![]() At one point, he even defied the orders of his race engineer, Pete Bonnington, refusing to pit when instructed as he sought to extract the most from his medium tyres. ![]() The past two years in Mexico, he had experienced the strange sensation of taking the title despite finishing ninth and fourth.īut with so many of his family in the garage watching on, this was no time for half-measures. Wedded to a one-stop strategy, when all the other leaders had decided on two, the champion-elect was thinking only of a win as the perfect adornment to his day of glory. “It’s an honour to be up there with the greats – and I’ll keep pushing.”Īs Vettel limped back to the pits, Hamilton made hay while the sun shone. “As an athlete, I feel as fresh as can be,” he said. While most drivers two months shy of their 35th birthday might talk of retirement, he will line up again next year with the finest car, expressing every intention of carrying on beyond F1’s rules revolution in 2021. The alarm for his rivals is that Hamilton shows no sign of relenting. “I feel so much emotion.” As for the message to his team, he adapted it straight from the title of the Maya Angelou poem tattooed across his back: “Still we rise, guys. After a feat on this scale, Hamilton wanted to share the joy as widely as possible. ![]() So, too, were much of his family: his mother Carmen, his stepmother, stepfather, his uncle George, even his aunt from Trinidad. Even Matthew McConaughey, his Oscar-winning friend and an Austin resident, was on hand to salute him. “Unauthorised vehicles will be removed.” Such was the deference to Hamilton in the paddock, any rogue parking was unlikely. While a red carpet was rolled out for visiting celebrities, a personal space was designated for Hamilton in parc ferme. “Six championships, whoever would believe it? It means the world.” “That’s the family motto.”įather Anthony, who has presided over every stage of Hamilton’s quest for greatness, could not conceal the strength of feeling as he watched his son enrich his legend. “My dad told me, when I was six or seven years old, never to give up,” he grinned. Even the second place that he delivered behind Valtteri Bottas at the US Grand Prix came only after a relentless fight for victory. Where lesser mortals might have resorted to autopilot, knowing that they needed to finish only eighth to make sure of the ultimate prize, Hamilton, with 83 wins to his name, displayed a cussedness worthy of a driver chasing his first. Today, only Michael Schumacher stands above him in the firmament, with seven titles, and perhaps only for another year.įittingly, for this flourish, Hamilton produced a performance full of the qualities that he has made his signature. There are still more pieces of the puzzle to add.” How many more, one wonders. “I’m working on my masterpiece,” he said on Sunday night. He preferred, he explained, to imagine himself as an artist. ![]() As he draped himself beside his car in the Union flag on Sunday night, he looked every inch the icon. It is a quite giddying number of titles: one more than Juan Manuel Fangio, twice as many as Sir Jackie Stewart. In his 13th season at the pinnacle of motor racing, Britain’s greatest driver has inscribed his name among the immortals of all sport as a six-time Formula One world champion. Here in the heart of cowboy country, he had performed not his first rodeo, or his second, but his sixth. Rubbing tears from his eyes in the cockpit, Lewis Hamilton struggled to absorb the feat he had just accomplished. Ranking Lewis Hamilton's six F1 world titles: How good is his 2019 triumph?. ![]()
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