Lewis Hamilton has revealed that he would have liked to have been a musician or an engineer at NASA had he not been an F1 driver. The Briton claims to have a life-long passion for music, having played instruments such as the guitar and piano for several years.
It is hard to imagine F1 without legendary seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, who is almost synonymous with the sport now. The Briton was asked by a student from the Mulberry group of schools in the UK what he would have liked to become had he not been an F1 driver. He replied by saying that he would have wanted to be a music producer or performer.
In a social media video made by Mercedes, Hamilton revealed his alternate career choices, saying:
“I was always very much into sports. I particularly excelled in the athletic side of things. I loved participating in athletics. I was good at most of the sports that I did. Also, I will always love music. Whether or not I had the ability to be a superstar in the music world, who knows? But, music would have been a path that I think I would have loved to have gone down - in terms of music production. Otherwise, I would have loved to have worked at NASA but you have to be super intelligent for that.”
Removing porpoising from Lewis Hamilton's car is Mercedes' number one priority
Mercedes claim that tackling the porpoising problem is still their number one priority moving forward into 2022. The team has had a disappointing start to the season, failing to challenge Ferrari and Red Bull so far.
The German team's progress in this year has been significantly hampered by the new porpoising problem caused due to the 2022 aero regulations. The team claims they haven't seen the W13's true performance as it is plagued heavily with these issues. Lewis Hamilton saw first-hand the issues caused by porpoising in Jeddah after he failed to get into Q2 for the first time since Brazil 2017.
Mercedes' head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin told Motorsport.com about the team's priority list going forward, saying:
“That’s [porpoising] probably priority number one. Because that’s ultimately preventing us from running the car where we’d like to run it for optimum performance. What we don’t know is, if we could just magically make that issue vanish, where would we actually be in terms of car pace: is the car fast enough or not? And it’s very difficult to answer that question.”
Meanwhile, Hamilton's new teammate George Russell fared considerably better. He finished the race in P5 while the seven-time world champion managed to score only a single point down the grid in P10.