Often in the in-between moments of his 18 seasons in Formula 1, Lewis Hamilton has found himself in rooms with legends. Some from other exotic industries: movies, music, fashion—all worlds Hamilton has felt increasing affinity for while becoming the winning-est F1 driver in history. And many from other major sports.

What he’d noticed was that eventually, particularly with these aging athletes just on the other side of retirement, the conversation would loop around to the subject of preparation for the afterlife.

Not death, exactly. But life after sport. “I’d spoken to so many amazing athletes, from Boris Becker to Serena Williams, even Michael Jordan,” Hamilton, now 39, says. “Talking to greats that I’ve met along the way, who are retired—or some that are still in competition—and the fear of what’s next, the lack of preparation for what’s next.

A lot of them said: ‘I stopped too early.’ Or: ‘Stayed too long.’ ‘When it ended, I didn’t have anything planned.’ ‘My whole world came crashing down because my whole life has been about that sport.’ ”

“Some of them were like: ‘I didn’t plan and it was a bit of a mess-up because I was really lost afterwards. There was such a hole. Such a void. And I had no idea how I was going to fill it. And I was in such a rush initially to try and fill it that you fill it with the wrong thing. And you make a few mistakes.

And then eventually you find your way.’ Some people took longer. Some people took shorter. But it just got my mind thinking about: Okay, when I stop, how do I avoid that? And so I got serious about finding other things that I was passionate about.”

Hamilton, whose parents split when he was a toddler and who started racing at eight, spent the first half of his life impelled by one thing: “Being the only Black kid on the circuit, struggling at school, really always my big drive was acceptance—‘If I win the race, I will receive that acceptance in this world.’

” That single-minded intent, for a working-class kid who grew up on a council estate north of London, led him to inconceivable heights within motorsport. His seven individual world championships in F1 tie him for most ever with Michael Schumacher; his eight team titles, with Mercedes, and his 103 Grand Prix victories put him in a class of one.

But it wasn’t until later that Hamilton finally felt comfortable directing the part of himself that he’d suppressed while pursuing racing full-time toward other creative arenas. Pursuits that, rather than detract from his racing career, might actually enhance his performance on the track, set him more purposefully toward the second half of his life, and ultimately enliven his soul.

“When I first got into Formula 1,” he says, “it was wake up, train, racing-racing-racing–racing, nothing else. There’s no space for anything else. But what I realized is that just working all the time doesn’t bring you happiness, and you need to find a balance in life. And I found out that I was actually quite unhappy.”

The fixation was flattening. “There was so much missing, there was so much more to me. And it was crazy, because I was like: I’m in Formula 1, I reached my dream, and I’m where I always wanted to be, I’m on top, I’m fighting for the championship. But I was just not—it was not enjoyable.”

During that period, he started dating someone in Los Angeles, and was exposed for the first time to creative people in creative industries. “It’s almost like being in a snow globe—that’s the racing world,” he says. “And there’s so much more outside of it that you just don’t have time to explore.

I think if you go to an office every day and do the same process every single day, eventually you just zone out. You have to find something else that can soothe you, can keep your mind going.”

Those trips to LA planted the seeds for what else might be possible, and ushered in a new wave of self-expression and creative experimentation—through, first, his hair, tattoos, and jewelry; then through music, fashion, and filmmaking. For the next decade, Hamilton steadily pushed against preconceptions of how a racing driver might present himself, and what else a racing driver might do while winging around the world for a global racing series.

 

“My mind is always moving,” he says, sitting across from me in London. “I have really, really vivid dreams, I have to wake up and write them down. I’ll have visions of something I’m designing. Or sometimes it’s music. Sometimes I have a song playing in my head. I’ll get up and go downstairs, play it on the piano, record it, and it becomes a part of something that I’m doing.”

Hamilton lives for the songwriting camps he sets up at least a couple times a year during his summer and winter breaks, when he gathers a team of producers and songwriters to help him pull together the many samples, threads, and lyrics he collects and noodles on throughout the season; he’s just returned from one when we meet up in February, and it’s left him on a high.

“Music keeps me alive,” he says. In the years since those seminal trips to LA, Hamilton has become the most prominent member of his sport, possibly even the most prominent athlete in any sport, to mess around this much and this seriously with so many sidelines in creative industries.

The idea of Hamilton indulging his interests hasn’t always been welcomed. “As I explored my creativity and also how to express myself,” he says, “I experienced a lot of pushback in the media.” Commentators who questioned Hamilton’s “distractions” off the track. “People just judging me: ‘This is not how a racing driver behaves.’ ‘This is not what a racing driver does.’ ” Hamilton’s rise coincided with a moment when the sport was maturing globally and corporate money was flooding into F1. As a result, the rougher edges of the sport were sanded away, and the hard-partying, death-defying racers of previous eras were replaced by a cadre of safe characters who evinced limited personality off the track.

“I actually feel for some of the drivers just before us, in the early 2000s,” Hamilton says. “There was clearly more to them, but they weren’t able to show that. But if you look at our world now, there’s drivers expressing themselves differently.”

“Bit by bit, I’ve had to work overtime to outperform,” he says, in order to shift people’s mindsets.

The motivation for Hamilton to keep pushing his sport forward on this front is twofold: Yes, to continue to break F1’s often conservative, conventional expectations. But also to set himself up for the second half of his own career. “I went through this phase of understanding that I can’t race forever,” he says, prompting him to cultivate those other passions. “Because when I stop, I’m gonna drop the mic and be happy.”

“The difficult thing is I want to do everything,” he says, laughing. “I’m very ambitious. But I understand that you can’t do—actually, I take that back because I don’t believe in the word can’t. To be a master at something, there’s the 10,000 hours it takes. Obviously, I’ve done that in racing. There’s not enough time to master all of these different things.”

So, what’s the one that’s gonna take the place of racing? I ask.

“Well,” he says. “I think it’s gonna be film and fashion.”