans, who have been salivating since Hamilton's shock announcement that he'd be moving to their team at the start of the 2025 season. "One, because Ferrari is Ferrari, and envisioning when they arrive at the factory, seeing some of the history... The racing was nuts back then. The cars were so dangerous. Could I look at it and say this could be done better? Of course. Capturing racing is really, really difficult, and I don't think anyone's been able to really capture it in a way that brings the adrenaline you have as a racing driver. But I think it's one of the best they’ve done. If you look at the old movies, with McQueen, the big camera on the helmet and the guy lying on the front of the car to capture the shot?" He laughs. "You should see some of the cameras that Joe is able to use. He's a visionary." Are you to the point of thinking, we've got to blow these other racing films out of the water? "I don’t feel competitive with these movies," he says, "but I guess we probably will be."

Fashion Lewis

Before movies, there were clothes. In 2007, Hamilton attended his first fashion show. "I come from a racing world where me and my dad were really the only people of color," he says, "and then when I went to the fashion world, it was so mixed, so diverse. I loved it." Hamilton had already spent his years coming up in the sport having to answer for superficial differences from other drivers; his braids, his tattoos, his jewelry, then his clothes. Every additional layer of differentiation brought outsize attention and required immense effort and energy getting people to believe that these things were not affecting his performance or causing harm to the sport. The scrutiny found yet a new target when he started working with Tommy Hilfiger. Hilfiger, who had been involved with Formula 1 for decades, invited Hamilton to design five collections for Hilfiger's namesake brand between 2018 and 2020. "I got almost like an internship experience, getting to work with these designers, in the background," Hamilton says. "I got to just be really hands-on, massively engaged, and then I would go to races and I was just really free." To celebrate his first collection, in 2018, Hamilton flew to a party in New York before a grand prix in Singapore. "That's not really great preparation for a race weekend," Hamilton concedes, "so you have to be really cautious about that. The narrative was, 'Oh, he’s not focused.' But I wasn't out partying late or drinking like that. I got to Singapore and I delivered one of the best laps that I've ever delivered. And after that, everyone was like, oh, he can do that. Even Niki would say to Toto, 'You can't let Lewis do this! This is not what a racing driver does!’'" In Lauda's era, I suggest jokingly, racing drivers would just drink and smoke all night before showing up to the track in the morning. Hamilton laughs. "Yeah, exactly. But eventually I got him to see it. 'Oh, maybe he can do those things, too.'"

In recent years Hamilton's interest in fashion has evolved. He doesn't just want to wear clothes or design them, he tells me, but to influence the industry in more ambitious ways. Hamilton has pushed diversity initiatives within Formula 1, Mercedes and beyond, efforts aimed at busting up the homogeneity in the spaces he inhabits. Now he's thinking about ways to marshal that sort of influence-and, yes, financing-to help independent fashion brands that he admires. "I think it's about really working on the idea of... We've really got to send the lift down," he says. "There are so many incredible young up and coming brands that at some stage would just get eaten up by the big organizations, and they'll lose a large percentage of the company that they've started, and that’s often the way it goes. I think it's about getting a seat at the table. It's not easy. Getting in the room with Arnault and having the discussion." Have you tried, I ask.

"Uh, I'm not yet in the room, but I believe I can." Just to pick one I've seen you support, I say, I look at a brand like Wales Bonner (from acclaimed 33 year old designer Grace Wales Bonner) that has about as clear a vision as any fashion label for what it's about-fresh takes on black style and contemporary Britishness-and yet remains humbly independent. Do you think about getting involved financially with businesses of that scale? "I have been to Grace's studio," he says, "and it's fascinating speaking to her about just how hard it is for her. She's putting on these great shows, she's super creative, she's very intentional with the work that she's doing. But there are opportunities that have just not been presented to her, and I know that there are so many of these young brands that somehow need more finance, somehow need more support, help with the infrastructure, which the big brands obviously have crazy infrastructure. Which when you do get, you know, they are at risk of just having to sell a chunk of it to somebody in order to stay alive. So I'm trying to just figure out how we fit into that picture." Honestly, one of my dreams is I have thought about creating my own diverse LVMH," he says. "Like, I don't know if we live in a time where that's really possible, but that's something that I'm conceptualizing." Act I: Beat Schumacher Act II: Beat Arnault Just one of those ideas that gets jotted down in the middle of the night and worked on, I suggest. "Yeah," he says. "We've got an opportunity to really lift people up and let them get in the jet stream. I think about LVMH and, of course, I love Pharrell. He's been, since I was a kid, just musically and creatively, someone that I really aspire to be like. And I was really split, having now been in the space, on the decision that LVMH took." That is, to make him men's creative director of Louis Vuitton. "'Cause, wow, he did the work with Chanel, Billionaire Boys Club, he deserves it 100 percent. Then I'm thinking about someone like Grace, or Martine Rose would've been cool. Put a woman in power in that position, because a lot of women aren't getting those opportunities within the industry. I think that would've been a baller move. But I'm loving what Pharrell is doing."

