Remembering who you are
On how being parasocial as a sports fan and investing in Lewis Hamilton's journey at Ferrari has helped me trust my journey as a first-time dad.
Lewis Hamilton was the last one out of the pits as the final minutes of qualifying for the Barcelona Grand Prix began.
One by one, the laps got underway, a final shot at pole position for Sunday’s race. George Russell of Mercedes soon set the benchmark, but then came Lewis.
Yellow first sector. Not as good as his previous effort. Okay.
Purple middle. The quickest of anyone so far, putting him on course for pole. I leant forward in my seat, my heart skipping a beat only to come back pumping twice as fast and hard to make up for it.
While once upon a time, Lewis Hamilton pole positions were as regular as rain in a British summer - he has 104 - nowadays they are a little more precious and feel more like ‘moments’. Was this about to be one?
Finally, the TV coverage switched to his car just as he was crossing the line…
…finishing second. Six hundredths of a second short from beating Russell.
Not realising just how ready I had been to launch myself off the sofa in celebration, I shuffled back into my seat, all too aware my seven-month old daughter was deep into one of her ‘big naps’ beside me which also can be rare and also, when they happen, are a cause for celebration.
A little over 24 hours later she was awake as Lewis went on to win the race - his 106th victory - owed to strategic brilliance from his Ferrari team and a vintage drive from Hamilton himself.
“Every day, I’ve been having this dream since I was a kid,” he said on winning with the prancing horse for the very first time. “I came from really quite a low place to get back here, and I think it’s just really about never giving up, never second guessing yourself, never giving up on yourself and just keep on trying.”
What makes your life are the moments you refused to give up. That’s when you make a choice to be one thing or the other.
Perhaps that’s why, rapidly approaching 30, I was staring at mine and wondering what the hell I was going to do. Turning the big 3-O felt like an ending. It was the sort of age where I was sure I should have everything figured out by now.
Instead, I still felt like I was just starting out. My teenage years had been swamped by social anxiety and bouts of depression, my university experience had been derailed by thyroid cancer, and throughout both there had been a lot of saying ‘no’ to life.
That’s why, having finally plucked up the courage to download dating apps for the very first time, I was a neurotic ball of self-doubt, fearing that as soon as any match heard my story, they’d write me off. The first one did, as I remember, which made me far less willing to be up front about it all.
Being shy and introverted, still living at home with my parents and starved of lots of life experience, I wondered realistically what I could ‘demand’. One of the things that the likes of Bumble and Hinge ask you when you set up a profile is if you have kids and, if not, if you’d like them some day?
I knew my answer but I was also thinking timelines.
If I met someone, hopefully soon, we’d want a few years together at minimum before having a baby. I’d want those years of falling in love, having adventures and building foundations. Then, only then, the time would be right but how long would that realistically take?
After all, even if meeting someone and hitting it off, who’s to say it’ll even last?
While there isn’t really a clock ticking for men when it becomes being a dad, I didn’t want to be that old all the same.
A sinking feeling overtook me. Considering where I was in life - the lack of confidence and embarrassing void of life experience - I figured maybe I wouldn’t make such a good dad anyway. I definitely wouldn’t be able to handle it. So I left it off my profile and I matched with people who said they didn’t want kids.
I told myself I was fine with it, but I’d also been thinking about what it would be like too for many years now. I saw myself playing with my kids, carrying them under my arm like they’re a football, making them laugh so hard with their little gappy teeth and dimply cheeks.
And throughout it all, I could see my face too: the most peaceful smile, like I’d reached the summit of life.
Then there was later, when they were older, where I knew I’d be a rock because of everything I’d gone through in my past. I’d be able to comfort them when they were upset, I’d be able to make a scary world seem like a safer place, I’d be able to help them make sense of things when their brains are at their most scrambled and everything feels it’s most messed up.
Was it a dream? I don’t know if it was quite that, but stepping into my 20s it was something I pondered more and more. I knew deep down that getting to the end of my life one day and not having kids, not being a dad would hurt. Even running the prospect through my brain in that moment gave me this hollow feeling.
