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Hamilton has such a compelling story, dad working two jobs to pay for go karting, appearing on blue peter racing a radio controlled car. Then you compare that to the sliver spoon racers like rosberg....
Yeah he did some dumb stuff in early days of racing but nothing worse than Max for instance. I don’t think he’s deliberately driving his car into anybody like Schumacher or Vettel. Schumacher’s shitty sportsmanship/ homicidal driving seams to have been erased from history since his accident.
I don’t think its unreasonable to acknowledged that a good proportion of the I don’t like Hamilton thing comes down to racism. Not that I’m accusing anybody on here of that.
HousecatHST-
Hamilton has such a compelling story, dad working two jobs to pay for go karting, appearing on blue peter racing a radio controlled car.
You and I have differing definitions of compelling ;)
Yeah he did some dumb stuff in early days of racing but nothing worse than Max for instance.
Losing the championship by going off into a gravel trap in the pitlane? Crashing into Kimi who was waiting at a red light at the end of the pitlane?
Schumacher’s shitty sportsmanship/ homicidal driving seams to have been erased from history since his accident.
I think there's plenty of evidence to the contrary in the past few pages alone.
I don’t think its unreasonable to acknowledged that a good proportion of the I don’t like Hamilton thing comes down to racism.
I think that's definitely present (Spain 2007 comes to mind), for me, it's the level of media bias in his favour that made it hard to like him. You'll see it every race weekend in qualifying where if he's a few tenths up on Bottas the commentators (well David Croft for the most part these days) will be gushing about it. When the roles are reversed there's barely anything said. I mean, sure, it's not quite on this level:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P-3lqN8SJ0
But it does get tiring. I think there's also an element of the whole singing career (Jacques Villeneuve also gets a bit of stick on that front) and his involvement in the fashion world which is quite different from what people generally see from racing drivers (personally I couldn't care less on this front).
I've found he's definitely matured a fair bit and would probably get a lot more respect from people if he stuck to talking about racing as he does have a habit of sticking his foot in his mouth otherwise.
That ended up a bit of a word soup there, apologies for that.
mmccarthy
I'm by no means a Hamilton fan but I agree, he's nowhere near as bad as Schumi (although Schumi was apparently the loveliest guy off-track). To be honest I think he's improved a lot throughout his Merc years, as a younger driver I thought he was an absolute diva who was a shit sport, he'd often sulk if things didn't go his way and there was that weird period where he kept crashing into Massa for no reason. Nowadays he's much fairer and more self-aware out of the car which I have to respect.
I also think that (some slightly sketchy Instagram posts aside) he's doing a really good job of using his platform to spread awareness of racial inequality, particularly in F1 which is a ridiculously white sport.