Lewis Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton's route into Formula 1 began with a handshake nobody was supposed to remember. As a ten-year-old, he approached McLaren boss Ron Dennis at an awards ceremony and told him he wanted to race for his team one day. Dennis signed him to McLaren's young driver programme not long after, an extraordinary bet on a child that ended up paying off more spectacularly than anyone could have predicted. Hamilton had been karting since he was six, coached hard by his father Anthony, who worked multiple jobs to fund his son's racing before McLaren's backing arrived.

He tore through the junior ranks, winning the GP2 title in 2006, and made his F1 debut with McLaren in 2007 as a rookie alongside double world champion Fernando Alonso — and promptly out-shone him, missing the title by a single point in one of the most remarkable debut seasons in the sport's history. He didn't have to wait long to put that right: his first World Championship arrived in 2008, won on the final corner of the final lap of the final race, a moment that's since become one of the sport's most replayed pieces of drama.

The middle years of his career were spent building toward something bigger. In 2013 he made the surprising decision to leave McLaren for Mercedes, a team not yet winning races — a gamble that looked questionable at the time and looks like one of the shrewdest moves in motorsport history in hindsight. Mercedes became dominant almost immediately, and Hamilton became the driver who dominated alongside them, winning six more championships between 2014 and 2020 to bring his total to seven, tying the record for the most titles ever won. Along the way he became the sport's all-time leader in wins and pole positions, redefining what a modern F1 career could look like both on track and in terms of cultural reach off it.

2021 delivered the closest, most controversial title fight of his career, a season-long battle with a young Max Verstappen that came down to the final lap of the final race and ended in Hamilton's favour being overturned — a result that still divides opinion. He continued at Mercedes through the years that followed, chasing a record eighth title as the team worked through a difficult rebuilding period, before making one of the most stunning moves of his career: leaving Mercedes, the team that had defined half his life, for Ferrari.

Racing in red at an age when most drivers have long retired, Hamilton is writing a genuinely unprecedented late chapter — the winningest driver in history, still chasing history's most storied team's first title in years, still hungry for an eighth championship that would put the argument about the sport's greatest ever ever beyond debate. Whatever happens next, few careers in any sport have combined longevity, dominance and reinvention quite like his.