Lewis Hamilton’s legacy will consist of more than 100 victories – The Undefeated

In the ruthless world of Formula 1, Lewis Hamilton is at the forefront. He’s the man to beat, the top earner, the most important voice, the most prominent personality – a black man alone at the top of the highest ranks in motorsport. England’s knight in Mercedes armor.

In the last 15 years, the 36-year-old Briton has won seven world championships, setting the record for Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher – the German F1 driver who was considered the greatest of all time until Hamilton broadened him from this place. At Sunday’s Russian Grand Prix, Hamilton rallied through a late shower of rain to earn the checkered flag en route to becoming the first rider in the history of the sport to achieve 100 career wins. Apart from his 100 career pole positions. When it comes to success in racing, this is beyond the other.

For one thing, racing is not like other sports. You don’t win some and you lose some. Cars break, racing strategies stall, accidents happen. Trust breaks under pressure. Drivers can drive for years without a win. On his way to Sunday’s IndyCar series finale in Long Beach, California, Scott Dixon, a six-time champion and active all-time winning leader of the series, had only one win on his name. Jimmie Johnson, the seven-time NASCAR champion who switched to open wheel racing earlier this year, won 27% of the time at his NASCAR Cup racing summit in 2007 – and did so with significantly more opportunities to try out a 36-race plan .

In Formula 1, 10 or 15 victories over a career are enough to make a legend. The Argentine Juan Manuel Fangio, the five-time champion who dominated F1 in the 1950s, has 24 wins. Frenchman Alain Prost, the four-time title holder who excelled in the 80s and 90s, more than doubled that amount. Schumacher, the Ferrari ace, raised the bar even higher and won an incredible 91 times out of 308 starts. Meanwhile, Hamilton’s 100 triumphs have come in a relatively airy 281 attempts. Not only is this by far the highest career success rate of any F1 driver, including Schumacher’s who stacked his 91 wins at 30%, it’s also far more wins than some of the teams on the grid. Even more incredible is Hamilton’s 63 percent chance of landing on the podium, beating Schumacher’s by 13 points.

Related story

Lewis Hamilton is a beautiful, precious factRead now

Of course, there are still people who dismiss Hamilton’s wealth as an inevitable by-product of a Mercedes team that has monopolized the sport since 2014. At that time, the F1 switched from fuel-guzzling V8 engines to V6 turbo hybrid “drive units”. If these new engines lagged a little in horsepower, they more than made up for it with seamless acceleration. (That is, there is practically no delay between the driver accelerating and the car pulling away.) In addition, Mercedes would not only gain an advantage in developing the new unit, but also on the track, with hundreds of millions of success that are spent every year to further develop the engine and the car.

But then again, it’s not as if Hamilton was sliding down a straight and slippery road the whole time. He had to drive the super sports car over and over again on the rugged edge, more than 16,000 racing laps, across five continents, in all kinds of moisture and of course in the rain. He has stayed in the fight this year despite suffering from persistent fatigue, dizziness, and other long-haul symptoms of COVID-19 after testing positive for the virus late last year. He elbowed his way to some pretty formidable rivals – first Fernando Alonso (who continued to chase him out of midfield after leaving McLaren in late 2007), then German Sebastian Vettel (a four-time world champion at Red Bull), then another German, Nico Rosberg (a beast from his youth who turned into a Mercedes teammate who turned fierce rival who won the 2016 Hamilton crown) and now the Belgian-Dutchman Max Verstappen (the 23-year-old Red Bull Racing prodigy taking a five-point lead on Hamilton ahead of the Russian Grand Prix).

Hamilton had to have the foresight to leave McLaren and sign with Mercedes – which not only had not competed as a works team in Formula 1 since the mid-1950s, but offered him a car that Schumacher had previously occupied.

Moreover, Hamilton’s biracial upbringing in the working class didn’t exactly set him up for a sport in which mostly well-heeled white families burned up on small fortunes and dragged their children to the top. Hamilton never makes it without his black Grenadian British father Anthony, who juggles four jobs just to keep him in go-karts long enough for Ron Dennis, then head of the McLaren Mercedes F1 program, to invest. Hamilton is still the first and only black man in this billionaire boys’ club, whose roots go back to the post-reconstruction black chain gangs that paved the way for the first “grand prizes” races in the early 20th century.

Yet something about Hamilton was inevitable.

