Frances Tiafoe reveals what he learnt from Lewis Hamilton, their shared approach to pressure and the remarkable serve that left him aced.
Frances Tiafoe has spent enough time on a tennis court to recognise a dangerous serve. Lewis Hamilton, apparently, has one too.
During filming for Rest Day with Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time Formula 1 world champion produced a delivery sufficiently strange to ace the professional tennis player standing opposite him.
Tiafoe still sounds faintly offended by the physics of it. Yet the improbable serve was only the lighter side of a day in which Frances Tiafoe and Lewis Hamilton compared notes on pressure, recovery, mindset and the methods elite athletes use to stop their own minds becoming another opponent.
Lewis Hamilton Had Tiafoe Curious Before They Met
The meeting forms the second instalment of lululemon’s Rest Day with Lewis Hamilton series, following Hamilton’s opening episode with professional golfer Min Woo Lee.
For Tiafoe, however, the attraction was less about appearing in another athlete’s content series than gaining access to somebody operating at the far end of elite performance.
“I was excited about getting to spend some time with Lewis. I’ve always enjoyed spending time with and picking the brains of the highest performers. And it doesn’t get much higher than Lewis. People like that usually have a unique mindset or perspective and I love to ask questions and tap into that a little bit. Plus, I just had a feeling we would get along well.”
It is an interesting instinct. Professional sport encourages athletes to become specialists to an almost absurd degree, yet some of the most useful conversations can happen beyond the walls of their own discipline.
Hamilton cannot tell Tiafoe how to return serve. Tiafoe is unlikely to be much help adjusting an Formula 1 car through a high-speed corner. The psychology surrounding those moments, however, travels rather better.
For Tiafoe, Leaving the Comfort Zone Starts With Action
The premise behind the series is to remove Hamilton from Formula 1 and put him into unfamiliar sporting territory. Tiafoe’s interpretation of that idea is pleasingly unsentimental.
“To me, this series means action. You have to take action. If you stop and think too much, you’ll think of a million reasons why you should wait, why maybe you aren’t ready, maybe you aren’t prepared enough. And you’ll end up doing nothing and regretting it. You just gotta go and take that first step.”
There is probably a motivational poster somewhere waiting to ruin the sentiment, but the underlying point is sound.
Elite athletes spend enormous amounts of time preparing. Preparation can also become a hiding place. At some stage somebody has to serve the ball, take the start or stand over the putt.
Tiafoe’s distinction is between getting ready and waiting for some mythical state in which every doubt has disappeared. Sport rarely grants that luxury.
What Impressed Frances Tiafoe About Hamilton Away From Formula 1
Perhaps the more revealing part of Tiafoe’s assessment concerns Hamilton away from competition.
The temptation with elite athletes is to study only the visible performance: the race, the match, the result. Tiafoe instead noticed how carefully Hamilton appears to manage the hours in which he is not competing.
“I’m not surprised at all, but my biggest takeaway from my conversation with Lewis was his outlook on life and his perspective on things. Lewis has looked at every part of his life and found ways to optimise his performance, but also values his time away from the track.
You can tell some of his hobbies give him a sense of peace but also charges his batteries to go and get after it when he’s back in that race mode.”
That last part matters.
Rest at this level is not necessarily inactivity. It can be distance: enough separation from competition to return to it with something left in reserve.
The title Rest Day therefore contains a small joke of its own. Hamilton’s version of relaxation still appears to involve examining how another world-class athlete thinks, learning a different sport and discussing the optimisation of human performance. Some people watch daytime television.
Breathwork Links Tennis and Formula 1 Pressure
Tiafoe and Hamilton also spent time discussing mindset, process and recovery, eventually arriving at one of the simplest tools available to an athlete: breathing.
“We talked a lot about mindset, process, recovery. You can tell Lewis has tried a lot of different things and puts a lot of energy into finding the right balance in those areas. One of the most interesting things Lewis and I talked about was the importance of breathwork to stay calm in the big moments.
It’s so interesting to talk through the differences and similarities with athletes in other sports; you see we’re all very similar and pushing ourselves in the same ways.”
That shared problem is more interesting than any attempt to pretend Formula 1 and professional tennis are fundamentally alike.
They aren’t.
But both sports eventually produce moments in which preparation has finished and execution has to happen under scrutiny. At that point, an athlete’s ability to regulate emotion and attention matters rather more than the badge on the uniform.
Golfers would recognise the problem immediately. There is a considerable difference between knowing how to hit a six-foot putt and being able to do it after your pulse has decided to join the gallery.
Then Lewis Hamilton Aced Frances Tiafoe
And so to the serve.
Asked for his most memorable behind-the-scenes moment, Tiafoe did not reach for a profound conversation about athletic mortality. He remembered being aced by a racing driver.
“Getting aced by Lewis Hamilton. He hit this one serve, I think it was his first serve of the day, that bounced and went several different ways, I’ve never seen anything like it. I’d like to say he hit it out of the middle of the racket but I’m not sure he can ever repeat that one! It was unbelievable.”
There are several delightful details in there.
Hamilton apparently produced it with what Tiafoe believes was his first serve of the day. The bounce then behaved with such disdain for conventional geometry that the professional on the receiving end could do nothing about it.
Most damagingly, Tiafoe does not seem entirely convinced Hamilton meant it.
That may be the correct verdict. There is skill, and then there is the sort of magnificent accident that becomes considerably better every time the person responsible insists it was intentional.
Why the Tiafoe and Hamilton Conversation Works
There is inevitably a commercial structure surrounding Rest Day with Lewis Hamilton. It is lululemon’s own series, the athletes wear the company’s clothing and the episode exists within that branded framework.
Yet the useful material comes from somewhere less polished.
Tiafoe is not particularly interesting because he and Hamilton can exchange a few shots for the cameras. He is interesting because he is curious about how another elite athlete has constructed a life capable of sustaining performance.
His answers repeatedly return to the same ideas: take action before doubt becomes paralysis, treat recovery as part of performance, remain curious about methods outside your own sport and find ways to stay calm once the big moment arrives.
The second episode launched globally on Thursday 27 August at 9 am PST on lululemon’s YouTube channel, with a final instalment in the series planned for the autumn.
Hamilton may have entered Tiafoe’s world as the novice. He left with an ace.
The fact that nobody, including Tiafoe, seems entirely sure how he managed it only improves the story.