I guess it’s something we do, isn’t it? We convince ourselves we wouldn’t be good at something, or simply can’t have something, because it saves us having to put ourselves out there and do one of the scariest things in all of life: try.
There’s something inherently parasocial about being a sports fan.
Week after week, month after month, year after year, you entrust your mental and emotional wellbeing to men and women who will likely never know you exist. But still, you place your hopes and dreams on their shoulders and live their highs and lows as if they’re your own.
Every now and then, though, that trust pays off. Every now and then, sport lets us ascend from reality and dance around in our dreams, even if it’s just for a little while. It’s the one place where we get to see the impossible made possible.
But in August of last year, Lewis Hamilton was struggling to do that.
Months into a dream move to Ferrari, things were warping into something that more closely resembled a nightmare.
At what had historically been one of his best tracks in Hungary, the 7-time world champion qualified in 12th. Afterwards, he told the TV cameras, “I’m useless, absolutely useless.” With his teammate on pole, Hamilton concluded he drove “terribly” and suggested the team should replace him.
I’d never been much into Formula 1 until, in 2007, a rookie showed up for McLaren and nearly won the whole thing in his very first season. That was Lewis, of course, and having watched him in all the years since, the last few have been spent impatiently waiting for him to have the chance to put right the wrongs of the 2021 Formula 1 season.
That’s why I felt that post-qualifying pain in Hungary deeply - so much so, I wrote to my unborn daughter about it in the journal I’d been keeping for her.
After running through the context around the situation, I wrote, “None of us have forever. And while daddy still believes he can do it and breaks records (that’s also hope, he’ll talk about that another day but behind love it is maybe the most beautiful, powerful force on this planet), he wanted to come and talk to you about time because, as I said, none of us have forever. We don’t even know what tomorrow will bring, so be everything you want to be today.”
Almost a year on, Hamilton followed two consecutive second-placed finishes with a first victory of 2026 and a first triumph in the red of Ferrari. In the process, a first title challenge since 2021 was now far more plausible than it had been before the race.
“I had to question how do I find myself again and how do I find my centre? How do I find the courage and the strength to keep going, to keep building, to keep trying?” he said afterwards.
From watching him clear Timo Glock on the final corner in Brazil to win the Formula 1 World Championship for the first time in 2008, through to the inevitability of his insanely successful era at Mercedes, there have been a lot of memorable seasons as a Lewis Hamilton.
After sealing his seventh title in 2020, he came on the radio and declared, “That’s for all the kids out there who dream the impossible. You can do it too man! I believe in you guys!”
But his less successful years after 2021 and the difficulties since moving to Ferrari in 2025 are shaping up to be my favourite Lewis Hamilton era yet.
Sometimes the impossible isn’t winning championships and breaking records, sometimes it’s fighting against doubt from yourself and others, continuing to work and continuing to believe, and showing it can pay off.
“What do dreams cost us?” I asked myself. “No,” I thought, deciding to challenge it. “What does giving up on our dreams cost us?”
I eventually met the love of my life through Hinge - yes, they’re not lying, it really is the dating app designed to be deleted. Even if, after feeling a bit beat up from experiences before that, I did make her wait for six weeks until meeting up, convinced the moment she’d meet me she’d write me off.
Instead, my fears were unfounded. She took me as I was and as I explained my lack of life experience and confidence, she treated me with kindness, patience, love and understanding. Through her, I met new people and got to have all the adventures I’d been dreaming of for the longest time.
We moved in together, we got pregnant and I proposed (several months later and I had been thinking about it anyway before we got pregnant, just to be clear).
Learning I was going to be a dad was the craziest thing. I remember walking to the football once to go and watch Norwich City, staring at a video of our baby from our first ever scan. She was just a little peanut but I could see her tiny heart beating hard. The sense of protectiveness and purpose I felt from looking at it was transformative.
Learning she was going to be a girl a few months after that at our gender scan saw the excitement grew. I was going to be a girl dad and I thought I’d make a great one. But, then she was born, and I started to understand you don’t just will your dreams into existence.