From the moment the Brit entered Formula 1 in 2007 at the age of 22, it was clear he wasn’t going to take the time to adapt to the series’ more complex cars and tracks. Hamilton would also not step back behind his McLaren-Mercedes team-mate Alonso, a born Wheelman who started this year as the youngest re-champion in the history of the sport. But in the first five races of the season, Hamilton finished twice ahead of Alonso, while tied with the Spaniard at the top of the drivers’ standings.

Victory # 100 started in cool and slippery conditions in Sochi, Russia, which at times turned the field on the wrong foot and resulted in an atypically sloppy driving for Hamilton. In the run-up to the race, he collided with his Jackman in the pit and crashed into the pit wall during a routine stop, a final mistake that condemned Hamilton to fourth place on the grid.

When the 53-lap function was unwound under a slate-gray sky, Hamilton was immediately besieged by his rivals and slipped to seventh place. And while Verstappen, Hamilton’s main rival, was even further behind after he started last, four of the cars in front of Hamilton were Mercedes-operated – essentially, he came in in a shadow race. Additionally, two of these cars – which were part of Hamilton’s old McLaren team – came from the season’s only one-two F1 win. Hamilton waited patiently for his time and managed his tires. And when he crept into second place on lap 30, a historic moment that once seemed so out of sight after a winless series of five races was in sight again. “You can win this race!” Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff called out to Hamilton over the radio.

The only man who stood in Hamilton’s way was Lando Norris – like him, a young Brit who started his F1 career at McLaren. And by the last nine laps of the race, it was clear that Norris was determined to take his first career win by whatever means necessary. When the Black Sea showers finally drifted onto the track, Norris was firmly convinced that he would hold out until the end and waved off the team’s orders to get rain tires. Hamilton also stayed on his heels because he believed he could catch up with Norris in time with his slick tires. But in the end he gave in to team orders and swapped tires – a decision that made all the difference. While Norris slipped and slipped and eventually slipped off the greasy track, Hamilton easily overtook him on lap 51 and drove to his fifth checkered flag in Sochi, where Mercedes has never lost.

When Hamilton emerged from his Mercedes machine at Parc Fermé, the station where cars were parked after the race, he was mostly subdued and clenched his fist as he quietly jogged to a cordon to hug his insane Mercedes teammates . “The team made a great call right at the end,” said Hamilton, who is two points ahead of Verstappen – who cleverly cleared the field in Sochi into second place. “I’m incredibly grateful to all the men and women here and in the factory because, wow, 100.”

The moment becomes even more important away from the track. Hamilton was born to a white mother and a black father and identifies as black. Whether after a race or online, he has faced challenges in a sport that has been pretty happy with homogeneity over the past century. During a test session in Barcelona in 2008, Hamilton was besieged with racist abuse from Spanish fans who were angry about his transfer from Alonso – some of them raining insults on their black faces. When Hamilton turned 99 in a controversial overtaking maneuver by Verstappen that knocked the championship leaders out of the race on the first lap.

Whenever questions about diversity and inclusion in sport arise, he is always the one who has to give an answer. When much of the sports world rose up after George Floyd was assassinated by a Minneapolis police offer in 2020 to protest against racism against blacks, Hamilton used his massive social media following and resonant voice in sports to raise the bar Forcing F1 to do the same, starting with kneeling before the races. Earlier this month, the Hamilton Commission, an organization the F1 champion launched to combat the inclusion of blacks in the sport, released a 93-page report that outlined three main barriers to entry, among other things: accountability and Measurement, support, empowerment and inspiration and engagement. Unsurprisingly, these very specific results were also achieved with vitriol.

Aside from condemning Hungary’s controversial new anti-LGBTQ + law earlier this year, Hamilton plans to do more than win races. Hamilton is inspired by tennis great Serena Williams, a friend from Miami who traveled to Monaco to play Grand Marshal and cheer him on before this year’s French Open. We’re seeing the next generation of black girls inspired by Williams. Hamilton is serious about doing the same for young black drivers, would-be engineers, aerodynamicists and team bosses that he has armed his commission with $ 30 million of his own money to accelerate this change.

For any other driver, 100 wins would end any debate about his immortality. But it’s just the beginning for Hamilton. With no fresher faces in his image to keep F1’s progress on track, 100 wins is just a nice round number in a record book that an even more ambitious driver may one day break. Of course, there is no promising F1 that will reach this point. Yet at this point, only a fool would dare bet against whatever comes closest to a certain thing in racing.

What is

right now

Award-winning text by Andrew Lawrence, a former Sports Illustrated contributor, appears in The Guardian, Men’s Health, Car and Driver, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter: @by_drew.