F1 world champion reveals details of lunch date with Her Majesty; But Mercedes driver under fire for asking to be excused from last week's Austria test
Tuesday 30 June 2015 10:26, UK
F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton has revealed he was given a rebuke by The Queen over his table manners.
Hamilton was awarded an MBE in 2008 after securing the first of his two world titles.
“I got invited back about a year later for lunch,” Hamilton told the BBC's Graham Norton Show. “There was about eight of us. I turned up after the Brazilian Grand Prix, walked in, saw the seating plan and I was sat right next to her. So I was kind of excited.
“So I sat down and she was to my right and I started to talk to her and she was like ‘no, you speak that way [left] first and I’ll speak this way and I’ll come back to you’.
"So she spoke to the guy next to her for five minutes and then she spent the rest of the time talking to me. It was really, really cool.”
Ahead of this weekend’s British GP, Hamilton leads this year’s World Championship by 10 points from Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg. But the Englishman’s decision to skip last week’s test at the Red Bull Ring, despite an indifferent performance throughout the Austrian GP weekend when he was unable to match the pace of Rosberg, has already proved controversial.
Mercedes confirmed on their Twitter feed that Hamilton had been due to drive alongside Pascal Wehrlein at the test but ‘chose not to’.
"I just find it bizarre that he would say ‘no’ and go off and be in Monaco with whoever he was with,” Derek Warwick, the president of the British Racing Drivers' Club, told Sky Sports F1 in response to Hamilton posting a 'selfie' picture on his Twitter account alongside pop star Pharrell Williams during the test. "As a racing driver you want every second you can in the car, if anything to keep the other driver out. It is obvious to me."
While neither of Ferrari’s race drivers elected to run during the Austria test, Hamilton also sat out the other in-season test this year which followed the Spanish GP. That event, which retrospectively marked the start of Rosberg’s current purple patch of three wins in four races, was preceded by Hamilton insisting his bid for a third title wouldn’t be derailed by his extracurricular activities after he flew to and fro across the Atlantic between races to attend the Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather superfight in Las Vegas.
This weekend, Hamilton, whose interest in music has reputedly extended to the 30-year-old recording his own material, was stageside when Williams performed at the Glastonbury music festival on Saturday night.
Rosberg, by contrast, appeared at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, three days after completing more than 100 laps in Mercedes’ dominant 2015 car as he stood in for Hamilton at the Red Bull Ring. “We ran a stiff setup in preparation for Silverstone, which will be useful for next week,” the German reported after topping Wednesday’s timesheets.
