MPH: Mark Hughes on...

If you have the British Grand Prix report issue of AUTOSPORT to hand, open it up to pages 32-33 and take a look at the two shots of Mark Webber: one post-qualifying when he's just lost out on pole position; the other on the podium after finishing second to his team-mate.

Each picture is a study in frustrated competitive will and you can almost see the whirring cogs of thought amid the disappointment. He'd come into the Silverstone weekend on a mission, knowing how crucial it was to get the upper hand over Sebastian Vettel as they each got their hands on what looked like being Formula 1's fastest car. And he'd failed.

It would have been easy to have been overwhelmed by that, but he simply came back even stronger at the Nurburgring where he completely over-powered his team-mate to take that maiden win. The competitive intensity and focus required to pull off that sort of performance at this level should never be under-estimated. With a team-mate as good as Vettel and a potentially race-winning car, it becomes about more than simply continuing to drive as hard as you did when in less competitive machinery.

The mental element looms much larger: are you ready to win; are you psychologically airtight; can you pick out the elements that are crucially important - the ones that at this level will differentiate a good performance from a winning one to keep your weekend on track? Can you spot the banana skins along the way?

It's a state of mind he will have progressively built up to as the Red Bull became ever-more competitive.

But what about when you're thrown a surprise opportunity amid a season of general uncompetitiveness? The opportunity provided by a car untypically competitive after you've been flailing around near the back all season? Such as that given to Lewis Hamilton at Monaco, where the McLaren's good slow-corner performance should theoretically have made him a contender. This was confirmed in the practices where the combination of the car's low-speed corner qualities and his own acrobatic skills were enough to get him to within a couple of tenths of the pace. Suddenly, all sorts of scenarios were possible, opportunities that had been a million miles away at more aerodynamically demanding tracks.

There was no progression here to get used to the idea, no steadily improving car, no winter testing programme that allowed you to gauge where you stood. It was just straight in: a one-off opportunity to steal a potentially awesome result. That's quite a distraction to the mental approach and the easy thing to do is over-strive, to have all the desire but not enough of the discipline to keep that desire on track.

Sure enough in Q1 Hamilton braked 15 metres later for Mirabeau than at any other time up to that point, and clanked the wall hard enough to put him out for the afternoon, leaving him back in 16th with a car that had the potential to be on the first couple of rows.

At the Nurburgring - with a heavily-revised car that looked quite respectable and combined the existing slow-corner performance with reasonable aero - he kept his head together well through the qualifying sessions, but lost out in the opening seconds of the race. Was that another case of over-reaching? That would be a harsh judgement. Better to consider it as a legitimate attempt to pull off something against the odds and which failed only because of the random element of Webber's movement snicking Lewis's tyre against the Red Bull's endplate.

The car was again pretty good at the Hungaroring. Plenty of the slow corners it's always been good at. But it was still no Red Bull on outright pace, still around 0.5s off.

It may not have looked that way in the race, but that was a tyre dominated pattern in that the Red Bull couldn't unleash its full performance without damaging the tyres whereas the McLaren - and Ferrari - could. But the crucial thing was it was close enough - and that Hamilton this time was absolutely in the right place in his head to maximise that opportunity.