Jeremy Hart (Journalist): So 26 years ago, when [Lewis] was 13, I got the chance to go to his house in Stevenage, just north of London. Bearing in mind, this guy was 13, and people were starting to talk about how good he was. He’d just signed this deal with McLaren under their young drivers program, Ron Dennis had spotted him. And Lewis was a kart racer at this point, you know, he was racing go-karts. So I went for a number of outlets—newspapers, Autocar magazine in the UK—and went to interview him. And so I turned up at this very modest terraced house in Stevenage. His dad Anthony, who was obviously his dad, but also at that time very much his mentor and his manager, brokered the deal and sent me off up to Lewis’s bedroom to go and do the interview, which these days of course, that wouldn’t be appropriate. There we were hanging out in Lewis’s childhood bedroom with posters of Schumacher on the wall—
Dianne Bortoletto (Podcast Host): Senna
Hart: Yeah exactly, he had his gaming console, he had scalextrics, you know, all this kind of stuff, as you would expect. His pride and joy was his autograph book, so he’s showing me his autograph book, and in it you’ve got Damon Hill, you’ve got David Coulthard, you’ve got Michael Schumacher. But next to their autographs, most of them, not all of them, had also put their phone numbers.
Bortoletto: Oh what?
Hart: Clearly, you know, they—Ron Dennis was a guy to be on the right side of, career-wise, every other reason—and clearly once Ron Dennis had given Lewis his seal of approval, then was putting him on this trajectory, nobody knew then, but hopefully towards F1. These drivers said well ‘look me up when you’re famous’-type thing.