Lewis Hamilton was this week’s guest on the “Hot Ones” show featured on the “First We Feast” YouTube channel. The seven-time Formula 1 world champion discussed racing movies, pre-race fashion, F1 lingo, reactions from fans on the road and more while eating spicy chicken wings. Highlights from the interview:
On biggest racing movie pet peeves and his own upcoming F1 film (2:05):
“Racing movies, I feel like it’s very hard to capture them…you can’t have a truck following, filming us at 20mph, it’s all kind of faked at a slower speed and they speed it up. But this is all real time, real speed. I think if you go back to Steve McQueen, for example, back then they would have men lying on the front of a car with a camera…but now we have all this amazing new technology so I feel like Joe (Kosinski, director), honestly, he’s gonna blow people away.”
On “hunter vs hunted” mentality (11:00):
“I think it’s easier to hunt…But I got to a point where I learned how to maintain the chase – so what I used to do is I just used to picture me further up ahead and so I was just chasing myself. So that seemed to keep me on the straight and narrow.”
Racetrack attire in streetwear and drivers’ sense of style (12:30):
“I remember when I was younger, particularly like race suits, the old race suits were really cool from back in the late ’80s but obviously it’s got more and more technical, so it got less and less cool. But I think now you’re starting to see a lot more drivers come out of their shell and focus a bit more on fashion… For me, it was I was walking into the track and it was like it’s no way I’m getting away from the cameras…I was like if I’m going to get pictured, I’m going to make sure I’m looking good.”
Biggest wipeout while surfing (14:50):
“I was with Kelly Slater on ‘Pipeline’…as I started to try and paddle in I got sucked into the kill zone and I turn around I see this set of like four waves coming and that to me was like its over…I dove down, I grabbed the reef and I could hear this wave crash behind me, came back up obviously gasping for air and the next one was coming so back down… I did that three times — I got up, I nearly ran out of air. I nearly drowned…”
On reactions from fans on the road/getting road rage from drivers (17:00):
“I’ve had people be at traffic lights and want to race. And definitely when I was young, I felt like yeah, ‘I’m going to smoke this fool.’ Today, I’ve had a lot of road rage ’cause I often actually, when I’m just casually driving I’m not going somewhere for work or anything like that so I’m cruising and so more people are in a rush than I am. So I get a lot of road rage, ‘speed up’…I find in America, they’re very quite aggressive…”
Watch the full interview below: