Lewis Hamilton admits F1 racing made him miserable

Lewis Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton admits F1 racing made him miserable

Lewis Hamilton has been in F1 since 2007

Sam Cook Digital Journalist

Sports Journalist who has been covering motorsport since 2023

Saturday 20 December 2025 18:56

Seven-time F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton has admitted that F1 made him miserable during his early days in the sport.

Hamilton joined the pinnacle of motorsport back in 2007 as a 22-year-old rookie, and he instantly hit the ground running, winning four races and missing out on that season's championship by a single point.

The Brit then went one better in 2008, claiming his maiden world championship title. While a period of drought then followed when it came to drivers' championships, Hamilton opted to move away from McLaren and join Mercedes in 2013, and the rest is history.

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Hamilton went on to claim six more championships in eight years after joining Mercedes, and became statistically speaking the most successful driver in F1 history due to his grands prix wins, podiums and pole positions tallies too.

But Hamilton's off-track work in the past few years has arguably been just as impressive as on-track, as he has become a champion for some great causes, including setting up his own charity Mission 44 in 2020 which seeks to help children from under-represented backgrounds to get into a career in STEM.

On top of his charitable work, Hamilton also owns a range of businesses, and even earned a production credit on the F1 movie which came out earlier this year and starred Brad Pitt and the stars of the F1 grid.

Now, Hamilton has been asked in an interview with Vanity Fair about how he finds the time to complete all of these projects, to which the seven-time champion gave a brutally honest answer about wanting to do more than just F1.

"I don’t really know where it’s come from," Hamilton admitted. "The problem is, when you grow up in racing, you are put in a box. If you listen to people in our sport, they say, 'just race.' That’s all they want you to do.

"When I was young, I enjoyed racing. But when I got to Formula 1, I was quite miserable. I was like, 'Oh my God, I’ve reached my dream. I should be the happiest ever.' But when you’d come away the Monday after the race, your adrenaline drops like coming down a roller-coaster ride.

"You hit ground bottom, almost because your energy’s depleted and, apart from working out, there’s nothing to fill the void afterward."

Was the F1 movie a success?

This latest interview that Hamilton has done was largely focused on his path to Hollywood and becoming a colleague of the likes of Pitt, Javier Bardem and Jerry Bruckheimer.

There's no doubt that the F1 movie was one of the big talking points of the 2025 season, with drivers, fans and critics all giving the blockbuster mixed reviews.

Carlos Sainz wasn't a fan, questioning the authenticity of the storylines, while many fans pointed to the appalling representation of females in the film.

Pitt stars in the lead role of the film as aged racing driver Sonny Hayes, who in his 60s miraculously returns to the sport to race for fictional team APX GP.

There is one female character of any note in the film, who is introduced as F1's first ever female technical director but who then magically falls in love with her driver and becomes Pitt's love interest (yes, you heard that correctly).

Financially, though, it was a success. The blockbuster surpassed $545m (£410m) at the global box office, higher than World War Z, which achieved $540m (£407m) and was previously Pitt's most successful film.

The movie was directed by Joseph Kosinski, and it also set a record for Apple Studios as their highest-grossing theatrical release of all time.

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