Formula 1 title battle: Inside Lewis Hamilton’s apprenticeship at Manor Motorsports in South Yorkshire

For the driver who stands two wins away from a record-breaking eighth Formula 1 world title owes a debt of gratitude to the apprenticeship he served at Manor Motorsports in Dinnington, an old pit village on the outskirts of Rotherham.

Back in late 2001, a 16-year-old Hamilton was at the top of the go-karting world, the big name on McLaren’s young driver programme, ready to take his first steps in a real car on a real circuit.

McLaren, that famous old marque in Formula 1, sent him to Manor to learn his trade in Formula Renault.

John Booth, a former driver himself, was the team principal and Hamilton’s race engineer would be Simon Finnis, a mechanic who fell in love with motor-sport growing up near the Oulton Park track in Cheshire.

“He was outstanding, you could tell straight away,” Finnis, now race engineer for Wakefield-based United Autosports in the European Le Mans Series, tells The Yorkshire Post.

“The potential he had was phenomenal, we all recognised straight away that he had more than anyone we’d ever seen before.

“There was a huge amount of natural talent there.”

The challenge for Finnis, Booth and the modest, hard-working team at Manor 20 years ago was to harness that potential.

“In fairness, it did take him a while to get some consistency,” remembers Finnis, who was with Hamilton at his first track session at Rockingham in late 2001 and stayed with him right until the end of his first season in the Formula 3 EuroSeries at the end of 2004.

“There’d be days when he was very quick but there were also days when he wasn’t, so he was quite inconsistent to start with.

“That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, not everybody makes the step up as quickly as others, but it doesn’t really matter how long it takes so long as they get there.”

Externally, though, it did matter how long it took Hamilton.

Such was the huge potential, the eagerness of father Anthony Hamilton to progress his career and the big companies already invested in him through sponsorship, there was an impatience for Hamilton to breeze through his driving apprenticeship.

Manor’s earlier success in fast-tracking Kimi Raikkonen to Formula 1 after just 23 races in Formula Renault, did not help the process.

“Kimi stayed in carts a lot longer, he was older and maturer when he came to us, he was able to adapt a bit quicker,” explains Finnis. “The expectation therefore was that Lewis was going to come in and do it just as quickly, so it took him a bit of time to accept that actually if it did take him a bit more time, more than 23 races at least, then it didn’t matter as long as he got there.

“So the Hamiltons had to realign expectations a little, which was the biggest thing. They were in a bit of hurry, they didn’t want it to go wrong, but we were patient.

“I remember his dad got involved at one point because he thought we weren’t doing a very good job, so McLaren sent a couple of engineers down to a test day we did at Croft, and they sent a report back saying the kid is very talented, obviously very quick, but still a bit inconsistent and left it at that.

“McLaren were very good, they just came to us and said ‘look, we don’t know anything about that level of motorsport, Manor have had success’ and they let us get on with it.

“And I’m delighted to say we didn’t fail, history proves he had a good apprenticeship.”

That first full season of inconsistency, where he could be “outstanding one week, struggling the next”, meant McLaren kept him with Manor in Formula Renault for 2003.

Hamilton would not make the same mistakes twice, dominating that championship and then finishing third in his one year with Manor in Europe in 2004, before moving on.

“He was a good kid to work with,” says Finnis, “a real racer, loved the racing side of it, wheel-to-wheel racing, battling with the other drivers.

“He worked very hard, he was prepared to put that work in.

“He and John (Booth) got on very well, but he fitted in very well with the team. Some drivers keep themselves to themselves, but Lewis was very popular. The team was based around success and he brought great success to the team.

“Despite all the external pressures, he had the talent and he knew that in time he would crack it, and once he got all the skills and learnt how to get the most out of the car he never looked back.”

Hamilton made it to Formula 1 in 2007, won his first world title a year later, his first for Mercedes in 2014, his seventh last year.

Two wins from the final two races in Saudi Arabia this weekend and Abu Dhabi next will see the Mercedes driver overhaul Max Verstappen of Red Bull and win an eighth world title, more than any other driver in history.

“It’s an incredibly exciting climax,” says Finnis of the F1 denoument. “The one thing I hope is that it’s the racing that decides it and not the politics between the teams. It would be wonderful if Lewis could win it this year by coming from behind. What a way to get the eighth title and break the record.”