Who is Lewis Hamilton?

For the last few months I’ve been reading Lewis Hamilton’s book, My Story. Each day in the lunch room I will read a handful of pages, and because most people in my workplace are quite polite, they’ll ask what I’m reading.

I realise that my level of devotion to Formula One puts me very much in the minority in Australia, and I realise that most rational people don’t stay awake until the early hours of every second Monday morning to watch a race, but they do read the papers, right? And they watch the weekly news bulletins, right?

Even if you don’t follow Formula One, everybody in the world knows who Lewis Hamilton is. He burst onto the scene in 2007 as a rookie McLaren Mercedes driver and ended up losing the world championship by one measly point to the quiet Finnish fellow. Come 2008, Lewis made up for his minor shortcomings in the previous season by winning the championship in a nail-biting final round in Brazil.

So, if you didn’t know who Lewis Hamilton was in 2007 or earlier, surely by the end of 2008 everybody knows of him, right? Well that’s what I thought, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The first person to ask me was a thirty-something colleague who drives a new Audi. Surely those factors alone would put him a general demographic that would know of Lewis? No. My colleague asked if it was his age or ignorance that led to his lack of knowledge. When I told him Lewis was a Grand Prix driver, he admitted that it was a case of ignorance, as he had no interest in Formula One.

I was surprised by this, but not as surprised as I was when three other colleagues all confided that they had never heard of Lewis Hamilton. Even after showing them the cover of the book with Lewis’s face on the front cover, there was no connection whatsoever.

I shouldn’t really be surprised, but I never thought that I lived in a little fantasy world where Lewis Hamilton was the most famous person in the world. Perhaps I should have expanded my little experiment by asking those same colleagues if they knew of such drivers as Michael Schumacher, Ayrton Senna or (due only to his nationality) Mark Webber.

It’s a fact that us die-hard Formula One fans will have to live with forever, that our beloved sport will never garner more than a few inches of column space behind the AFL, NRL, A-League, Rugby and even V8 Supercars. Channel Ten may give us a minute or two during the Monday night news, but only if there was a big accident or something else that appeals to the mainstream.

But does it really matter? Does it matter that no one else besides us realise that Formula One is the greatest sport in the world? Not in the slightest. I’m happy to continue living in my little fantasy world, where Lewis Hamilton is the most famous person on the planet.