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This weekend will mark Lewis Hamilton's 300th F1 race of his career. The driver started his career with McLaren as Fernando Alonso's teammate in 2007 and became a standout driver on the grid from his very first race.
In the drivers' press conference ahead of the F1 French GP, the Mercedes driver reminisced about the fact that it had already been 15 years since his debut. When questioned about what advice he would give to the Hamilton of 2007, he said:
“I really don’t know if I’m honest. Have a deep conversation, probably. I don’t know. Just enjoy. Just make the most of time. Time is so precious. And I think naturally when you’re a little bit younger, you feel like you’re going to live forever and that you’ve got all the time in the world.’’
He continued:
“And I would just say time is precious so just maximise every moment you get with family with friends, create memories, that’s the most important thing. And don’t stress too much.’’
It's hard to find too many faults in a driver that has had, arguably, one of the best debuts in F1 history. Hamilton started his career against the gold standard on the grid, Fernando Alonso, took the challenge to him, and ended up beating him in the championship, all of this in his rookie season.
Lewis Hamilton unfazed by the "300-Club" curse
Lewis Hamilton was told by David Croft that no driver that has crossed the 300-race threshold has been able to win another race in their career. Lewis Hamilton laughed off the stat and admitted that he was not fazed by such things as a lot of these stats are circumstantial. More importantly, his team was working very hard to get back in front, and sooner rather than later, it was going to happen. He said:
“It doesn’t faze me because I’m working towards getting that win. So I do believe at some stage we’ll be able to compete with these guys. Whether it’s this weekend, or in five races time. So yeah, I don’t really think about that. I think more about the journey. The journey is the important part. I think we started off not where we want it to be, we’ve made progress, we started to reach a patch of a bit of consistency. Not a single person in our team has given up, and we’ve continued to push.’’
Lewis Hamilton heads into the French GP weekend on the back of three consecutive P3s in the last three races. It will be interesting to see how whether Mercedes can build on its momentum.
