G&Ts with Max Verstappen, gifting Max Mosley a whip, Toto Wolff’s threats, battles with Lewis Hamilton, grief, tragedy and the best job on this planet – my 20 years masking F1 for the Daily Mail: JONATHAN McEVOY

It’s a joy to open the curtains on another sun-blessed morning next to Melbourne’s St Kilda beach. Another day that you are glad you never got a proper job.

That is the way it is again as I write this, thinking back to how I became Motor Racing Correspondent of the world’s greatest newspaper almost exactly 20 years ago, an unearned honour that came, as so often in my trade, almost by accident.

I did not know it at the time but I was sent to Edmonton, Canada, on trial for this assignment. And the person you have to thank – or curse – for me landing the gig was nobody to do with Formula One at all.

While Sir Clive Woodward’s Lions were getting thrashed in New Zealand, I was reporting on England A in the Churchill Cup.

The phone rang from the sports desk in London, saying they had not yet been able to get hold of our columnist Rob Andrew, the great fly-half of Cambridge University and England.

Could I speak to him and get his thoughts over, pronto, mate? I wrote down what he said in my notebook, not least about the deficiencies of the Lions’ lineout. His thoughts were meticulously in order like a work of art and all I had to do, to be honest, was read his comments back over to the copytaker, only the odd phrase tweaked.

I got the London office out of bother, the column was good, no great thanks to me, but it sort of got me on the starting grid.

And so a few weeks later I was inflicted on you in the capacity I have done ever since, with a few excursions – five Olympic Games, including the unforgettable London 2012, among other highlights.

Anyway, here we are back in Melbourne, where a year after I began on the Formula One beat, I witnessed Lewis Hamilton arrive as a fireball. His opening bend on his debut was a remarkable harbinger of nine consecutive podiums at the start of that season.

He arguably rarely performed so well as in the rawness of youth, scoring as many points in 2007, and ahead on victories, as his McLaren team-mate Fernando Alonso, the Spaniard who had usurped Michael Schumacher as the most potent driver in the world.

Lewis was polite under the influence of his mentor Ron Dennis. He was a bit of a corporate man, though easier to deal with then than in later years. He would say hello with a bone-crunching handshake.

I had interviewed him a few months before, in May 2006, when he was on the cusp of Formula One, a driver of huge promise in Formula Two, the feeder series he crushed.

I went to McLaren’s factory in Woking to see him.

‘All around, experts are plotting the future in bespoke laboratories and an exhibition of dream cars reminds visitors of a glorious past,’ I wrote at the time. ‘Pictures of motor-racing heroes hang from the wall and the trophy cabinet is brimful of silverware. The surroundings might faze most young Formula One wannabes. But not Hamilton, the 21-year-old Englishman whose name is on every lip.

‘Is he daunted at the prospect of breaking the white, middle-class mould by becoming F1’s first black driver? Is he unsettled by the thought of carrying Britain’s world championship hopes? Is he worried about emulating his hero Ayrton Senna by racing for McLaren as early as next season?

‘Not at all.’

It was not always easy with Lewis. We fell in. We fell out. His Mercedes boss Toto Wolff tried to get me banned from the paddock for what they considered to be disobliging stories.

But relations with Hamilton flickered; they never died.

After he won his fifth title in Mexico City in October 2018, at, in my view, the high point at which he combined his native gusto with the guilefulness of experience, he addressed me in the official press conference. ‘We haven’t spoken for a long time,’ he said over the microphone, shrugging off five years of a fractured relationship.

‘I would like to say welcome back. I have read all the great stuff you have written about me this year and I want to say thank you.’

More ups and downs followed. I did not like his naïve support of Black Lives Matter, or the hectoring that implied telling his fellow drivers that they must take the knee or be construed as racists.

Hamilton mostly lives in LA now; not Monaco other than for tax requirements. He has a place in London too, in Kensington, not far from the Daily Mail offices.

I wrote since his debut that he would end up at Ferrari one day. I was not a clairvoyant. His father Anthony whispered as much from day one. And I was in Maranello when Lewis drove a Ferrari for the first time at their test track, Fiorano, last year.

