The Silverstone mega moments that cemented Hamilton’s legend status

10-11 June 2006, GP2 Series

The mainstream audience was several months out from learning Lewis Hamilton’s name. But those attending the 2006 British Grand Prix got a taste of what was surely coming to Formula 1. After several years of dominance by Ferrari and Michael Schumacher, ticket sales had been on the wane and many in the crowd had at least one eye on footballing matters in Germany where, on the Saturday, England faced Paraguay in the first Group B game of the FIFA World Cup.

“Genius” was how Autosport described Hamilton’s outstanding drives in the two GP2 Series races which formed the top of the supporting programme at Silverstone that year. “On a weekend when World Cup fever swept across the home of British motor racing, his dominance put the focus firmly back on the track and was further proof that here is a star in the making.”

In the longer feature race on Saturday, Hamilton started alongside fellow Brit Adam Carroll on the front row, seized the lead from the polesitter at Copse – the first corner in those days – and remained in front despite three Safety Car periods, crossing the line five seconds ahead of Timo Glock. It was a performance that would linger longer in the memory than England squeaking past Paraguay courtesy of a
Carlos Gamarra own goal.

But it was Sunday’s sprint race which inked Hamilton in as a bona fide future star. Since the first eight grid spots were determined by reversing the top eight finishers in the feature race, Hamilton had to fight his way through from eighth – with championship nemesis Nelson Piquet Jr fifth.

Hamilton had the benefit of some luck – gearbox issues for third-placed Alex Premat and seventh-placed Glock meant he gained two places before dicing for fifth with Carroll throughout the opening lap. Giorgio Pantano was tougher to break but Hamilton made the better restart after a Safety Car period
to seize fourth.

All that lay ahead was polesitter Felix Porteiro, aided in his bid to cling on to the lead by the frenzied battle for second between Clivio Piccione and Piquet. The Brazilian drew alongside through Copse – but Hamilton slipstreamed beautifully to get a tow from each car. They went three-wide into the right-hander at Maggotts and Hamilton swept into second, passing both in one move. As a bonus, Piquet briefly speared off-track and through an ad hoarding before rejoining.

Posterity has established this as the move of the race but Hamilton also had to work hard to pass Porteiro. Once in the lead, he clocked the fastest lap of the race to emphasise his dominance before crossing the line for his fifth victory of the year. Piquet’s only consolation was a post-race promotion from fifth to fourth when Porteiro was disqualified
for a technical infringement
picked up at scrutineering.

Hamilton's future boss at Ferrari Vasseur has fond memories of his ART driver's charging performance at Silverstone in 2006

Photo by: Lorenzo Bellanca / Motorsport Images

Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur was running Hamilton’s ART GP team: “We had a lot of good race weekends that season. Lewis won both races at the Nurburgring – that was the first time he did it and this [Silverstone] was the second, if I remember correctly. Turkey [where Lewis finished second to Piquet in both races
after starting fifth and seventh on the grid]
was also a good one.

“I don’t remember every detail of the Silverstone race but the important thing is it wasn’t just about that overtake on Piquet and Piccione. Lewis won race one and because of that [the partially reversed grid] he had to start from P8.

“It was also the first time that Ron [Dennis] came to the podium that year. I still have the picture in my office in Paris”
Fred Vasseur

“And he came back and won the second one. Psychologically speaking, he took the lead on Piquet this weekend [he was already ahead on points]. Piquet even went out and crashed into the polystyrene board. That was good! I think Lewis killed Piquet this day. He probably won the championship [that day].

“It was also the first time that Ron [Dennis] came to the podium that year. I still have the picture in my office in Paris – taken from under the podium. I was with Steeve Marcel [who had engineered Nico Rosberg to the 2005 title but only attended a handful of events in ‘06 owing to cancer treatment], who was working with us and unfortunately passed away later that year.”

6 July 2008, British Grand Prix 

Hamilton's first British GP win came in crushing fashion in terrible conditions in 2008

Photo by: Sutton Images

When F1 celebrated its 1000th world championship GP in China in 2019, journalistic doyenne and GP Racing contributor David Tremayne compiled a list of best-ever drives to mark the occasion for the official F1 website. He placed Lewis Hamilton’s performance in the 2008 British GP eighth overall in a pantheon which included Juan Manuel Fangio’s Nürburgring 1957 masterclass and Jackie Stewart’s four-minute victory margin at the ‘Green Hell’ in 1968.

