Stay informed on all the biggest stories in Formula 1. Sign up here to receive the Prime Tire newsletter in your inbox every Monday and Friday morning. ZANDVOORT, NETHERLANDS – Formula One’s summer shutdown is a 14-day period for the paddock to recharge.

Some visit family, others go to the beach with their friends. Advertisement Lewis Hamilton started his break similarly, visiting his family in Turkey before devoting part of his break to traveling through Africa. He tried to maximize his time there, he said, going “straight from the airport into activities, history museums and just cultural experiences in each of the different countries I went to.

” Hamilton stopped in Morocco first and later visited Senegal and Gorée Island off the coast of its capital city, Dakar, which served as a prominent French slave trade base until 1848. Further into the trip, Hamilton met refugees at the Maratane Refugee Settlement in northern Mozambique, a country that’s home to more than 33,000 refugees (predominantly from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda), according to the UNHCR. “There’s so much to take from it,” Hamilton said Thursday in Zandvoort, Netherlands, ahead of the Dutch Grand Prix weekend.

“I’m still digesting the trip and going to a refugee camp and seeing the work being done there and how people are displaced.” Hamilton shared how “it’s one thing reading about it and seeing it on the news, but actually seeing it and speaking to kids who .