The Tifosi crammed on to the bridge 12 deep as he emerged out of the fog of morning in a scarlet car. I spoke to Anthony at our hotel that night, along with Lewis’s mother Brenda and his second wife Linda. ‘It is like starting all over again at McLaren,’ Anthony said of the new chapter at Ferrari.

He also told me of my relations with Hamilton: ‘With Lewis you are either all in, or you are out. There is his way or no way.’ Anthony knew a lot about the binary nature of his son, having fallen out with him and been ‘sacked’ as his manager in 2009.

Getting down to it, Hamilton is not the best driver I have seen in 20 years across more than 350 grands prix. That accolade belongs to Max Verstappen. Michael Schumacher is second and Hamilton third – and he is doing his legacy some harm as he plods on at Ferrari.

Hostage to fortune because by the time you read this, Hamilton may have won the opening race in Melbourne, but aged 41 time has run out on the best of his brilliance. He is hardly a bad driver overnight but has been in incremental decline for some six years.

Even when officialdom ambushed him in 2021 in the deciding race in Abu Dhabi, with the infamous withdrawal of the safety car, do not forget how extraordinarily Verstappen made his decisive pass, earlier in the lap than Hamilton had imagined – albeit the elbows-out Dutchman being on fresher tyres.

That night I went on the Red Bull boat, at the Verstappen party.

The new world champion knocked back gin and tonics, his favourite tipple. He brought up how I had asked him why he kept crashing earlier in his career. ‘I shall headbutt the next person who asks me that,’ he had said back then.

On the boat he told me we knew each other better now and all that angst belonged to a bygone age.

Was Hamilton robbed? On the night’s evidence – yes. But Verstappen was a worthy champion over the stretch in a marginally inferior Red Bull as against Hamilton’s Mercedes. Verstappen was on the rise, Hamilton on the wane, just slightly, by fractions.

Hamilton these days is interested in celebrity, jealously guarding his self-promotion. Verstappen despises the limelight. He is salt of the earth. What you see is what you get. A meat and two veg man, as well as a genius driver. Easy to deal with in my experience.

Sunday is the day things most likely happen. Sometimes, awful things. Jules Bianchi’s crash at Suzuka in 2014, from which he later died, was a bleak moment. For me, it was writing the sad news from a cramped little hotel lobby near the track.

I wrote an apologia for Charlie Whiting, F1’s late brilliant race director, formerly a mechanic at Bernie Ecclestone’s Brabham. He was not to be blamed for the death, I contended. Truth be told, Bianchi was driving faster than the double yellow flags permitted, sadly.

Whiting, who had spent years trying to save drivers’ lives, rang me up while I was in the British Airways lounge the next day on my way out of Japan. He appreciated the support.

There was also that awful day Formula Two driver Anthoine Hubert, a talented 22-year-old from Lyon, died in Spa in 2019. Truly, you knew it was fatal the moment you saw the impact on the TV screen in the media room. His mother drove from Paris to the Ardennes Forest through twilight and tears to be on the grid the following afternoon in a semi-circle around her boy’s cerise helmet to mourn his death among a clutch of friends and competitors, their heads bowed.

She hid her grief from the world behind dark glasses. Sir Jackie Stewart was among the distraught throng. That remarkable man, a three-time world champion from a more dangerous era, had stood in churches and graveyards all his life, beside grieving widows and tearful mothers, and there he was again amid sadness.

He shrugged, sadly, when I asked for his thoughts that afternoon, admitting that death would never be eradicated from motor racing. And on the accreditation pass that grants me access to the paddock it says on the back: ‘Motorsport is dangerous.’

Stewart told me on the occasion of his 80th birthday, in an interview at his home in Switzerland, that had he not led his campaign to improve tracks he would be a more popular world champion, but a dead one.

He let slip that the Queen would be guest of honour at his big bash at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, surely a unique distinction for any British sportsman.

Sundays?

Well, that unforgettable morning after the 2008 Boat Race down the road from me in Fulham. I awoke to a million missed calls. ‘Have you seen the News of the World?’ the messages on my phone asked.

