20 YEARS ON: The inside story of Lewis Hamilton’s first F1 test with McLaren

As Lewis Hamilton gears up for Sunday’s Qatar Grand Prix, he will be doing so exactly 20 years after driving an F1 car for the first time with McLaren. To mark the milestone, F1.com spoke with one of the drivers he tested alongside that day, fellow Briton Alex Lloyd, for a first-hand account of the outing which kicked off Hamilton’s journey to seven world titles…

It’s December 1, 2004. McLaren have arrived at a cold and crisp Silverstone to give some up-and-coming racers their first drive in an F1 car. Included on the run plan are McLaren Autosport BRDC Award winners in Lloyd and Jamie Green – a victor in Euro Formula 3000 and the champion of that year’s Formula 3 Euro Series respectively.

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But there’s another name on the list. McLaren’s long-time protégé Lewis Hamilton, a teenager who lit up the karting scene and was making an impression in single-seaters, having beaten Lloyd to the Formula Renault UK title in 2003 and finished fifth overall as a rookie in the highly competitive F3 Euro Series category won by Mercedes-backed Green.

For all three, it marked the realisation of a dream they had shared since their days in karts, with an added layer to the story for Hamilton and Lloyd, who were rivals on the track but had developed a strong friendship off it.

“Lewis and I were very close,” Lloyd tells F1.com. “We grew up together, we were sort of best friends from age 10 through to 15 or something. We vacationed together and during the summer holidays between school we’d hang out each other’s houses. So, I knew Lewis really well.

“At the McLaren test, we were saying to each other, ‘Can you believe this is happening?’ Going back to our karting days, when we said, ‘One day we’re going to drive an F1 car’, then it’s, ‘Okay, this is the day!’ It was nice that it was both of us at the same time, getting that opportunity to do it and experience it.”

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As touched on, it was jumper and scarf weather when Hamilton, Lloyd and Green arrived at the gates of the British Grand Prix venue for their breakthrough test, with the wintry conditions adding to the challenge ahead of them – but it was, thankfully, dry.

Each driver would get two short, solo runs in the McLaren MP4-19 – which did not live up to its title-contending predecessor but still won a race in Kimi Raikkonen’s hands – to tread the fine line of wanting to impress McLaren and keeping the car on the track.

“I don’t know how it is for the award winners today, but it was 10 minutes, another 10 minutes, and that’s it,” Lloyd points out. “It felt very much like a lot of build up for this short moment that you’ve got to try and grasp, even if there’s not really much you can do in 20 minutes.

“The big thing I remember was thinking, ‘Wow, we got lucky here in December at Silverstone, that it’s still dry’. It meant we could actually experience the car a little bit, because if it’s torrential rain, it’s still cool, but you’re not really going to feel the grip and all those things that you want to experience in an F1 car.”

For Lloyd, who spent some of his youth living near Silverstone and was often awoken by the sound of cars pounding around the circuit, the grunt from a Mercedes V10 engine and the downforce generated from an Adrian Newey-designed car meant his jaw dropped when he left the pits and hit the throttle.

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“I think none of us had ever driven anything like it,” Lloyd smiles. “I thought I’d be prepared having driven an F3000 car, which at that point in time was about as much as you could do without getting into an F1 car, but it was a whole different ball game.

“For the first couple of laps, I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know if I can cope with this’, as my brain couldn’t keep track with what was happening. You hit the throttle pedal and you were thrown into the back of the seat. It just felt like a spaceship!

“It took about three laps and then your mind starts to slow down a little bit and you can work out what’s happening. You go from not a panic mode, but sort of, ‘How the hell do I drive this thing?’ It was so ridiculously fast and a much bigger step than I imagined.”

As the laps ticked by, two standout features for Lloyd, Green and Hamilton to get to grips with were super sharp steering and carbon brakes that required careful bedding in before the left pedal delivered its optimal, scarcely believable level of stopping power.

“I remember being shocked at how light the power steering was, because I’d been driving in Euro Formula 3000 with this big, heavy steering, and then suddenly it’s precise,” he says. “The steering felt really awkward, as if you were skating around for the first couple of corners.

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“I’d also never driven carbon brakes and damn near crashed at the first turn! I didn’t realise that carbon brakes, until you get heat in them, they don’t work at all. It was like having bicycle brakes on an F1 car for the first corner. I had to swerve around a cone and thought, ‘Oh God’.

“You needed to apply 100 plus pounds of brake pressure to get it to work. The team were showing me data against Juan Pablo Montoya’s, how much force he was putting on the pedal compared to me, and at the beginning I was applying around 25% of it. Then it’s, ‘Okay, I’ve really got to start doing a leg press with this thing!’”

It begs the question: how did all three drivers approach their dream chance with so many elements to learn and so much potential for something to go wrong?

