Whether off the track or on much of the talk about Formula One in 2014 has been about Lewis Hamilton. And the opening day of practice for the Monaco Grand Prix was a continuation.
As seems to be the way in just about every day of F1 running this campaign he established himself therein as the guy to beat, even though he was slightly tardy in attending the first session having, um, slept longer than anticipated.
But it was afterwards that it all really kicked off as it was said, not for the first time, that Lewis had mis-spoke.
The banner headlines – including those from usually reputable sources – appeared unequivocal: ‘Lewis Hamilton: Nico Rosberg not as hungry for the title as me’ and the like. One from the extreme end of the interpretative spectrum even attributed ‘Nico’s a rich kid’ to him.
The only problem was he didn’t say this. He didn’t come all that close either.
What actually happened is that having been asked in an interview about a German publication that had speculated ‘whether Nico is too soft for that fight – because you (Lewis) have more killer instinct’, Lewis replied: ‘I come from a not-great place in Stevenage and lived on a couch in my dad’s apartment – and Nico grew up in Monaco with jets and hotels and boats and all these kind of things – so the hunger is different.’
Note that. ‘Different’. Not bigger. Not smaller. Different. From a different source. Of a different sort. Pretty non-contentious.
This seems just the latest case wherein sensationalist headlines and actual words barely were nodding acquaintances.
And by my reckoning even if we are to try to delve beneath the surface of Lewis’s words, in the effort of finding a subtext regarding his take on his team-mate and title rival’s ‘hunger’ or of anything else, they can be interpreted as a slight of Rosberg, but they can equally be interpreted as not a slight of Rosberg. And I’d venture that given everything the latter interpretation seems much more probable.
Alongside the reaction too I’ve encountered the odd comment to the effect that it was off limits for Lewis to talk about upbringings – certainly to talk about Rosberg’s; perhaps even to talk about his own.
It didn’t strike me as a too unreasonable area of discussion however. Such talk is pretty common in those other sports wherein many of its participants emerge from humble beginnings, such as football, boxing as well as the major American sports. Therein the related ingrained-from-an-early-age desire to prove yourself, to haul yourself up by the bootstraps as it were, possibly even to use your sporting skills as an avenue of escape, is a fairly regular narrative; something thought to sustain many glittering careers.
Perhaps the chafe from Lewis’s words reflects that F1 remains an activity with lots of wealth, and let’s face it lots of privilege, and therefore ‘working class hero’ tales are less likely or common. It chafed mainly out of rarely having been aired before, in other words.
And if Lewis believes that this is where he derived his unbreakable and desperate will to win that he continues to benefit from then it doesn’t seem too unreasonable for him to talk about it, especially in response to a question which asked him explicitly about his ‘killer instinct’.
As for the question of why mention Rosberg’s upbringing, the most likely answer is ‘context’. After all, if Lewis thought that everyone else had a similar upbringing to him there would be little point in talking about it.
Lewis in his answer then went onto say that he wants ‘to be the hungriest guy in the cockpit from all 22 of us’, but this seems no more noteworthy than saying he wants to be the quickest out there, or to make the fewest mistakes. So nothing to see there either.
And that was your lot.
At a stretch one could say that Lewis could learn to pick his words a bit more selectively. Perhaps he could have – however unfair it seemed – foreseen how his prose would be twisted and either treaded more carefully or even sidestepped the matter altogether.
Indeed this is something we’ve seen Lewis encounter controversy via before, such as a few weeks ago with his ‘everything happens for a reason’ comment about Michael Schumacher’s injury. Clearly from watching the interview and reading the full text this was intended as a message of hope, that Michael’s physical fitness and fighting spirit meant few would be as well-placed as he to get through what he’s been experiencing. But that wasn’t the inference of much of the reporting and comment. Or even a few days ago when he said he should have been quicker than Rosberg in the Spanish race. Reading the words I interpreted it as Lewis being his own harshest critic – a territory he has roamed plenty of times before of course – but that’s not what many took from them.
Perhaps the rest of us should be more careful in turn too however. We can have sympathy for Lewis as in none of these cases as far as the best evidence suggests did Lewis mean harm. And after all one way or another he appears more open with the media these days, having shed a lot of the distant, rather suspicious, demeanour that he had for a while in his McLaren years. Let’s hope that recent experiences won’t send him back to the bunker as it were.
And in this latest case even with everything said, even with the potential for reinterpretation of what Lewis said, those headlines mentioned – as also mentioned from so-called reputable outlets too – seemed to me something of a stretch. I don’t like to sound pious about media reporting but it feels a lot to me that Lewis has had something of a number done on him here.
Most broadly also how often are we heard to bemoan that F1 pilots aren’t open with the media these days; that they give bland, non-committal answers to questions? Perhaps cases such as this – and the frenzied reaction to them – demonstrate that, just as with many things, we get the F1 drivers that we deserve.
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