F1 Lewis

The start of 2024, Hamilton says, is "probably the most exciting time in my life", in large part because it's the first time he's been able to think about the next two years in tandem. "I've never started a year excited for the year to follow," he says. His life has been measured in seasons; one team, one car, one series, one summer break to cram in all the travel and songwriting camps and other interests. "People ask me all the time, where do you see yourself in five years? And I've never been able to look that far ahead. But now I'm in a place where I can map out a little further ahead. There's some really cool things that will be happening in the next two years." He means, "Some really fun projects with fashion that will come to light at the end of the year, obviously the movie, and hopefully a documentary to follow." He pauses, and I smile. Yeah? Anything else? Hamilton shocked the racing world a couple weeks before our conversation by announcing that he would be leaving his long-term team, Mercedes, for its most famous rival, Ferrari, at the start of the 2025 season. He would, then, be racing all of 2024 with the team to which he'd been effectively married and won everything there was to win for over a decade, all while having the next relationship primed and ready to go for the day after the divorce, which forces him to hold both this year and next year in his head concurrently; a rare state of play for a driver. "My focus is, how do I deliver the best year that this team has ever had, after all the great years we've had?" he says. "It's how you engage with the people around you ho have taken the news, some of them really well, some of them less so. How do you take them on this journey and leave on a high together?" Before moving on, he says, he has to figure out how to make sure the work he's done at Mercedes on diversity initiatives continues to live on without him pushing it. It's a consideration that could apply to many of the shifts Hamilton has helped facilitate in the sport. What happens when Lewis is no longer at the front of the pack challenging the status quo? At one point, I ask him, what's the thing you're most surprised hasn't evolved further during your time in F1? "We still need more women in the sport, and to fight to make sure that there are more and more women to put out at the front, in view, for young women and girls to be able to see that this is a place for women." In 2024, he says, "I'm training harder than I've ever trained. I feel the most physically prepared I've ever been, so I'm really excited about the present, knowing that nothing is promised beyond that," he says. "But then it's also conceptualizing. I have all these ideas of things I want to do beyond, in the next phase. Honestly," he continues, "I've manifested everything I've ever wanted to do. I do it every year. Working with Tommy, winning a world championship, breaking records. And so I've had some other plans for the future." Did you manifest the Ferrari move, I ask.

"Yeah," he says. "I think perhaps more unconscious manifesting from the early period of my life, but it's always been up there for me. For now, though, I'm gonna lift Mercedes as high as I can this year. The way that I exist..." he continues, "I don't look at it as on the way out. My commitment to the team is exactly the same as previous years. I want to kill every other team. We want to beat them. My approach remains the same, right 'til the end, and I can't let too much of my mind be distracted by what's afterwards. You can't really tap into that until next year." This final season at Mercedes comes during an unprecedented stretch for Hamilton, who has not won a race the past two seasons. Mercedes constructed a car in two consecutive seasons that has struggled. Red Bull and Max Verstappen have dominated. Hamilton wouldn't be doing it still if he didn't think he could compete for a world championship, he says, but we discuss whether the end of the 2021 season felt like a turning point for him in his career. The title that year was decided in the last race of the season, the last lap of the season, the literal last minutes of the season. After a surreal, improvisational ruling by the race director, Hamilton and Verstappen were cut loose to settle the title in one final sprint. But with Verstappen's car in a clearly advantageous state (he had fresh tires), Hamilton's fate was sealed before Go. Were you robbed, I ask him. "Was I robbed? Obviously. I mean, you know the story. But I think what was really beautiful in that moment, which I take away from it, was my dad was with me. And we'd gone through this huge roller coaster of life together, ups and downs, nd the day that it hurt the most, he was there, and the way he raised me was to always stand up, keep your head high. And I obviously went to congratulate Max, and not realizing the impact that that would have, but also I was really conscious of, like, there's a mini-me watching. This is the defining moment of my life. And I think it really was. I felt it. I didn't know how it was going to be perceived. I hadn't, like, visualized it, but I was definitely conscious of, these next fifty meters that I walk is where I fall to the ground and die, or I rise up." I ask him if he fixates on that race. "If I see a clip of it, I still feel it," he says, "but I'm at peace with it." And the winninglessness that's followed? "My fans were really ride or die. I couldn't understand it at first. 'Guys, but I'm not winning anything!' But I've realized it's not easy to relate to someone that's always finishing first. It's inspiring. But there's no..." There's never been a comeback story until now. It's a good lesson from his sideline in movies. People love a comeback story.