Lewis Hamilton’s Dyslexia: How It Became His Advantage

Lewis Hamilton, dyslexic Formula 1 champion, outside 10 Downing Street in 2025 — Photo: Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street, OGL 3, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.

Sir Lewis Hamilton has won seven Formula 1 world titles. Only Michael Schumacher has won as many. He has more than 100 race wins and now drives for Ferrari.

He is also dyslexic, and he did not know it for most of his school years.

By his own account, school was the hardest part of his life. The race track was where things made sense.

School and the hard part

Hamilton grew up in Stevenage, England. He went to Peartree Spring Primary School and then John Henry Newman Catholic School.

He has said he was always playing catch up in class. He also missed a lot of Friday lessons, because he was away racing on weekends.

Reading and writing were only part of it. On the podcast On Purpose with Jay Shetty, he said he was bullied from the age of six. He was one of only a few Black students at a school of about 1,200, and he faced racist abuse.

He called that time the most difficult of his life. He also said he struggled with his schoolwork all the way through.

When he found out

Hamilton first spoke about it in public in 2015. In an interview with children for the German newspaper Stuttgarter Zeitung, he said he was dyslexic and that school had not been much fun.

“As a dyslexic, I struggled.”

Lewis Hamilton, Stuttgarter Zeitung interview, 2015

In 2020, when he was 35, he talked to pupils at a London school for the education campaign Togetherband. He told them he did not realize he was dyslexic until he was 17.

On the Jay Shetty podcast, released in 2023, he gave the age as 16. Either way, he was nearly done with school before anyone gave him an answer.

He also said that around then he met a teacher who really cared. That teacher helped him understand himself better and improve through learning.

Lewis Hamilton’s dyslexic advantage

Hamilton has not claimed that dyslexia makes him drive faster. What he has described is how those hard years shaped him.

A place to put it all. He says racing was where he could finally channel what he felt. He has described his helmet as a kind of cloak. Once it was on, his strengths came out.
The catch-up habit. Years of working to keep up in class built a habit of working. In his 2020 message he tied his success to hard work.
Using it for others. In June 2020 he became an ambassador for the United Nations goal on quality education. He said he wanted to use his own school struggles to help. He believes every child should have access to a good education.

The proof is in the record. He won his first world title in 2008 and his seventh in 2020. He raced for McLaren, then Mercedes, and joined Ferrari in 2025.

He is still racing in 2026, more than twenty years after he found out why school felt so hard.

What we take from it

Lewis spent most of school thinking he was just behind. Then he found out his brain simply works in a different way, and he went on to win seven world titles. We think that is a fair reply to a bad report card.

We also like that he talks to kids about it. A seven-time champion saying he struggled in class is worth more than any poster on a classroom wall.

Lewis Hamilton’s Dyslexia: How It Became His Advantage

School and the hard part

When he found out

Lewis Hamilton’s dyslexic advantage

What we take from it

Sources