None of my siblings or close friends enjoy car racing. Therefore, I had no one to celebrate with yesterday after Lewis Hamilton clinched his third Formula One (F1) championship, especially given that it played out against NFL Sunday.
In fact, one of my NFL-loving brothers dismissed my jubilant attempts to convey the significance of Hamilton’s achievement with derisive comments about car racing and rednecks. This caused me to betray my own prejudice by countering that FI is to urbane people like me what NASCAR is to rednecks….
In any event, here’s a little of what I wrote seven years ago – in “Hamilton Becomes the Youngest Ever and First Black F1 Champion,” November 3, 2008 – after he won his first championship.
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If you don’t know Formula One from Formula 409, please take note:
F1 car racing is a sport that requires the steady hands of a surgeon, the daring skill of a jet fighter, and the physical stamina of a marathon runner. Moreover, no sport can match the sustained thrill and nail-biting suspense one gets from watching those drivers navigate the zigs, zags, and hairpin-turns of a grand prix racetrack as they jockey for position at speeds exceeding 200 mph! …
Naturally, given the uncanny similarities in racial background and precocious talent between Hamilton and Tiger Woods, the barons of Hamilton’s sport are banking he’ll do for F1 racing what Woods has done for golf.
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Of course, the spectacular downward spiral Tiger’s career took just one year after I wrote this makes the analogy to him a little unfortunate in hindsight.
I’m sure Tiger never imagined that booty hunting in his private life could haunt his professional life the way it has. Therefore, I hope Lewis learns this lesson, especially given the way he flaunts his pursuits in this respect. Indeed, that he’s so often featured as a front-row gawker at Victoria’s Secret and other fashion shows does not bode well.
But there’s no gainsaying today that the only driver who can stop him from rewriting the records books in FI, as Tiger was supposed to do in Golf, is Lewis himself.
After the ecstatic Lewis Hamilton took the chequered flag on Sunday he performed donut spins for the cheering crowd while Daft Punk’s ‘One More Time’ blared out from the Mercedes garage. As he crossed the line and had it confirmed that he had equalled his idol Ayrton Senna by making it three F1 world championships the 30-year-old said over the car radio: ‘This is the greatest moment of my life.’
(UK Guardian, October 25, 2015)
Incidentally, Hamilton’s Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg deserves the viral condemnation he’s getting for his poor sportsmanship, which had him stewing in self-pity over his second-place finish. Still, he deserves credit for finishing this race like a worthy teammate, holding off the furious late challenge by third-place finisher (and four-time F1 champion) Sebastian Vettel as he did.
After all, a truly spiteful Rosberg would have let Vettel overtake him and thereby deny Hamilton the points separation he needed to clinch the championship in this race. Never mind that the effect would only have been to delay Hamilton’s coronation for another day (either in Mexico on November 1, Brazil on November 15, or Abu Dhabi on November 29 — the final of this nineteen-race season).
Drive on, Brother! Drive on!
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