Why is Hamilton such a divisive figure?

Once upon a time it was easy to categorise a British racing hero. Bow-tied Hawthorn; canny Jackie; dashing James with an eye for the ladies; marauding Mansell; Damon, the valiant underdog. We understood who they were. We knew what to think.

Through shifting eras they wrote their own chapters in the book of British sporting greats, crystallising our opinions through their deeds on and off-track. Be it silk-sheets Jim Clark - all classical elegance at the wheel of yet another brilliant Chapman Lotus - or boy-next-door-Button, they've formed a golden thread of winners whose presence at the sharp end of Formula 1 has helped cement Britain's wider involvement in the sport.

Indeed, for the British motor-racing establishment, the sight of Moss, Brooks or 'Wattie' winning for Cooper, Vanwall or McLaren could only mean that all was right with the world. God in his heaven. The sceptred isle green and pleasant for another day. Phew!

And now we have Lewis Hamilton: a ground-shaking, bass-quaking, shape-shifting megastar whose very presence forced a reappraisal of what it meant to be a top-line British racing driver, on account of his mixed-race genes and blue-collar upbringing. And that was before he started winning everything.

These days, three world titles and 3.4 million devoted Twitter followers later, Hamilton has gone way beyond merely blowing like a hurricane through the sometimes stultifyingly conservative F1 paddock.

He is arguably bigger than the sport that made his name, and occupies a position among the globe-trotting glitterati - seemingly as comfortable stepping down from his cherry-red Challenger jet as he is stepping out in LA, London, Colorado, Barbados or wherever in the world happens to take his fancy on any particular day.

Follow Hamilton through Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook and you're granted regular glimpses into a lifestyle previously the realm only of those similarly young and wealthy, or blessed with the most fantastical imaginations.

He might be thwacking golf balls into the clouds from the slopes of a New Zealand mountain; taking selfies on a motorbike as he cruises down the blacktop; maybe there's the bump 'n' grind of a Miami sweatbox; or he's off to the Caribbean for a circuit demo in a 2013 Merc F1 show car - all the while finding time to shadow-box on a clifftop overlooking the Atlantic at sunset, or to pump a set of inverted press-ups on the steps leading down to the plunge pool of this week's luxury hotel.

It renders the otherwise enviable existences of his gifted, wealthy and famous peers almost humdrum by comparison. Post-Sochi, Hamilton's team-mate, Nico Rosberg, shared a few shots of a pristine first-light cycle blast along the Cote d'Azur and some family time on the Monaco waterfront spent with his baby daughter, Alaia. Very nice, too, if strikingly unexceptional by the standards of a thoroughly modern F1 driver.

Fernando Alonso, meantime, busied himself promoting the Baku Grand Prix circuit, for which he is an ambassador. Nice work if you can get it. But 'nothing to see here'.

Hamilton, though, streaks on, like some Millennial-Generation comet, existing on what seems to be a different plane from the rest of the Formula 1 set, itself already rarefied and distant from any normal walk of life. Not for him the cosy cadre of Monte Carlo, where he owns a property. Observers say he's rarely seen in town.

Such has been his emergence into the public consciousness, in April he was listed as an 'Icon' among Time magazine's '100 Most Influential People', alongside Usain Bolt, Nicki Minaj, Jordan Spieth, Adele and Leonardo DiCaprio. And this from a magazine based in the USA, a country where F1 still struggles to gain widespread recognition.

But celebrity has its price and for Hamilton that has become manifest in the extremes of opinion, both positive and negative, directed his way. For all the warmth reflected back to Hamilton via #TeamLH, social media provides the perfect, zero-jeopardy platform from which haters can spew forth bile, in a manner far more brazen than any would likely dare, face-to-face.

A recent Twitter trawl unearthed anti-Hamilton hostility such as "tit" and "if one of the most influential ppl [sic] in the world drives cars in circles for money we're all fucked". Hamilton's wearing of traditional Arab dress during the Bahrain GP weekend attracted further pot-shots from several who questioned the state's human rights record.

While these comments might be dismissed as the predictable reaction of a self-selecting minority to the activities of a high-profile public figure, Hamilton is aware of the hostility and from time to time feels moved to comment. "I'm used to it. I'm not surprised by it," he said at the Russian GP. "I've been doing social media for a long, long time... So, to be honest I just see the positives from it, not the negative side."

Surely more interesting though is why Hamilton should be hated at all, for in many ways he epitomises everything that Brits love about their sporting heroes. For starters, he has succeeded largely thanks to his own talent. The evangelical guidance of his father, Anthony, was a massively powerful influence on Lewis's destiny, as Lewis himself regularly acknowledges, but those sublime wheel skills are Lewis's alone.

Yes, they were nurtured within a McLaren-funded environment throughout Hamilton's teens, but he took advantage of what was offered at every opportunity: he fell just one point short of winning the world title in his rookie F1 season, 2007. No one has ever got closer to achieving that singular feat.

Hamilton has succeeded, moreover, without making enemies on track: he's part of a generation of hard-but-clean racers (think Alonso, Vettel, Rosberg, Webber, Raikkonen, Ricciardo...) not given to shoving each other into walls or parking their cars on hairpins during the closing stages of a Monaco qualifying session.

So no need to make excuses for his 44 (and counting) victories. He has won them by the book, with no question of foul play. Only with Rosberg has there been tension - inevitable given their remit to race each other in front-running cars.

Hamilton is also utterly exceptional at the day job, by any measure right up there with the very greatest drivers ever to have raced in F1. Time and time again he has displayed every element necessary for serial success: blinding outright speed, relentless racecraft, passing ability, fighting spirit, and hunger for victory.

