Tommy Martin: Still the king, but now Lewis Hamilton thinks about more than winning

Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Happy Gilmore — history is full of hungry young men dripping with ambition. That’s Max Verstappen in our tale and Lewis Hamilton is the King of Kings

Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton celebrates winning the Formula One Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in front of the second placed Red Bull driver Max Verstappen. Picture: Hassan Ammar

The weird — and kind of brilliant — thing about the first series of Drive To Survive, the Netflix show which turbo-boosted the popularity of Formula One, is that Lewis Hamilton barely appears in it.

Weird because it was 2018 and he was on his way to a fifth world drivers’ championship. On the face of it, this would be like having The Last Dance without Michael Jordan, right?

As it happens, no. Hamilton’s team, Mercedes, refused to cooperate with the documentary makers, this being back when Formula One was figuring out how to shake off its old-world fustiness. It had just said goodbye to Bernie Ecclestone, the former supremo who once said there was no point in the sport appealing to younger viewers because “young people don’t buy Rolexes.”

As it turned out, Hamilton’s absence from the show allowed others to shine while preserving the impression of the seven-time champion as a man apart. He would occasionally ride by on a scooter when the camera panned the pit lane looking for someone more interesting to film. Even when he appeared in subsequent seasons, his measured, cool persona made him far less entertaining than the other guys who swore a lot and crashed into stuff.

None of that is to diminish a man with a strong claim on being the greatest of all time. He has surpassed Michael Schumacher’s record tally for Grand Prix wins and will, if he beats Max Verstappen to the drivers’ championship in Abu Dhabi this weekend, move ahead of the legendary German for most career world titles.

On the contrary, the distance portrayed in the Netflix show seems only fitting for a character who can be said to have been in something of a regal phase. He was at once of the sport and above it. As the most talented driver in the fastest car, he provoked reverence rather than passion; a sort of aging monarch, beholding the majesty of his empire and seeing that it was good.

And then along came Max.

This season’s championship battle has been so ridiculously dramatic that the next series of Drive To Survive might get accused of jumping the shark. But it’s not just the litany of crashes, controversies and spell-binding manoeuvres that have made it captivating. As with all great title fights, the personalities of the champ and the challenger are what make the story.

Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Happy Gilmore – history is full of hungry young men dripping with ambition. That’s Max Verstappen in our tale and Hamilton is the king whose head he wants on a spike. Where Hamilton has been cultivating his legacy by embracing social issues, Verstappen remains blankly ruthless. He is a shark; a cold-eyed killer with a taste for regicide.

Lewis Hamilton.

“He drives with so much energy, fire and without any compassion,” the British former F1 driver Anthony Davidson said this week, evoking the spirit of the young Schumacher that Verstappen appears to share. Like Schumacher, Verstappen has that ruthlessness that borders on the reckless, the refusal to back down in split-second moments that makes champions. Did he slam on the brakes when Hamilton came up behind in Saudi Arabia last week? What did the scorpion say to the fox again?

Unlike Hamilton, he shows no concern for the world outside the track. “Max is how he is,” his father, the one-time F1 journeyman Jos Verstappen says. “He says what he thinks but doesn’t get involved in political matters, such as what is happening in other countries, like Lewis does. Max sees it as a case of doing a job as a sportsman and leaving it at that.”

Strangely, for all Hamilton’s achievements, you sense that Verstappen is more Formula One’s kinda guy. Perhaps because it deals so nakedly in the dark themes of death and money, it feels like an inherently amoral sport. With its embrace of Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, F1 doesn’t just do sportswashing, it will gladly launder, iron and neatly fold your dirty deeds in exchange for a weekend’s lucrative desert racing.

Hamilton’s activism sometimes seems borne of a sense of disgust about the sport around him. If he is aloof around the pit lane — a charge Jos Verstappen also made this week — it’s worth noting that he is still the only black man on campus. Remember that, upon the killing of George Floyd last year, he had to shame his sport raising its voice. “I see those of you who are staying silent, some of you the biggest of stars yet you stay silent in the midst of injustice,” he wrote on Instagram. “Not a sign from anybody in my industry, which of course is a white-dominated sport.”

Hamilton, with Sebastian Vettel in the background, wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt prior to the Styrian Formula One Grand Prix race at the Red Bull Ring racetrack in Spielberg, Austria. Picture: Mark Thompson

Hamilton’s chastisement led to many drivers taking the knee last season and F1 launching its ‘We Race As One’ programme, aimed at fighting racism and inequality.

He has continued in that vein: a week after his astonishing victory in Brazil last month, when he raced from the back of the qualifying grid in a breath-taking display of overtaking skill, he was calling out the laws against LGTBQ+ people in the gulf states into which the F1 cavalcade had just swung.

That Hamilton has single-handedly grafted Formula One a social conscience while at the same time pushing his talent to new heights in the battle with Verstappen may represent his crowning achievement. “When you’re young, all you’re thinking about is winning,” he said last month, every inch the elder statesman. “You don’t have time for a lot of these other things. Well, you think you don’t, but you actually do. And that’s what we’ve got to get across.”

But for all the substance of his words and the grandeur of his status, the toe-to-toe battle with Verstappen has dragged Hamilton the racer back into the F1 fray. The lion in winter has come vividly to life. Come Sunday, like the young pretender who wants his head, the great champion will be only thinking about one thing too.