Hamilton in McLaren: 28 years ago he joined the Young Driver Support Programme

Ambition “One day I want to race for you. I want to race for McLaren.” It seemed like an extremely decisive sentence for a boy of just 10 years old who presented himself in this way in front of the then Team Principal of the Woking company, Ron Dennis, at the 1995 Autosport Awards. Instead, the repeated successes in the karting championships meant that it was the English manager who was the first to believe in the potential of a very young driver who would go on to write the history of the team and of Formula 1: Lewis Hamilton. Born in Stevenage in 1985, in that meeting the current Ferrari driver was actually even more precise about his ambitions, as he himself recalled: “to race for McLaren and become world champion”. A path that took a real turning point 28 years ago, more precisely on 3 April 1998, when Dennis seriously bet on Hamilton by announcing his entry into the McLaren-Mercedes Young Driver Support Programme. The dream realized From there, his growth was such that he increasingly convinced the Team Principal to bring him closer to the world of F1. All this after winning the Formula Renault 2000 UK championships in 2003, the F3 Euro Series in 2005 and the GP2 (now Formula 2) in 2006. Statements that transformed the dream of racing for McLaren in F1 in 2007, with Hamilton already coming close to winning the world title as a rookie, something that was not achieved just by being one point behind Kimi Raikkonen in a season that saw him take nine podiums consecutive from the first match of the championship. An appointment with history that however arrived the following year in a sensational finale of the Brazilian GP, ​​where Hamilton obtained the first world title in the land of his idol Ayrton Senna. 2008 was the only championship won with McLaren (the first for the team after Mika Hakkinen in 1999), but in his subsequent experience with Mercedes the Briton won six more world championships, equaling Michael Schumacher’s all-time record, as well as establishing other historical records such as the highest number of F1 victories (105, only driver above 100), pole positions (104) and podiums (203). An ambition, the one declared 31 years ago in front of Ron Dennis, which with hindsight turned out to be anything but naive or arrogant for a boy today known as Sir Lewis Hamilton.