Perhaps here, in fact, Hamilton might fall short of a notional British sporting ideal - it being a country unused to serial sporting success and attitudinally more comfortable in defeat, so long as it has been a 'good game, well played'.

Meek capitulation is assuredly not Hamilton's style, as one McLaren staffer recently confirmed: "We gave him a pretty shit car in 2009, but by the middle of the season we'd got it together and he won in Hungary. By that stage he was already more than 50 points off Jenson, who was leading the championship on his way to the title, but I remember Lewis in the garage saying to us all, 'Come on guys, we can win this. We can still win the title!' His competitive spirit was always incredible."

Another aside from his McLaren years: once, on duty to take an ex-Ayrton Senna car for a track run, he was disappointed to find his hero's machine had been fitted with rain tyres, when he could see a temptingly dry track. "Why no slicks, guys?" he queried. "Too expensive," came the response. Hamilton offered to shell out for a few sets himself, just to have some proper fun in a proper car, but none could be found.

That almost childlike enthusiasm is still evident deep inside the celebrity bubble he has grown around himself in recent years. He'll respond to a paddock 'Hi Lewis' with a smile and handshake and he has time for those he's worked with - and liked - throughout his career.

There remains, in fact, a direct connection with the Stevenage lad who wasn't gifted academically but found out instead during his school years that he was astonishingly brilliant at racing remote-control cars. Since then, one toy led to another and now, with multiple millions in the bank, it's F1 cars and private planes, instead of Tamiya models and a lift home from dad.

An object of envy, then, assuredly. But hatred? Not in the view of, say, Paul di Resta, who has raced against Hamilton in various categories since the age of eight. He describes Hamilton as "a world ambassador for the F1 brand".

And not in the view of Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff, whose tricky task it is to channel Hamilton's phenomenal talent, while allowing his prodigy the ever-increasing slack
he needs to accommodate a life beyond F1. "He was a superstar already after his first world title," says Toto. "Actually he was a superstar from the beginning when he first came into Formula 1. He was the real deal."

Wolff's insights run deeper, as might be expected of a man who has worked with Hamilton extremely closely since 2013: "Lewis was always a personality that polarised - which is an ingredient of all the great superstars. And when he came to Mercedes he was just exceptional. The way he behaved on and off-track is different to many of the others - that's why it's not something that has come from one day to the other, but has developed over the years.

"The great ones don't want to be boring. If you're of no interest to anybody you will never be a worldwide phenomenon. You need to be loved and if you're loved then some will hate you. And that balance is the pattern you can see with some of the superstars."

There's that 'hate' word again, linking itself with Hamilton, even as it's being debunked. In living memory only two F1 drivers have divided opinion so starkly: Senna and Michael Schumacher. One was deified after his fatal accident, with the result that some of the more questionable aspects of his career and character have been airbrushed from history; the other remains in rehabilitation from his near-fatal brain injury and has a racing legacy of near-notoriety.

Nothing in Hamilton's career has come close to the extremes of car-as-weapon thuggery practised by Senna and Schumacher; a few handbag swipes were exchanged with Rosberg after T1 contact at last year's US GP, and there was the 'racing incident' in Spain this year, but the slate is largely clean.

That leads to the inevitable conclusion that any invective hurled at Hamilton must be truly personal, because his racing record, and ethics, are almost beyond reproach. It must stem from a dislike, pure and simple, of someone whose life choices outside F1 are markedly different from the majority of those within it, yet whose sporting success simultaneously proclaims him as one of its greatest exponents.

"Lewis has a different view of his value," says Mark Gallagher, a respected F1 commentator. "His value to the world is in promoting himself but then - dare we mention it - in this profoundly white, European, conservative, Anglo-Saxon culture that is Formula 1, Lewis just isn't part of that.

"He has his fashion interests as well, and his music, so it doesn't add up for a majority of people who are the establishment. And it's not only the old brigade. Even some new journalists in F1 and younger people who have come into it are so passionate about the sport that they don't understand how Lewis can have a life outside it.

"So, actually, a lot of key opinion formers within F1 just can't abide Lewis Hamilton, because his narrative isn't that of the established style."

"Maybe it's because I'm black?" Hamilton joked in Ali G-style at the 2011 Monaco GP after receiving two penalties. That's a difficult question to address, such is its sensitivity and for his part Hamilton has always avoided making race any kind of issue. It's certainly true, nonetheless, that the F1 paddock abounds with casual racism of many stripes.

But is it 'because he is different?' That's nearer the mark, though for as long as Hamilton keeps delivering on-track, he has an answer for any critic. His second and third world titles were achieved while playing as hard as he raced, and he blitzed Rosberg in 2015, after a closer contest in one year earlier.

Over the first five races of 2016, true form was harder to establish, since the breaks all went Nico's way, and their Spanish GP lasted less than a lap. Then Hamilton won in Monaco, though still trails his team-mate by 24 points in the title race.

Rosberg is good enough to capitalise on even the tiniest drop in Hamilton's performance and should there be any hint that his lifestyle choices are compromising his racing, then, reckons Wolff, we'll see an immediate change.

"If we were to try to put him in a box, his performance would suffer and fundamentally, the thing I care about most is performance," Wolff explains. "If he's in a good place he will perform well. If his performance doesn't work one day, he'll be the first one to adjust things."

Meantime the haters, whoever they are, might do well to look in the mirror before reaching for the keypad. Lewis Hamilton is what he is: a brilliant racing driver who smashed the mould.

As Johnny Herbert says: "Love him for what he is, love him for being someone who is willing to go out there and show a side that we're not used to as Brits. He always makes a big effort to say 'hi' to the fans. He does it at races, he does it on social media, he does it on his Snapchat stuff. He's very aware and he wants people to share.

"That's the modern world we live in and good on him for doing that. Like him for that. Like him for showing you his life."