Lewis Hamilton career highs and heartbreak revisited ahead of staggering milestone

Lewis Hamilton will make the 400th Grand Prix start of his career this weekend at Interlagos, a milestone no other driver in Formula 1 history has reached without leaving the sport for a period.

The Ferrari driver, now 41, made his debut with McLaren back in 2007 and has gone on to collect 106 wins, 209 podiums and 105 pole positions across 20 seasons, seven of which ended with him as world champion.

What sets Hamilton's longevity apart is not simply the number of races but the fact he has kept winning across three separate decades, a distinction that marks him out even from Fernando Alonso, whose own record-breaking start count, now at 444 races, has included stretches away from front-running machinery and F1 entirely.

RacingNews365 takes a deeper look at Hamilton's F1 highs but also the lows...

The highs: Turkey, Silverstone and a Brazilian stampede

Among the 106 victories, two are consistently singled out by analysts as Hamilton's finest. His win at the 2008 British Grand Prix is regarded as a wet-weather masterclass, with the then-McLaren driver navigating treacherous conditions at Silverstone without error while lapping the majority of the field.

12 years later, his victory at the 2020 Turkish Grand Prix delivered a seventh world title to match Michael Schumacher's record, achieved by nursing a single set of intermediate tyres on a newly resurfaced, low-grip Istanbul Park surface that caught out much of the grid.

The 2008 season finale at Interlagos, the very circuit hosting this weekend's round, also features prominently in assessments of his career-defining moments. Late rain forced a decisive tyre call and a final-corner pass on the last lap that settled the drivers' championship in Hamilton's favour.

The same venue produced another standout performance in 2021. Hamilton arrived in São Paulo having been disqualified from Friday qualifying after his Mercedes failed a DRS aperture check, demoting him to the back for the sprint, and then took a separate five-place grid penalty for a fresh engine, leaving him down in 10th for the grand prix itself. 

He fought from 20th to fifth in the sprint before converting his lowly starting slot of 10th into a staggering victory on Sunday, surviving a tense wheel-to-wheel battle with Max Verstappen along the way, a drive widely held up as one of the great recovery performances of his career.

Not every statistic-laden win is viewed equally by pundits, however. Some of his lights-to-flag victories during Mercedes' hybrid-era dominance are regarded by commentators as less revealing of raw racecraft, given the scale of the car's advantage at the time. 

Races such as the 2018 German Grand Prix and the 2014 Bahrain Grand Prix are instead held up as underrated examples of Hamilton's ability, the former a recovery from a lowly grid slot in mixed conditions, the latter a battle against Nico Rosberg enjoying a clear strategic tyre advantage.

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The lows: heartbreak, controversy and barren spells

Hamilton's record is not without its darker chapters. The most painful of all came at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, where he crossed the line second to Verstappen after race director Michael Masi allowed only the five lapped cars between the two title rivals to unlap themselves before immediately calling in the safety car for a one-lap shootout finish. 

The decision cost Hamilton what would have been a record eighth world championship and triggered a lengthy FIA inquiry, which concluded that the handling of lapped traffic had been down to human error, while also finding that Masi had acted in good faith despite intense pressure from competing teams. 

The fallout saw Masi removed from his post as race director ahead of the following season, direct radio communication between team principals and race control banned, an off-site virtual race control centre introduced, and the sporting regulations rewritten so that "all cars" rather than "any cars" must be permitted to pass the safety car.

Other setbacks have shaped his career in less dramatic but still significant ways. In 2007, a title that looked within reach slipped away at the Chinese Grand Prix when McLaren left him out too long on worn intermediate tyres in drying conditions, before Hamilton made a crucial mistake himself by driving into the pit-entry gravel trap.

Two years later, the 2009 Australian Grand Prix "Liegate" affair saw Hamilton disqualified after he and McLaren misled stewards over whether he had deliberately yielded position to Jarno Trulli under the safety car, a controversy that dented his reputation at the time. 

The 2011 season is often cited as his most difficult on-track campaign, defined by a string of collisions, notably with Felipe Massa, and frequent trips to see the stewards. 

In 2016, mechanical unreliability derailed his title bid, an engine failure while leading the Malaysian Grand Prix handing a decisive swing in the championship to teammate Rosberg. 

More recently, the introduction of the 2022 ground-effect regulations brought an extended competitive drought, as Mercedes' porpoising-afflicted early chassis left Hamilton grappling with handling problems far removed from his accustomed front-running form.

Quite where this weekend's race in Brazil, the scene of one of his most dramatic triumphs, will rank among those 400 starts remains to be seen.