One of Lewis Hamilton’s former McLaren mechanics has joked how the state of his relationship with Nicole Scherzinger could be tracked by his in-car performances.
Upon arriving in Formula 1 in 2007, Hamilton began a long-term relationship with Pussycat Dolls singer Nicole Scherzinger, which proved to be quite on and off before the couple split for good in 2015.
Lewis Hamilton’s relationship with Nicole Scherzinger could be ‘clearly tracked’
The tumultuous nature of the relationship, which was quite often in the public eye due to the celebrity status of both Hamilton and Scherzinger, led his McLaren mechanics to be able to hazard guesses at how well things were going off-track for Hamilton, with Marc Priestley revealing how the garage crew would joke about Scherzinger being the biggest contributor to laptime than any car upgrade.
“When he first came into this sport, we used to joke amongst the team that Lewis’s performance was so intrinsically linked to the state of their relationship,” Priestley said on his Pitlane Life Lessons podcast.
“As in, on a good day, he performed well. When their relationship was in the doldrums, and they were so off and on, it was a bit like an emotional roller coaster – when he was in these low points in the relationship, you could clearly track the performance in the car to the way their relationship status seemed to be.
“We joked that there seemed to be more lap time in keeping those two together than there ever could be with anything we could do with the car!
“But there was a serious point to that, in that it was about understanding and appreciating that Lewis’s emotional state clearly affected his performance. This is not just linked to Lewis Hamilton; of course, we all face these challenges in life.
“Some of us find it slightly easier to manage and regulate emotions and others. Others of us don’t.
“It’s not a strength necessarily or a weakness, it’s just part of who we are and our individualism. Lewis has some unbelievable strengths that many of us can only dream of being able to achieve.
“But, emotion regulation is probably not one of the things that he finds easiest to do.
“Lewis is a guy who’s quite emotional. He wears his heart on his sleeve so, without the ability to really control those emotions to the level that some other people might be able to do or might find easier to do, we were faced with an unbelievably talented racing driver whose performance was, in some way, affected by how his emotional state was, which varied greatly at different times over a race weekend or a season.”
Hamilton’s emotional control may not have been exemplary at this point in time, with Priestley revealing how frank conversations he’s had with Hamilton over the years since has seen the now-seven-time F1 World Champion explain how he dealt with tough days at the track.
“Lewis Hamilton, when he was struggling, when he’s having those tough days, as I said, he might have had a difficult Saturday,” Priestley said.
“He’d come out of the car on a Saturday after qualifying when it’s been disappointing, and he would go away that evening, and he’d be very quiet. He’d be very down. He wouldn’t offer very much in terms of the debrief.
“Actually, you could easily look at his comments in a post-session debrief after a really difficult Saturday, and he could come across as being petulant. It was often one-word answers. It was the same sort of thing you see in an interview sometimes that you see post-race in the modern era – he can sometimes give flippant or one-word answers that are not in any way really helpful to the process.
“As engineers, our only goal was to try and improve things so that it could be better the next day or the next time out.
“To get the driver, who’s a key part of that debrief, in a state where he’s just throwing petulance [with] answers that are unhelpful to you because he’s so down, that’s not in any way productive and doesn’t help us get closer to a solution.
“But he’d often go away on a Saturday night, he’d disappear, and I wouldn’t see him on a Saturday evening. He would sometimes even cancel commitments to sponsors and partners. He would disappear and shut himself in a room, and he probably pondered over it for quite some time, digging himself into an even bigger and deeper hole, is how he’s described it to me in years gone by.
“He mulled it over in his mind and continued to tell himself that same story – that he wasn’t doing a good enough job. He would beat himself up emotionally. He would completely reiterate the negative thought processes that he’d been having that afternoon right through into the night until he went to sleep.”
But, as has been evidenced on countless occasions over the years, Hamilton had, and has, an uncanny ability to brush off negativity.
“But one thing he was quite good at was waking up the next day with a fresh perspective. He always said to me that this was a new day, a new set of opportunities,” Priestley said.
“This was a case of coming in to try and do it better. If you ever see a TV interview on a Sunday morning after a Saturday afternoon where he struggled in qualifying, even today, that’s generally what you get. You get a new Lewis Hamilton where he’s no longer down. He’s no longer struggling with emotions. He’s now got this fresh perspective where he sees nothing but opportunity in front of him.
“He may not have expectations that he might have had going into Saturday. His expectations might have had to be reset but, in doing so, he takes away some pressure. He relieves himself of that burden that was overwhelming him on a Saturday. And we go into Sunday with a Lewis that’s there, ready to take the opportunities, to push like crazy.
“How often do we see a way better Sunday than we see him have on a Saturday? That was the same quite often, even way back when he first came into the sport working with us at McLaren.”
