Nick es posiblemente uno de los que mejor se lo está pasando este año siguiendo la Fórmula 1. El hermano de Lewis, posiblemente, le aporte la cordura que Wonder_Ham necesite para estar en medio de todo el tinglado.
Su historia, la de los Hamilton, no es sencilla, como cuenta el Independent:
«My dad has been the main driving force behind me getting to where I am. The way I am now is all because of him. Some people may say he’s overprotective, but he was making sure that I had a better life than he had.»
Anthony Hamilton had a tough childhood in west London as the son of a London Underground worker who had moved to Britain from Grenada in the 1950s. By the time his own boy was born in January 1985, he was living in Hatfield in Hertfordshire and married to Carmen, who is white. They named the boy after Carl Lewis.
Two years later, Carmen and Anthony divorced. Both have since remarried. «I’ve got two separate families but we work closely together and I spend a lot of time with my mum.» At the age of six he was given a remote-control car for his birthday. Soon he declared it wasn’t fast enough, so they got him a petrol version which he raced in competitions. But it was the following year, when he tried a go-kart on holiday in Spain, that Lewis Hamilton found his vocation.
«I just seemed to have the technique, working the throttle and the brake,» he says. «Karts are where you learn your race craft.» His hand-eye co-ordination and feel for a track were astonishing, say those who saw him move rapidly through the ranks of junior competitions.
Anthony, who was prepared to back his son’s talent as far as it would go, took redundancy from British Rail in order to be able to drive Lewis to practice and races all over the country. At the same time, he found an outlet for a self-taught talent of his own, by starting an IT consultancy.
«If I hadn’t been born, he would probably have stayed at British Rail, so we’ve had a real effect on each other’s lives,» says Lewis. The youthful-looking father is sometimes mistaken for his son. He was also responsible for Lewis meeting Ron Dennis, the head of the McLaren racing team, at an awards ceremony in London. Hamilton was there as the youngest karting champion in Britain, aged 10, and his father urged the boy to introduce himself to Dennis. He did, and said: «I’m going to race for you one day.»
Dennis told him to call in nine years’ time. But it didn’t take that long. Just three years later, after yet more karting victories, Lewis was invited to join a new training programme started by McLaren and Mercedes. Dennis has called him his My Fair Lady experiment.
El resto de esta información la podeis leer completa en el estupendo artículo de Independent on Sunday, merece la pena.