Formula One’s 2024 season rounded its halfway mark over the July 4 holiday weekend with the British Grand Prix. It’s the sport’s home race, held at Silverstone Circuit, the track that held the first-ever Grand Prix in F1’s highly competitive World Championship era in 1950. This year’s winner was Englishman Sir Lewis Hamilton, who sits apart from the rest of the sport thanks to his history-making success as the winner of the most F1 races (104), the most Driver’s World Championships (seven, held jointly with fellow legend Michael Schumacher), and most wins at Silverstone (nine).
Hamilton’s accomplishments over his 17-year career in F1 so far are more than enough to merit a spot among the all-time greats. As the only Black driver in F1 history, though, Hamilton isn’t just the Michael Jordan of the sport; he’s the Jackie Robinson, too, a class of exactly one. In other words, if you know just one name associated with F1, it’s probably Lewis Hamilton.
OK, so a well-known world-class driver won a race he’d won eight previous times. Good for him, but so what? Hamilton’s outstanding career record obscures a crucial detail: Prior to July 6, 2024, his last Grand Prix win was in December 2021. That’s 945 days if you’re counting, and as Hamilton revealed in his celebratory Instagram post about it, the man definitely has been counting. Since 2021, Lewis Hamilton has kind of been an underdog. It’s impossible to overstate the significance of this win, both as a Hamilton-loving F1 fan, and as a fan of the often high-drama Netflix docuseries Formula One: Drive To Survive.
For many F1 fans, the concluding moments of 2021’s final race were agonizing to watch, and for Drive To Survive fans, it was instantly and undeniably great TV. Hamilton’s hairsbreadth loss—to his young rival at Red Bull, Max Verstappen, depriving Hamilton of an eighth championship victory—was based on a questionable rule interpretation going into the race’s final lap, and remains controversial. As the last moments of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix ticked down, the platform then known as Twitter exploded into a flurry of outrage and giddiness in anticipation of how Netflix would tell this story in Drive To Survive’s fourth season.
The streamer made the only logical choice, opening the fourth season’s trailer highlighting that online burst of fevered excitement, delight, and fury. Hamilton’s loss also inaugurated a sudden, shockingly durable flop era for him and Mercedes, and a rather boring imperial period for Verstappen, who built on his Driver’s Championship win in 2021 by taking the crown in 2022 and 2023, in a walk both times.
Hamilton’s win in 2024 is the opposite of controversial, it’s practically a new holiday for fans of the sport, and is a content goldmine for Drive To Survive’s next season. Hamilton was already poised to be featured prominently due to his surprising move to Ferrari in 2025, and this win tees up a dramatic mid-season peak for the series editors. It’s got so many angles for moments to highlight across multiple episodes: the shock of his move to Ferrari, tenacity and drivers’ sustained belief in themselves under enormous pressure and in the face of failure, the value of healthy teamwork, and more.
A win is a win is a win, except when a win is even bigger than the moment it happens. This particular win was a sports fan’s dream, the ecstatic culmination of nearly three years of day in, day out grinding by Hamilton’s entire team. As he crossed the finish line a winner once more, the team’s almighty roar transformed those 945 days of disappointment and frustration into pure pride and joy. After that, it was a cascade of happy tears for the next hour, each moment more glorious than the last. Hamilton was audibly choked up on the team radio. He immediately and profusely thanked the whole team for continuing to support him over several largely fruitless seasons, even as he prepares to leave at the end of this season.
Following the checkered flag waved by Queen guitarist Brian May and his victory lap waving to the 164,000 fans packing the stands with the Union Jack streaming behind him, Hamilton leaped out of the car and into the embrace of his father and former manager Anthony, who held his son as he sobbed out his relief and happiness for a full minute. Crowd surfing, champagne spraying, a press conference featuring appearances by Hamilton’s multiracial extended family and his 12 year-old bulldog and Instagram star, Roscoe: This win truly had everything. Let no one harbor any doubt. Lewis Hamilton—who turns 40 this year, racing against some guys about half his age—has shown that he’s still a racer’s racer, still a winner. The GOAT is so back!
