Ambition
“One day I want to race for you. I want to race for McLaren”. It seemed like an extremely determined phrase for a boy of only 10 years old who introduced himself in this way to the then Team Principal of the Woking-based team, Ron Dennis, at the 1995 Autosport Awards. Instead, repeated successes in karting championships meant that the English manager was the first to believe in the potential of a very young driver who would later write the history of the team and Formula 1: Lewis Hamilton.
Born in Stevenage in 1985, in that meeting the current Ferrari driver was actually even more precise about his ambitions, as he himself recalled: “to race for McLaren and become world champion”. A journey that took a real turning point 28 years ago, more precisely on April 3, 1998, when Dennis bet seriously on Hamilton by announcing his entry into the McLaren-Mercedes Young Driver Support Programme.
The dream realized
From there, his growth was such that it increasingly convinced the Team Principal to bring him closer to the world of F1. All this after winning the 2003 Formula Renault 2000 UK championships, the 2005 F3 Euro Series, and the 2006 GP2 (now Formula 2). Successes that turned the dream of racing for McLaren in F1 into reality in 2007, with Hamilton already coming close to winning the world title as a rookie, something that was not achieved only by a one-point disadvantage to Kimi Raikkonen in a season that saw him achieve nine consecutive podiums from the first race of the championship.
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An appointment with history that nevertheless arrived the following year in a sensational finale of the Brazilian GP, where Hamilton obtained his first world title in the land of his idol Ayrton Senna. 2008 was the only championship won with McLaren (the first for the team after Mika Hakkinen in 1999), but in his subsequent experience at Mercedes, the Briton won six more world titles, reaching the point of equaling Michael Schumacher’s all-time record, as well as establishing other historic records such as the highest number of F1 victories (105, the only driver over 100), pole positions (104) and podiums (203). An ambition, the one declared 31 years ago in front of Ron Dennis, which in hindsight proved to be anything but naive or arrogant for a boy known today as Sir Lewis Hamilton.
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