In 1995, a nine-year-old boy approached the McLaren team principal at an awards ceremony, asked for his autograph and said: “Hi, I’m Lewis Hamilton. I won the British championship and one day I want to be racing your cars.” Ron Dennis wrote back in his autograph book: “Phone me in nine years, we’ll sort something out.” What followed exceeded anything Dennis could have imagined in that moment.

Sir Lewis Carl Davidson Hamilton was born on January 7, 1985, in Stevenage, a town north of London, into a working-class family. His father, Anthony Hamilton, bought Lewis a kart when he was six years old under one condition: keep the grades up at school. To fund his son’s racing career, Anthony Hamilton worked up to three jobs simultaneously, including sales, dishwashing and construction work. That investment, financial and emotional, would define the early years of the most successful driver in Formula 1 history.

Hamilton was a prodigy from the very beginning. At 10 years old he won the British Karting Championship in the cadet class, becoming the youngest driver ever to do so. In 2000, aged just 15, he became European Formula A karting champion with a perfect score, beating future world karting champions and Robert Kubica in the same competition. That same year he won the Formula A World Cup at Suzuka. During one of those finals, a driver who had briefly returned to karting watched him race and said: “He is fast, mentally very strong, and only 16. If he continues in this path I am sure he will make it to Formula One.” That driver was Michael Schumacher.

The transition to single-seater cars was equally swift. In 2003 he won the British Formula Renault Championship, taking 10 of 15 races. In 2005 he claimed the Formula 3 Euro Series, and in 2006 the GP2 — the direct feeder series to F1. He had won at every level he had touched. McLaren needed no further convincing.

His Formula 1 debut in 2007 with McLaren was one of the most striking in the sport’s history. In his rookie season he won four Grands Prix, set multiple records and came within one point of winning the championship in his debut year — losing the title to Kimi Räikkönen on the final race of the season. One year later, in 2008, he delivered: he won his first world championship on the final lap of the final race of the year in Brazil, with an overtake in the last sector that passed into legend. At 23 years old, he became the youngest world champion in F1 history at the time, and the first Black driver to win the world title.

What followed at Mercedes from 2013 was an era of domination without precedent in the modern history of the sport. Six additional championships, including four consecutive titles between 2017 and 2020. In 2020 he equaled Michael Schumacher’s seven titles, a record many believed untouchable. With 105 victories, 104 pole positions and over 200 podium finishes, Hamilton rewrote every page of Formula 1’s record book.

In 2025 he made the most surprising decision of his career: leaving Mercedes after 12 years to join Ferrari, the most iconic team in the sport’s history. At 41 years old, Hamilton remains on the grid — now in 2026 with the Maranello outfit — chasing an eighth title that would place him permanently beyond any historical comparison.

The boy from Stevenage who once asked Ron Dennis for his autograph ended up making every other driver look small. Formula 1 will never see anything quite like it again.

Thumbnail: By courtesy of Pirelli