The British Formula One driver ahead of the 2022 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
James Gasperotti/ZUMA Wire/IMAGO
For Lewis Hamilton, what he calls “probably the most traumatizing” has nothing to do with his Formula One career.
It was back when he was in grade school, the seven-time world champion said in a rare podcast appearance, on a recent episode of On Purpose With Jeff Shetty, which will be released Monday. The bullying and racism he experienced reached the point where he “suppressed” a lot of it because “I didn’t feel I could go home and talk to my parents,” adding, “I didn’t want my dad to think I was not strong.”
“I was already being bullied at the age of six. I think at the time of that particular school, I was probably one of three kids of color, and just bigger and stronger bullying kids were throwing me around a lot of the time,” Hamilton said to Shetty, adding that he typically was the last kid picked on the playground or when choosing teams “even if I was better than somebody else.”
He continued, “And then the constant jabs, things that are either thrown at you like bananas, or people that would use the n-word just so relaxed. People calling you half-caste and you know, just really not knowing where you fit in. That, for me, was difficult. When you then go into like history class and everything you learn in history, there are no pictures of people of color in the history that they were teaching us. So, I was thinking, Oh, well, where are the people that look like me?”
Out of approximately 1,200 students, Hamilton said there were around six or seven Black kids at the school, three of which routinely landed in the headmaster’s office. He added, “The headmaster just had it out for us, and particularly for me, I would say.”
On top of all of that, Hamilton struggled in school, not finding out he was dyslexic until he was 16 years old. He said during a Vanity Fair interview last year how he was in “the lowest classes and never given a chance to progress or even helped to progress.
“Teachers were telling me, ‘You’re never going to be nothing,’” he said. “I remember being behind the shed, in tears, like, ‘I’m not going to be anything.’ And believing it for a split second.”
The buildup of racism, bullying and school struggles made him feel “that the system was really up against me and I was kind of swimming against the tide. But I’m so grateful for that journey, ‘cause that’s what built me to the person that I am today,” he said to Shetty.
Hamilton often held back tears, but once he began racing, he found a way “to channel this emotion.” He has become one of the biggest names in Formula One, bringing home seven driver world championships and helping with eight constructors’ titles at Mercedes. He’s recorded 103 first-place finishes with 191 podiums over the last 16 seasons with McLaren (2007 to ’12) and the Silver Arrows (’13 to present). But he is the only Black F1 driver on the grid, and the racism still persists.
In an interview conducted in late 2021 that surfaced last summer, Nelson Piquet used racist language in reference to the Mercedes driver when discussing the crash between Hamilton and Max Verstappen in the ’21 British Grand Prix. Sky Sports’ translation of the Portuguese interview found that the Brazilian used the derogatory term twice in the interview. The reference translates to “little Black guy,” per The Race and Associated Press.
Piquet, a three-time F1 world champion, issued an apology, stating, in part, “The term used has widely and historically been used colloquially in Brazilian Portuguese as a synonym for ‘guy’ or ‘person’ and was never intended to offend.” Meanwhile Formula One, the FIA and Mercedes all condemned his comments before his apology but did not name Piquet in their statements.
“I’ve been on the receiving end of racism, criticism, negativity and archaic narratives, for a long, long time, and undertones of discrimination,” Hamilton said during the 2022 British Grand Prix weekend, adding that “it’s more about the bigger picture.”
“You’ve got to imagine that everyone’s PR agency have a script ready for something like that, crisis management,” he said about the “knee-jerk reaction” of condemning racism. “It’s not enough. Now it’s about actual real action.”
