Lewis Hamilton has revealed he dislikes testing so much he has feigning illness to get out of his driving duties at least once in his Formula 1 career.
The Mercedes driver has never disguised how little he enjoys testing, which is far more restricted than it was in 2007 when he debuted in F1. Now, teams’ race drivers only tend to appear in F1’s official tests while test drivers are called upon for private test days and in some cases even shakedowns of new cars.
In a post-season debrief at Mercedes’ Brackley headquarters, Hamilton was joined by his team principal Toto Wolff and reserve driver Mick Schumacher but not his team mate George Russell, who was unwell. Wolff told the assembled crowd Russell hadn’t pulled a “sickie” by pretending to be unwell when he wasn’t.
“George is really ill,” said Wolff. Hamilton admitted “I was wondering!”
“In the past I have done that to miss the test days, because I just generally don’t like test days,” he continued.
“So yesterday when I heard that he was sick, I was like ‘ah, he’s one-upped me, he’s gone to another level.”
Although Hamilton revealed nothing further about his absence from a test, he has missed driving duties on past occasions when illness was given as the reason. In 2015 he missed a day of running at the Circuit de Catalunya in Spain which the team said at the time was due to illness.
Mercedes called up their test driver Pascal Wehrlein to stand in for him. Hamilton returned to the cockpit successfully and won the world championship that year.
Hamilton also missed the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix after catching Covid-19. At that time F1 and international travel rules required him to isolate while testing positive for the illness, which ruled him out of racing in Bahrain. He returned at the next race one week later in Abu Dhabi. The following year Hamilton revealed he continued to suffer the symptoms of Covid.
In 2017 Hamilton moved to a plant-based diet which he has credited with improving his health and helping him to cope with the growing length of F1 seasons.
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Formula 1
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