Lewis Hamilton feared losing Ron Dennis’ backing in early McLaren years

Lewis Hamilton has revealed how he put extreme pressure on himself to perform in order to stay in Ron Dennis’ “good books” at McLaren.

Having famously approached Ron Dennis as a 10-year-old karter at the 1995 Autosport Awards to tell the legendary team boss that he wanted to race for McLaren one day, Dennis gave his backing to Hamilton by signing him to McLaren’s driver programme three years later.

With McLaren the leading team in F1 at the time, Hamilton knew he had a golden opportunity to impress Dennis as he continued his climb through the junior categories.

Continuing through karting championships before making his racing car debut in 2001, Hamilton took on series after series – usually meeting with success.

But such success didn’t come easily, with the now seven-time F1 World Champion revealing that he put incredible amounts of pressure on himself to perform as he feared even a single dud race could mean he was written out of Dennis’ “good books”.

Lewis Hamilton: Second place, in my eyes, would be failure

“No, it’s not that I was confident,” he told Australia’s Fox Sports, when asked whether he thought, as a child, that he could actually make it all the way to F1.

“I think I was just so dead set on it, like ‘I’m going to get there’.

“I was that determined but no, it was definitely that I was nervous every day. I’d wake up, I was working on always trying to make sure I kept my deal with McLaren – I wanted to stay in the good books with Ron.”

Hamilton revealed that he even viewed a second place as a “failure” that could cost him his McLaren backing.

“So I had to make sure I won every race, so I made sure I just won everything I could,” he said.

“I won every championship really that I did and was just really focused on delivering, you know?

“Because I was like anytime any second place or anything below would be, in my eyes, a failure at the time and I might lose my job, I might lose my opportunity.”

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Looking back on that time period, in which Hamilton climbed through the single-seater categories with Manor Motorsport, he admitted that he probably didn’t have to perform at the level he did in order to continue his progress.

“It was a bar that I mostly set myself because, whilst yes I did have to perform, it was probably not to the level that I did in order to have an opportunity to at least get to cars, for example,” he said.

“But I set the bar so high because I wanted to make sure that I was the best, undeniably, and that’s what I worked towards.”

Asked whether he would offer his younger self advice if he could go back in time to do so, Hamilton said he would have some words of wisdom, but it wouldn’t be to reduce the pressure…

“Well, I wouldn’t change it so I wouldn’t really want to go and say anything!” he said.

“I think if I could go back and talk to my younger self, I’d say don’t take things too seriously, don’t take yourself too seriously.

“I think I got so caught up in the intensity of wanting to be perfect in racing, I completely secluded myself from the fun things in life that are along the journey at the same time. So I would have said ‘Have fun with it!'”