Context is everything here. The season had begun with McLaren under a proverbial cloud after the ‘Spygate’ controversy and record fine the previous year. Its new car was equally matched with Ferrari’s, though each had different strengths and weaknesses which played out from circuit to circuit.

Victories in Australia and Monaco put Hamilton in the points lead, but then a bizarre pitlane blunder in Canada and the resultant grid penalty served in France (where he fell foul of the stewards
again) dropped him to fourth place.

On a sporadically wet Saturday Hamilton qualified second to team-mate Heikki Kovalainen, a dispiriting 0.5s off. That night, Hamilton’s brother Nic delivered a crucial pep talk, reassuring him
of his remarkable wet-weather driving gifts.

Race day was wet again but, after shadowing Kovalainen for five laps, Hamilton went by into Becketts and disappeared into the distance as his championship rivals humiliated themselves in the tricky conditions. Felipe Massa spun five times.

As the gap to second stretched to half a minute the pitwall begged Hamilton to slow down – but he couldn’t, finishing over a minute ahead of Nick Heidfeld’s Sauber. It was a drive of which his hero, Ayrton Senna, would have been proud.

Zero fuel founder and CEO Paddy Lowe was McLaren’s engineering director: “One of Lewis’s most exceptional qualities is his racecraft. Obviously he’s very fast as well, one of those drivers who can just pull out an enormous lap where people go, ‘Where on earth did that come from?’

Lowe worked with photographer Tee to chart tyre wear

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

“In his first year, he got nine podiums in a row in the first nine races. I don’t think anybody will do that ever again. On the 10th race [the European GP, where he finished ninth], he came on the radio to ask, ‘Where do I go?’ Because he didn’t know where you parked the car when you weren’t on the podium…

“Silverstone 2008 was a nice weekend – apart from the weather of course. But that was a big part of the story. As the engineering director I would go to races to keep in touch with everything – in the race itself I didn’t sit on the pitwall, I would time our fuel connection because it’s a very strategic input, but I would also time other teams’ pitstops. I’d be wandering around the pitlane with about three stopwatches around my neck.

“Lewis arguably lost his championship in China in 2007. He wore his wet tyre through to the canvas and fell off in the pit entry – and it was our fault. So we became very conscious of tyre life in these wet/dry races.

"We were able to keep the tyres safe because we had a photo every lap to understand how much tread we had left"
Paddy Lowe

“In Monaco in ‘08 we had similar changing conditions [the race went from wet to dry and Hamilton’s strategy was compromised by an early stop for intermediates when he hit the barrier at Tabac on lap six]. I was looking over the pitwall trying to spot tyres – there were no sensors for wear in those days – and [McLaren team photographer] Steven Tee was next to me. I said, ‘Steven, can you photograph that intermediate tyre every time please?’

“We started doing it and I was able to radio the pitwall to tell them to keep him on the inter for much longer than they wanted to – I could look at the photos and say, ‘The tyre’s all right, keep going.’ This was the first time anybody had done that and it was impromptu because Steve just happened to be there.

“So when we went to Silverstone I was doing the same but in a more planned way this time with the photographer – Steve again – organised for the job. Again we were able to keep the tyres safe because we had a photo every lap to understand how much tread we had left.

“And it was an enormous race from Lewis,
as you saw!”

6 July 2014, British Grand Prix

Hamilton's triumph over Rosberg in 2014 was an important element of his run to a second world title

Photo by: Emily Davenport / Motorsport Images

Mercedes entered the new-for-2014 hybrid era with the most competitive engine and a quick chassis – also the least ugly of the new breed. Such was Merc’s dominance that F1 ‘ringmaster’ Bernie Ecclestone pushed through a ridiculous change to the championship format in which
the final round awarded double points. But despite winning four rounds and taking two second places in the first eight races, Hamilton arrived at Silverstone 29 points down on
team-mate Nico Rosberg.

Failures to finish in Australia (spark plug failure) and Canada (brakes), plus Rosberg’s duplicity in Monaco (where he won from pole after scuppering Hamilton’s final qualifying run with a Michael Schumacher-style ‘spin’) all conspired to sap his championship momentum. Not that Niki Lauda was concerned: “He will keep fighting. Don’t worry.”