I nearly keeled over when I walked into the newsagents. I told the owner behind the counter: ‘I had dinner with this guy the other day.’ It was Max Mosley, president of the FIA, the sport’s regulatory body, the right-hand to Ecclestone’s left hand as they transformed the sport into a modern phenomenon and a highly lucrative one. The headline on the front page read: ‘F1 BOSS HAS SICK NAZI ORGY WITH HOOKERS.’ Beat that!

He sued Rupert Murdoch and won for an invasion of privacy, the erudite Mosley willing to bear his conflicted private life in a public court to prove there was no Nazi theme to his ‘party’ as he called it.

The Nazi accusation was a matter of intense sensitivity given that his father was Sir Oswald Mosley and his mother Diana, nee Mitford, one of the six sisters who lit up society before the Second World War. Diana never renounced her husband’s rebarbative politics. And Evelyn Waugh wrote that her beauty rang through the room like a peal of bells.

Mosley spent the rest of his life fighting the Press, a silly obsession that he took to his grave.

At the height of this animosity, he spoke to me in his black tie at the FIA gala dinner in Monaco, asking if I would set up a meeting with my then editor Paul Dacre so he could discuss his vendetta.

‘Mr Dacre is a serious figure, the dean of your business,’ he tried to oblige me. The request went unanswered. I let the ball go outside the off-stump.

Another day, I was rung up. Mosley was dead. I was tipped off by a colleague in my office. I contacted Mosley’s old friend Ecclestone and asked if it was true. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll ring up Jean and get back to you.’

Jean, the daughter of a police sergeant, had married Max in 1960 when they were undergraduates at Oxford. Ecclestone came back a few minutes later. ‘What you have told me is true,’ he said. 

Max Mosley had blown his brains out at home, ailing from cancer. His aunt, Unity, who was infatuated with Hitler, had tried the same trick. She got it wrong. A misjudged shot and struggled on, incapacitated. Max, after a final dinner with his partially estranged Jean, who bizarrely lived down the road from him in Chelsea, had aimed the bullet in the right place and left a note on his bedroom door: ‘Don’t enter. Call the police.’ 

It took my mind back to his farewell dinner in Monza some years earlier. Eight of us, say. Despite his detestation of the Press had remained on good terms with the F1 journalists. Given his predilection for sado-masochism, we bought him a whip from Swaine Adeney Brigg, purveyors of umbrellas and riding equipment to Buckingham Palace.

It fell to me to hand over the whip, which I said in my brief speech was a token of our appreciation of his affiliation over the years and which may be of practical use in his retirement. Thankfully, he laughed.

Other memories, speaking to Ecclestone as he lost control of the sport he had controlled for so many years, in 2017. ‘I await a call that will tell me whether I am gone.’ Liberty Media took over – a £6billion deal – and Bernie sat in his office in Knightsbridge where he had controlled an empire, and told his successor Chase Carey, ‘You have bought the car, so you might as well have the keys.’

Ecclestone’s essential genius, still going on at 95, was as a reader of the human condition.

Other stories. Jenson Button to McLaren, a telephone call I got that nobody believed. It came true a few weeks later. Being a co-driver to Tony Jardine in the World Rally championship. My reading of the pace notes was average, particularly if there was a sheer drop over my left shoulder.

And there I was poaching eggs on Easter Sunday in Covid lockdown when Lady (Susie) Moss rang me, unforgettably honouring her word, at the height of her anguish, that if there was news about Stirling she would let me know the ill-tidings before anyone else.

She had also allowed me to sit at the great man’s bedside a few weeks before, when he told me that his win in Monaco in 1961, in an inferior Lotus, was the outstanding Formula One drive of his life, and that Ecclestone was his oldest friend.

The Mosses read the Mail every day, but both are gone now, Susie, as her family said, of a broken heart, aged 69.

I once said to a friend that I would have exchanged 15 grands prix wins to write one race report on deadline for the Daily Mail, a high-wire act at times. My mate pointed out that that many wins would have made me one of the five most successful British drivers in history. Maths has never been my strong point, but joint seventh with Button, in fact.

Never mind missing out on that. This remains a roaring life. And thanks for continuing to read me.