The enigma of style and substance

Lewis Hamilton, a ‘Marmite’ figure for some, is undoubtedly a great Formula One driver and one of the global sports stars of the current era. He possesses a heart-warming back story featuring humble beginnings, an ambitious father whose life-gamble paid off, a disabled brother and a precocious talent that took him right to the top when every major sport’s history is littered with legions similarly blessed who – for every reason under the sun and then some you couldn’t possibly invent – eventually fail to fulfil their potential and climb the greasy pole to world domination.

And yet it’s his occasional prattish behaviour, flash extravagance, naff chic ‘street style’ dress sense and elephant-sized sense of entitlement that irritates many of us over the age of fifty whose memories allow us to go back as far as such gentlemen of the track as Stirling Moss, Tony Brooks, Mike Hawthorn, Jim Clarke and Graham Hill.

I hesitate to say it, but it virtually boils down to Lewis’s lack of ‘class’ and I don’t mean that in a poncey, arrogant, ‘them and us’, condescending sense of the word.

Some of those who have reached the peak of their chosen walk of life from a start in the gutter have had more class in their little finger of their right hand than any number of titled aristocratic ‘cabbages and kings’ – to quote from another Lewis’s (Carroll) The Walrus and the Carpenter.

With that preface registered, today I’d like to share with Rust readers this report by David Tremayne which appears on the website of – THE INDEPENDENT