In front of a packed home crowd, Hamilton appeared to be making heavy weather of qualifying, falling to sixth in changing conditions. Then on race day, he had to contend with an early stoppage when Kimi Raikkonen
hit the barrier on the opening lap in his Ferrari and damaged a guardrail.

While the red flag threw tyre strategies into flux at this demanding circuit, come the restart Hamilton got his head down and sliced through the field to challenge his team-mate – who ultimately retired with gearbox problems. “I had my family with me and the support from the fans really spurred me on,” he said. “I couldn’t have done it without them.”

He also took issue with the cheap-looking plastic sponsor’s trophy taking the place of the traditional Mervyn O’Gorman item: “Where’s
the gold one? This is broken already!”

Andrew Shovlin remains Mercedes’ trackside engineering director: “We’d made a really good start to the year. We had a very quick car and it became apparent quite quickly that the championship would be contested between Lewis and Nico. Lewis had suffered two DNFs, though, so he was looking to make up ground. Silverstone is a weekend everyone always looks forward to, with the team being based down the road.

Shovlin recalls Hamilton was determined to recover from a tough qualifying in 2014

Photo by: Sutton Images

“We’d won the British Grand Prix with Nico the year before and I’m sure for Lewis, he knew it was a great opportunity to take another victory in front of his home crowd and close the gap to Nico. Saturday wasn’t straightforward though.

“The intermittent rain made it a difficult session and the improvements at the very end dropped Lewis to sixth. He was understandably very down on Saturday evening but you could see he was focused on coming back stronger the next day.

“He made a great start and it was shaping up to be an exciting race between him and Nico. A gearbox problem for Nico forced him to retire, though, and Lewis drove a controlled race to win. You could see the joy on his face to win at Silverstone. It was a tense year from there as both battled for the title but in the end, Lewis was a worthy winner.”

 2 August 2020, British Grand Prix

Silverstone hosted not one but two rounds of the world championship in 2020 as Formula 1 adapted to the circumstances of the COVID pandemic, holding races behind closed doors and with minimal staff travelling in closely monitored ‘bubbles’. Across the UK, with the exception of the back garden of 10 Downing Street, strict quarantine measures prevailed. For once
Hamilton would have to do without the support
of a vocal home crowd.

As he exited
Brooklands on the final lap, Hamilton's front-left also shed its remaining tread, and he drove the half-lap of his life to nurse his car across the finishing
line on three wheels…

The opening phases of the race proved largely uneventful, except for a Safety Car deployment and some indiscipline in the midfield, as Hamilton led from pole from team-mate Valtteri Bottas. But here, in round four, it was becoming apparent that car development was pushing Pirelli’s tyres to the limits of their endurance.

Bottas and then McLaren’s Carlos Sainz slowed in the final laps, complaining of vibrations – which were signalling imminent tyre failure. Bottas’s front-left exploded three laps from the end, while Sainz’s front-left let go similarly as he dived for the pits with two to go. Max Verstappen made a precautionary stop, handing the slowing Hamilton a 30-second lead.

But would it hold? As he exited
Brooklands on the final lap, Hamilton's front-left also shed its remaining tread, and he drove the half-lap of his life to nurse his car across the finishing
line on three wheels…

The dramatic circumstances of Hamilton's 2020 British GP victory are unlikely to be repeated

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

 Toto Wolff is the Mercedes
team principal: “The weekend was a strange experience. We were so happy to be back racing but it was such an odd feeling doing it in front of empty grandstands.

“Silverstone is just 10 miles from our Brackley factory, and we always have a large number of factory-based staff able to come and see their cars racing. That is one of the things I remember most – being so disappointed that they couldn’t be there. Seeing the cars on the grid before the start without that familiar Silverstone roar, particularly for Lewis who was starting on pole, was surreal.

“The race itself was relatively straightforward up until the final few laps. We had a brilliant car that year and our pace was stellar. However, we lost a 1-2 finish with Valtteri getting a puncture a few laps from the end. We knew it was going to be a long final stint for both drivers but didn’t foresee the issues we would face in those closing stages.

“Once Valtteri’s tyre had gone, we warned Lewis as quickly as we could to look after his. Of course he then had a similar issue and that final lap felt like one of the very longest of my career in motorsport. It was more a sense of relief rather than celebration when he crossed the line.”

Wolff recalls an overwhelming sense of relief after Hamilton made it to the flag on three wheels

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images