which, with everything kicking off, had been difficult. All my lessons in life, my dad’s and my family’s advice and encouragement and examples of how to live and how to behave, have stood me in good stead. When you have been through some of the stuff I went through as a kid, and when you have seen life through a really normal pair of eyes in Stevenage, in London, in Grenada and other places – all of that on top of my racing career gave me the right kind of grounding to cope with it. So I just did my thing.
Being able to control yourself, redeem yourself, is important. When I play computer games with Nic I always try my best to beat him. I never let him win. I never let anyone win at anything, at home or anywhere. I am always the same. I am just that competitive. I have to win at everything, but I would never cheat. I just love knowing that I won fair and square or that I tried my best.
Mental strength is so important. On the surface, it may look like I am pretty cool most of the time, but underneath I am a very emotional person. That is why these things matter. I love being at home with my family and the equilibrium that gives me. We are all emotional people in my family – that is part of our nature – but in this business, in Formula One, you have to be a bit cold and a bit selfish. I suppose we are all a bit selfish in our own lives and that comes out sometimes in all of us. But I find I can balance it all if I am around my family.
Racing takes up most of my weekends, so any weekends I do have off are so important and valuable to me, and, going back to square one, returning to my own home and occasionally going to my parents’ house, the power station – that is important, too. It is where I do all my mental preparation and feel good. My strength is in the family, wherever we all are, as long as we are together.
There are loads of places where you can get mental strength and energy, but again there are loads of places you can lose energy! For me, the problems are energy-wasters. And it is my dad’s job to make sure that he helps me with that – he absorbs all of the negative energy when it happens. It is too easy to be sucked into things and just find you are drained by it all.
This whole thing about changing negative energy into positive energy is not rocket science. It is just about trying to look on the positive side and turn this or that mistake, or whatever, into something positive. I cannot do it with everything. Sometimes it is just too big to put through my small generator. So, that is when my dad absorbs it; or I put it onto someone else – I might call my mum, or a best friend, telling him about the problem – and then it’s their problem! As long as I keep the same set of principles, I will be fine.
I have been racing since I was eight years old and I have learned what works for me. I always try to remember to appreciate the opportunity I’ve been given and I always give 100 per cent. I always say, ‘Keep your family as close as possible.’ These are the things I believe in and they have done me well.
In my career, it is the same. McLaren and Mercedes-Benz have been incredibly loyal to us and, hopefully, we will be loyal to them and I’ll see out most of my career with them. For me, loyalty matters. In terms of friendship, it means being someone others can trust. And that works both ways. I am the sort of person who tells it all and can be quite blunt. Sometimes I do not realize that I may have affected someone, for worse or better, but it is just me being honest.
I know I am a lucky person. I have a good life, I have been given a talent and I have enjoyed myself very much, for most of the time, in my twenty-two years. It is never easy though. No way. Not for me, not for my dad and not for my family. We have had some extremely hard times and some extremely good times. But – and I think this is the most important thing – we have learned from them all.
‘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