Getting up to speed with Lewis Hamilton
"There's no one better than Lewis Hamilton in Formula One racing today." That's what Charlie Rose declares in the 60 Minutes Overtime video above. And Rose should know. He not only profiled Hamilton for this week's 60 Minutes broadcast, but he also put his life in Hamilton's hands on the track.
"It wasn't possible for us to drive in a Formula One car because they're only one-seaters," producer Keith Sharman tells Overtime. "We tried to figure out what was the next best thing."
The next best thing was putting Hamilton in an ultra-fast Mercedes AMG sports car and unleashing the 31-year-old speed demon at Silverstone, home of the British Grand Prix -- with Rose in the passenger seat.
The 60 Minutes team wanted "to get a sense of what it's like" for Hamilton, Sharman says. "Both the speed and also the strategy when he is in a racing situation."
London-based 60 Minutes cameraman Wim de Vos rigged the car with eight mini-cameras, mounted to show Hamilton and his driving from many different angles, even filming two of the tires as they literally burned rubber. The team also used a drone camera operated by Danny Cooke that hovered over different parts of the track during the ride.
"The challenge for Charlie was to do the interview while going 140, 150 miles an hour and not losing his lunch," Sharman says.
But Rose says riding shotgun with Hamilton was "one of the great thrills" of his life.
"As we came into the track, and I felt him begin to accelerate, you just sense that this was going to be an adventure that I never felt before."
After Lewis gave a demonstration, he decided to have a little bit of fun with the correspondent by doing several doughnuts around Silverstone.
"All I could hear was the screeching of the tires and I could smell burning rubber," Sharman says. "First rule of 60 Minutes is, you know, don't hurt the correspondent. So when they got back, I was relieved to see Charlie in one piece."
For Rose, however, the adrenaline rush of driving with Hamilton was pure joy. "It's the greatest feeling I've ever had in terms of being inside of something that's going fast," he says. "You know, I didn't feel any fear because I knew I was in the hands of a great driver."
The video above was originally published on December 13, 2015, and produced by Will Croxton and Erin Horan, and edited by Will Croxton.