“I remember Lewis going out, running through the gears, cruising for a lap or two, building from a speed perspective,” continues Lloyd. “I think it was probably a little bit the comfort of knowing this was going to be the first of many opportunities. I think he didn’t really have that sort of feeling that he needed to prove himself as such.

“I think Jamie probably did have that feeling. He went out there and you could see it, all guns blazing… I did the same. I think Lewis probably felt a lot more comfortable in his position of, ‘Okay, I can build up to this properly’, the way I probably should have done too. But again, what are you going to prove in 20 minutes?”

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Indeed, lap times were not shared with the media after the test, while McLaren’s end-of-day press release made no reference to them, with the team offering a basic summary and quotes from Lloyd and Green about what it felt like to receive their prize runs.

Lloyd did note the presence of some rudimentary timing on the pit wall that then ran from Woodcote to Copse, though, even if the testing trio were out on track at different points in the day and approaching each run in their own way.

“McLaren had very much said, ‘No timing, you will not impress us in 20 minutes. Just enjoy it, drive the car, soak it in, there’s no pressure’,” Lloyd comments. “Nobody was timing officially, but of course, everybody’s parents… Lewis’s dad was there, my dad was there, Jamie’s family was there. You could see everybody there with their stopwatches.

“I remember Lewis and I basically matched times, and I think Jamie was a second or so faster than us – he was on it. But for all three of us, there was probably still a lot of performance left on the table. None of us were on the ragged edge.

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“You learn as much as you can in 20 minutes, but you also know that if you had a whole day, you’d be going a lot faster. But it was fun to see us all somewhat battling for a good time, even though it’s completely irrelevant at the end of the day.”

With the test completed, Lloyd, Green and Hamilton came back down to earth and continued their respective motorsport journeys – all aiming to one day turn that brief taste of F1 machinery into something more.

Green was placed in German touring car series DTM by his backers Mercedes for 2005 and stayed there for some 15 years, with an F1 seat never materialising, while Lloyd – struggling to find the necessary finances – made sporadic outings in Italian Formula 3000, Formula Renault 3.5 and A1 Grand Prix before heading to the United States.

As it transpired, Hamilton was the one to make it all the way to the F1 grid, winning the Formula 3 Euro Series and the GP2 title back-to-back to show McLaren that he had what it took to jump in alongside reigning two-time world champion Fernando Alonso in 2007.

“It was cool to have that experience with Lewis in an F1 car for the first time, and for me to watch from afar in the US and just see his progression,” says Lloyd. “Especially that first year at McLaren when he was coming in and taking on Alonso, and damn nearly winning the championship.

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“When Lewis got put into F1, he was ready, he was there. It felt like there really wasn’t much of a learning curve or rookie mistakes… A couple of little things here and there, but in general it was as if he had been prepared perfectly, was dropped into this seat and away he went. Witnessing a few of those steps along the way was nice.”

Childhood friends, Lloyd and Hamilton inevitably lost touch with each other as the years went by, with the former building his new life in the US – which included taking the Indy Pro Series title and reaching IndyCar – and the latter becoming a global superstar.

“We stayed in contact a little bit for a while,” says Lloyd. “When I moved to America, I very much moved to America, I didn’t really come back home… I think we did sort of drift apart. It’s maybe a little easier to keep in contact nowadays with social media.

“I remember I was racing at Indianapolis in the Pro Series in 2007, a race he won in F1, so it was good to catch up with him there. But it became increasingly rare that we were around the same areas, when I was primarily on the American scene, and at that point not really travelling to the UK or Europe at all.”

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Now, two decades on from that first F1 test, Hamilton is a record-equalling seven-time world champion with a record number of 104 pole positions and 105 wins to his name.

That success has been achieved across two lengthy stints with McLaren and Mercedes, but next year, when he races into his 40s, the Briton will represent another legendary team in Ferrari in one of F1’s biggest ever driver moves.

“It’s kind of crazy that the test was 20 years ago,” Lloyd chuckles. “Now look at where Lewis is… Am I surprised that he’s been very successful in F1 and achieved great things? No, not really. That looked pretty realistic for him. Everybody could see he was extremely talented.

“But still, it’s incredible that he’s still there, racing in F1, and about to start another chapter with Ferrari. I’m sure he’ll win more races, and maybe he can get an eighth championship there. I think that would be a poetic ending for a great career.”

Lloyd adds: “But I think what’s been probably more impressive is the way he’s handled himself outside of the track. At that level of fame, that level of notoriety, you tend to see people go one way or the other. I think he’s very much remained humble and doesn’t tend to stoop to those levels that others do when things get a little heated here and there.

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“He tends to take that higher road, and I think he’s done a great job of being a role model for younger people coming up. The level of success that he’s had… I don’t know how many people would have done it to that degree. But again, it’s not really a surprise.

“His whole family are genuinely very, very nice people, and humble people who always had to work hard. Especially in those early years, the pre-McLaren years, working to get to where they were. I think all of that shines through in who Lewis is today. It’s pretty damn impressive.”