You can be handed the puzzle pieces, but you’re the one who has to put it all together. It takes a lot to haul your dreams fully into reality and to make it happen, you have to remember who you are, what you’re capable of and why you’re doing it.
I found it so hard to do that, though.
The harder it all got, the more I wanted to let go of myself as I became convinced I was the problem. There was a moment where I started to feel like my daughter hated me. I grew convinced she was smiling at everyone but me and felt my heart snap a little when she gave me nothing.
I couldn’t calm her down when she cried and struggling to regulate my emotions at this point, I probably made things worse rather than better, with the stress of everything boiling over. I wanted to give up and run away.
Being a dad was something I had wanted so badly, but I was stuck in what felt like a prison of mirrors, all reflecting back at me just how woefully out of my depth I was. There was a voice echoing in my head all the time: you can’t do this, you can’t do this, you can’t do this…
And I started to believe it. I felt useless.
My daughter was a little over two weeks old when Lewis Hamilton declared his first season at Ferrari to be a “nightmare”.
“I’ve been living it for a while,” he said, after having to retire from the Brazilian Grand Prix - another of his best tracks, where he’d qualified 13th. “The flip between the dream of driving for this amazing team and then the nightmare of the results that we’ve had.”
At this point, Hamilton sat sixth in the championship standings, 66 points behind his teammate, Charles Leclerc, with no win and no podium finish to his name. But there was something else he said too.
“I believe there is something extraordinary up ahead in my life and in my destiny. I truly still believe in this team and what we can achieve together. I just have to keep pushing and keep giving them everything I can.”
The rest of the season saw an 8th-placed finish in Las Vegas, after qualifying last; a 12th-placed finish in Qatar, after qualifying 18th; and an 8th-placed finish in Abu Dhabi, having qualified 16th.
They were solid recovery drives, but the context of the dream Hamilton had left Mercedes to finally get to live, as well as the fact he was a 7-time champion meant it was a sore end to a difficult season.
The best stories, though, face their characters with adversity, making the moment things turn around all the sweeter.
Winning in Barcelona six months later, Hamilton said, “You’ve got to continue to believe in yourself at the core. Those are the things that I’ve managed to reimplement into my mentality.
“I’ve rebuilt my mind to this point, to get myself back to where I was.”
Throughout all my early struggles as a dad and the new weight of life I was carrying, I maintained that everything would work out in the end. I didn’t know how I’d get there, but I just knew I would.
But then there was the moment I felt my own flip between the dream of being a dad to this beautiful little girl to the nightmare that was my struggle to connect with her and cope.
Ironically, this happened just after I’d seen Lewis claim a first podium for Ferrari at the Chinese Grand Prix back in March. After the race finished, my daughter was overtired and I was soon faced with tears and screaming and I didn’t handle any of it remotely well.
I didn’t know who I was anymore. This life I’d spent so long building up in my mind, so much time visualising, so many days imagining had arrived and it was falling short of everything that I’d been dreaming of.
I was giving it everything. It still wasn’t enough. I was horrible at it.
So, I didn’t want to keep pushing anymore. I didn’t want to keep giving everything I could.
I spent most of the morning withdrawn and refusing to even make eye contact with my daughter because I was spent. My confidence was gone. I’d written myself off and I’d given up.
It didn’t last long, though.
Ironically, as we were walking around a potential wedding venue, I kept watching her, so happy in her pram, and I felt this sadness and this guilt and this sense that I should stop being a fucking idiot.
So I got back to work trying to connect with her. Because that was who I was. I was a dad. I was her dad. And I wanted to be good at it. That’s the big secret, too. There’s no magical fix, or a big cinematic moment when everything falls into place.
It’s a lot less dramatic and more tiring that.
It’s just staying in the eye of the storm sometimes, continuing to show up, even if the rain is hammering down and the wind is lashing your cheeks. You just have to stay, because you know you’re in the right place, and have the faith the clouds will clear and the sun will shine on you again.
And it certainly has.
