The book doesn’t contain any original interviews, which given its focus is not necessarily a drawback, but too little discernment has been shown when selecting sources. Quality publications appear alongside tenth-rate content scrapers and even deleted social media posts under potentially fake names. Throughout the text, Sawyer leans heavily on mostly recent articles, giving an impression the was hastily put together – a view reinforced by the fact several of the URLs cited reveal his search terms.
Hamilton’s first season occupies a disproportionately large chunk of the book – one-quarter of its 24 chapters – and these sections draw largely from his autobiography (written 18 years ago) and press conferences, reproduced in indigestible verbatim chunks. The characterisation of other figures is simplistic, hero-or-villain stuff, with
Max Verstappen and Fernando Alonso falling into the latter camp.
It appears the book’s editor has a blind spot for F1 team names: ‘McLaren’, ‘Benetton’ and ‘Toro Rosso’ are all misspelled. ‘Williams’ is spelled correctly, but is incorrectly identified as the team Alonso won his world championships with.
