Lewis Hamilton’s Big F1 Win Matters More Than You Think

Formula One’s 2024 season rounded its halfway mark over the July 4 holiday weekend with the British Grand Prix. It’s the sport’s home race, held at Silverstone Circuit, the track that held the first-ever Grand Prix in F1’s highly competitive World Championship era in 1950. This year’s winner was Englishman Sir Lewis Hamilton, who sits apart from the rest of the sport thanks to his history-making success as the winner of the most F1 races (104), the most Driver’s World Championships (seven, held jointly with fellow legend Michael Schumacher), and most wins at Silverstone (nine).

Hamilton’s accomplishments over his 17-year career in F1 so far are more than enough to merit a spot among the all-time greats. As the only Black driver in F1 history, though, Hamilton isn’t just the Michael Jordan of the sport; he’s the Jackie Robinson, too, a class of exactly one. In other words, if you know just one name associated with F1, it’s probably Lewis Hamilton.

OK, so a well-known world-class driver won a race he’d won eight previous times. Good for him, but so what? Hamilton’s outstanding career record obscures a crucial detail: Prior to July 6, 2024, his last Grand Prix win was in December 2021. That’s 945 days if you’re counting, and as Hamilton revealed in his celebratory Instagram post about it, the man definitely has been counting. Since 2021, Lewis Hamilton has kind of been an underdog. It’s impossible to overstate the significance of this win, both as a Hamilton-loving F1 fan, and as a fan of the often high-drama Netflix docuseries Formula One: Drive To Survive.

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