How Hamilton overcame his disability

Lewis Hamilton. There, that's that out of the way. A name - especially that name - can cast a big shadow. But this is the story of an illuminating individual. This is the story of Nicolas Hamilton.

The 23-year-old would have earned this story on AUTOSPORT regardless of his filial ties to a two-time Formula 1 world champion. If you don't know, Hamilton has cerebral palsy. His condition, which affects muscle control and movement, meant he was in a wheelchair until a few years ago and even now moving around is difficult.

What makes him different to any of the 150,000-plus people in Britain suffering from cerebral palsy, and why are we interested in him? Because he became a British Touring Car Championship driver at Croft last month. I'm not going to insult your intelligence and suggest Lewis's success hasn't aided Hamilton Jr's profile. He doesn't shy away from it either.

"I'm proud of my association with the family and what Lewis has achieved," he says. "We're always going to get that, 'Lewis's brother' or whatever. But I'm focusing on myself now and stepping out of his shadow - even though I'm proud of being in it at the same time."

His means for doing that is the BTCC, which is incredible when you consider the severity of his disability. You'd do Hamilton a disservice to pretend not to notice the difficulty he has manoeuvring inside the AmD Tuning truck, because it rams home the seismic effort he's put in to get to the stage where he can drive his Audi S3 touring car.

Hamilton will contest five BTCC rounds this season, in a slightly-modified Audi S3 © LAT

"In testing I was starting to struggle on long runs; my leg would start to hurt and ache," admits Hamilton, whose Audi has a hand-operated clutch and slightly wider pedals that are spaced further apart.

"But I buckled down again. Once you drive the car you know what you need to strengthen. Now I don't struggle; in terms of my condition it's not an issue - I've got enough strength to keep going."

Granted a guest entry and starting his BTCC campaign at Croft, Hamilton will contest four more rounds this season, with Knockhill not on the cards because of its grid limit.

While Croft was the beginning of this new part of his racing career, it was also the end of a long road for Hamilton, who set his sights on the series back in 2013. He has tried to be independent, and although Monster - a sponsor of his brother - has a significant presence on his car, it's a different story to his two years in the Renault UK Clio Cup, when his car was covered in a litany of McLaren/Lewis backers.

"The thing is now I can sit in my seat and say I've earned it," he says with a fierce pride. "I've been working non-stop over the past two years, and it's been me and my management team helping raise the funds and sponsorship. It was me who instigated it all and got it together.

"This is all about what I wanted to do, all about me. It's been a pretty crazy journey. If you looked at me in 2006 when I was in a wheelchair, things weren't looking positive - especially on a sporting level. I remember leaving my house on Friday thinking, 'Wow, I'm off for my first race meeting in the BTCC, look how far we've come'.

Nicolas has been a regular presence supporting brother Lewis in F1 © LAT

"It's a bit surreal knowing that's my car sitting out there waiting for me to get in. The amount of work and effort we've all put in to get to this stage is phenomenal. I'm proud to be sitting on the grid - it's a milestone in itself."

By the end of that weekend it would have been easy to look at the timesheets from Croft and declare that this was a mistake and the move was far too soon. After all, he qualified 29th, half a second off the next driver and a shade over four seconds from pole, then finished last of the drivers who had a clean run in all three races. But that would be to gloss over facts and ignore context.

In qualifying his best lap should have been a second faster had he not been baulked at the Complex, and would have been at least a couple of rows further up the grid - or, as he puts it, "beating a lot of able-bodied people". This was at a track he hadn't driven since 2012, with just three days of testing a touring car under his belt.

Hamilton went from 5.2 seconds off the benchmark in FP1 to setting a best lap 3.5s slower than the best in race three. He drove three clean races, which couldn't be said for plenty of other drivers, and should rightly be looking for a big step forward at Snetterton - a venue where he has tested the Audi - when the championship resumes in August. He will almost certainly not be at the back of the grid for long.

You might look at this as an incredibly generous assessment for a driver so far from the points, let alone the front. But while there are two elements people automatically register when they think of Hamilton - his brother and his disability - there's a third that's as significant for his move into the BTCC as the other two: his inexperience.

Two seasons in the Renault UK Clio Cup form the bulk of Hamilton's experience © LAT

His last full season was in 2012, which was a disappointing sophomore year in the Renault UK Clio Cup plagued by incidents. Prior to that he had no karting background - his disability saw to that.

And since then he's had a handful of outings in a SEAT in the European Touring Car Cup, but they ended in mid-2013. A Ginetta G55 test in early 2014 is all he has to his name from the time his racing stopped two years ago to the moment he started testing the Audi.

Hamilton's perseverance and determination to live and compete on his terms in the face of a serious disability define his character, but it's his inexperience that defines his ability as a driver. He's been able to work on his physical limitations, and often cites the effort he put in at the gym to go from being able to barely push 20kg with his legs to comfortably pushing over 100kg (a BTCC car requires 90kg of pressure on the brake pedal at full whack, for comparison).

His lack of mileage is something that only seat time will overcome. The BTCC is as tough as any championship to crack. Drivers who have had success across the TOCA package or in a previous life as a budding single-seater driver have struggled to come in and succeed.

Hell, even former champions have come back and been mired in the midfield. So what chance does a disabled rookie with only two full years' experience under his belt - and a two-year gap between his last race and his BTCC debut - have?

Every chance, reckons Hamilton.

"Firstly I want people to understand I didn't plan to come in here and blow the world apart," he says. "I knew it was going to be tough. I want people to understand it's a massive learning process for me.

Hamilton made steady progress during his BTCC debut at Croft © LAT

"The inexperience is where you come unstuck. You can never stop learning and it doesn't matter how fit I am and that I have now overcome my condition to get to this point.

"When you get in the car and don't have the experience and confidence you need, that's when it gets tough. You can't replace it. That's why it's so difficult to just jump in and get pace out of it."

He reckons it's only a matter of time before he gets to that stage, and it would be churlish to dismiss that optimism off the back of what was genuinely an encouraging debut.

Once he starts moving forward, more people will take notice - and take him seriously. Then the 'driven-to-inspire' moniker he attaches to his project, already a hit if social media is anything to go by, can really take off.

That's a salient point to note when asking why Hamilton chose the BTCC. It's an important destination, not just in his pursuit of a career in motorsport but as a gateway to people with or without disabilities who he wants to motivate. You only have to look at the goodwill towards Alex Zanardi, who has continued his motorsport career after losing both legs in his CART crash but also reinvented himself as a top Paralympian.

What Hamilton wants to do, though, is try to show that you can become a good driver if you, unlike Zanardi, start off with a disability - even though it creates significant hurdles.

"I'd like them to look at it as: I'm a disabled guy beating able-bodied people," he says. "That's what I'd like to see. It's unheard of in motorsport; people think it's impossible to do so. I'll have more time to show my true colours and I just want people to get behind me and be inspired by what I do.

"I've got so much to learn and being in BTCC these guys don't take any prisoners. There's too much to learn to put pressure on yourself to gain a result. I want to win; I want to get faster. All people need to look for is progress."