What methods does Lewis Hamilton use to help control his emotions?
A primary method Hamilton uses, Priestley explained, is in meditation. An interview the former McLaren mechanic-turned-broadcaster and presenter carried out with Hamilton in 2023 led to a conversation in which Priestley revealed how Hamilton employs the practice to help address his mental state.
“He said he came to an understanding and an appreciation that clearly that wasn’t good for him, and the more that he kept telling himself that story, that it was his fault, that he wasn’t good enough, that’s Lewis telling himself a story in his own mind that then backs up the beliefs that he isn’t good enough,” he said.
“Go back to that interview in 2024 where he came out of the car on a Saturday, and he quoted to say, ‘I’m just not fast anymore’.
“The more he hears that story internally, the more substantiated it becomes, and the more ingrained in his own belief system that message becomes. It’s the same for all of us – if we continually tell ourselves that we have messed something up, that it was our fault, that maybe we start to question our own ability, our own performance levels, whatever it is, whether we’re getting old and we can’t do things the way we used to, which, I have no doubt, has crept into Lewis’s mind at times.
“The more we tell ourselves those stories, the more that story embeds itself in our mind. What happens when that situation occurs is that, over time, we’ll have another disappointing day, and the first thing our mind goes to is this embedded self story that we’re not good enough, that the reason it hasn’t gone well on a Saturday in qualifying or in our own lives, and whatever might have not worked out the way we expected, we jump to this embedded self-story that we’ve been telling ourselves sometimes for years, in many people’s cases, that we’re simply not good enough, or that we’re not as good as the people around us.
“In Formula 1, it’s really easy to look at other great people in this sport, other teams that might be winning, or drivers that might be winning and measure ourselves against them. If you’re going up against a Max Verstappen, for example, who’s much younger than a Lewis Hamilton that’s now in his 40s, if you’re measuring yourself up against that guy, one of the stories you’re likely to start allowing to creep in is that age must be the factor, because ‘I used to be able to beat him. I used to be able to beat everybody’.
“‘Well, now look, I’m verging on 40. I’m creeping into the latter stages of my career. Maybe that’s the reason that I’m now being beaten by this young gun’. Well, the reality is it may be that, but there’s a very high chance it’s not that.
“It may be that you’ve had a couple of bad days. It may be that you’re still performing at a very high level, but someone else has come along who’s performing at a higher level. That’s real, and that’s okay, by the way, we can’t control what others do around us, only what we control about what we do ourselves.
“Lewis told me he’s been working constantly on trying to correct that self-story. He’s been working on trying to understand what he can do differently about what he tells himself.
“I’m talking about the thought processes, the constant conversations we all have with ourselves. The person we speak to most in this world, for all of us, is ourselves, and we do that all the time, don’t we? We ask ourselves questions, we tell ourselves things. We question our ability at times, sometimes it might be telling us positive things, and that’s what Lewis said he’d been trying to work on doing, constantly telling himself positive things over and above negative things, even when negative things had been happening.
“Now he finds that quite a difficult thing to do because of that disposition that he has around finding it hard to regulate his own emotions. His emotional state can be so overwhelmingly powerful for him that if something negative happens, it’s very difficult to remember this idea of trying to be confident, to be positive, to tell yourself a good self story.
“To try and stop that, Lewis has found a way of creating an area of space in his mind, a period of time where he allows nothing to go on in his mind other than this very intentional thought through his meditation.
“He creates that freedom and space by eradicating everything and thinking about just one single thing, whether it’s your breath or a kind of mantra that you repeat to yourself, whatever it might be.
“It’s something that’s intentional that stops the flow of any other thoughts getting in. If you’re intentional about what the thought is, the one thought you’re going to think about and focus everything on it, there is no space for anything else to come in, and that’s the way you create a period of space in your mind. You calm things down. You create this blank space where, at the end of that meditation, where you’re feeling calm, you’re feeling relaxed, but importantly, your mind is free of all of the mess that was in it before.
“Now, you get to start from a fresh like a blank sheet of paper where you can insert whatever you want to happen next.
“He says when he wakes up early, he just does the meditation, he clears his mind, and then he goes straight out for a run. Off the back of that, he goes into an exercise regime, which is obviously part of his physical preparation, but because he’s got clear mind and a clear space in his head when he goes for a run, he’s able to think about what he wants to achieve that day, whether it’s in a car or in any other area of his life. This is a really powerful practice, which does take some skill and some practice.
“So, trying to create a positive emotional state is going to help create a more positive outcome in your performance. So that’s Lewis Hamilton’s idea around meditation, around clearing the mind and resetting the mind. He was able to do that very, very successfully.”
