The hurdles Hamilton had to overcome

As the tension built during the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix weekend, Lewis Hamilton faced endless questions about the pressure of this world championship decider.

When he qualified a sedate (by his standards) three-and-a-half tenths off arch-rival Nico Rosberg, the interrogation gained momentum. Why had he struggled to put together good laps when it really mattered in Q3? Was the intensity getting to him? Would he crack?

Hamilton's response to these lines of questioning was perfunctory and predictable. He wouldn't change his approach; he would race to win like he always did; he was in control.

But it sounded like he was trying to convince himself, simply saying the right things because he recognised the need to be in that place mentally.

Could it be that behind Hamilton's eyes was the turmoil of a driver whose desperation to clinch a second world title threatened to derail him in what was a relatively straightforward task - that of following Rosberg home?

It's very easy to say that you need to focus on the normal process of a race weekend, but to do it, to really achieve that and not let the fear of failure or the desperation to achieve the ultimate goal win out, is harder than most will ever realise. Hamilton has endured defeat snatched from the jaws of victory before, and even when he achieved his previous title success it was far from straightforward.

Whether Hamilton had any real doubts or fears - and he did admit to not sleeping as well as he should have done on Saturday night - is impossible to say. But what is beyond doubt is that the second the red lights went out, he had everything under control.

Nico Rosberg proved a worthy adversary, but Hamilton deserved this championship and he was not going to allow it to slip through his fingers after eight months of blood, sweat, tears and success.

The first hurdle: the start

As has so often been the case in 2014, Hamilton reversed a disadvantage on Saturday so that it became an advantage on Sunday. Hamilton produced a stunning getaway, one that made Rosberg's pedestrian but not disastrous start look worse than it really was. In a matter of seconds, he had turned the tables.

"Very little is the athlete," said Hamilton when asked about his role in the launch. "We have a sequence that we have to go through and we have to perform at the right time, making sure that you prepare the clutch throughout the weekend, prepare your tyres when you get to your spot.

"I work very closely with the engineer who works with my clutch. He came into my room before the race and asked, 'How do you want to approach this?'

"I said the same as every time, we don't need to do any more or any less. On the formation lap, you get a feel for how good the clutch is at that point. We hit it spot on. When you let out the second part and you feed the throttle, that's when the driver comes in. It felt like the best start I've ever had."

The start is usually the biggest pressure point of the race. Many drivers have come unstuck at this moment, even without titles at stake. It's so easy not to be smooth with the clutch operation, to replace progressive movements with imprecision.

But not for Hamilton. The first seconds of the race were always going to be the hurdle most likely to trip him up, but he dealt with it perfectly.

While Rosberg encountered too much wheelspin, particularly on the upshift to second gear, which prompted him to bang it up to third quickly to calm the rears, Hamilton catapulted into the relative safety of the lead. Whether that dissipated the stress, banished the fear of failure, only Hamilton knows. Either way, he was in the box seat.

There was now no way back for Rosberg. During the brief early stint on the super-soft Pirellis, which degraded rapidly, Rosberg initially sat around a second and a half behind.

By the time Hamilton dived into the pits at the end of lap 10, this gap had increased to around three seconds. All he needed was a clean stop and there was no way Rosberg, who pitted on the following lap, could jump him.

The second hurdle: resisting Rosberg's pressure

But Rosberg wasn't in such a bad position. Yes, he was behind, but the equation wasn't so dramatically transformed.

Even if he won, he needed Hamilton to hit trouble and not finish second, so the strategy was to try to pressure his team-mate into an error, or hope unreliability came into play.

Rosberg, resolute, had made no bones about the fact that he wanted Hamilton to come unstuck in the race and was determined to do everything he could to make his rival crack.

"I wanted to push and fight and keep the pressure on until the last lap and the last corner and do what I can," said Rosberg. "I was burning for that."

Mercedes was hit with a technical problem, but from Rosberg's point of view it was the wrong car that was hobbled. Rosberg started the 23rd lap of the race 2.730s behind Hamilton.

Rosberg's ERS problem put an end to his hopes © LAT

Things were going to plan. Rosberg's strategy was simply to keep a watching brief, protect the tyres and hopefully go longer than Hamilton before making his next stop.

There's no guarantee this would have helped, but it was better than simply following him around, pitting a lap later and still being behind. Rosberg still had hopes of making something, anything, happen.

But then came the ERS problem. The loss of hybrid power robbed Rosberg of 160bhp and he lost three seconds per lap.

All was not lost, for Rosberg still knew that he only needed fifth place were Hamilton to fail to score.

That scenario required his team-mate to be out of the picture, so if he could hold on to a top six spot while the other Mercedes was still there, the title was still on.

As always, Rosberg did a fine job of extracting what pace he could from the car and by doing so there was still at least a chance he could keep himself in the mix. But he was always fighting a losing battle.

To Rosberg's credit, he rejected the call - or should that be the offer - from the pitwall to retire the car and insisted on finishing the race.

"I still believed in it for a long time because there was always the possibility that Lewis could also get a problem," said Rosberg. "So I believed until the end, on the very last lap I was still pushing."

Unfortunately, by then there was little left on the table for him. He was powerless to prevent even Romain Grosjean's Lotus overtaking him on the final lap, relegating Rosberg to 14th place.

As Rosberg pointed out several times after the race, even if Hamilton had endured a disaster, he would never have been able to capitalise on it.

The third hurdle: defeating Massa

With Rosberg fading from the equation, the complexion of Hamilton's race was transformed. While there was still the threat that the sister Mercedes could finish in the top five if he encountered a mechanical problem, Hamilton played it conservatively.

Shortly after Rosberg hit trouble, Hamilton's pace also dropped off and for a few minutes it seemed possible that he too was facing symptoms of the same problem. But this was more through caution than imminent ERS failure.

"We managed the pace at that stage and then the tyres came to the end of their life," explained Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff. "We turned the engine down a bit, the tyres fell off the cliff and then you saw the drop in pace."

This brought a third driver into contention for victory; Felipe Massa. The Williams had been clearly the best-of-the-rest throughout the Abu Dhabi weekend and after jumping team-mate Valtteri Bottas, who suffered clutch slip at the start, it was the Brazilian who led the charge.

All weekend, Massa had looked the faster of the Williams drivers, but on his final Q3 run he had been held up by Rosberg on his warm-up lap. His front tyres weren't up to temperature, so he went off on what should have been his key lap, meaning that he started fourth behind Bottas. But in the early stages of the race, he held a comfortable third place.

Hamilton pitted before Massa, but the Brazilian could not catch him © LAT

Before his problem set in, Rosberg had an advantage of around nine seconds over Massa. But without ERS, it took Massa no time to close up and breeze past Rosberg on lap 27. A lap earlier Hamilton's advantage over Massa peaked at just over 14 seconds.

By the time Hamilton headed for the pits four laps after Massa took second, the gap had dropped to under nine seconds.

But while Hamilton and Massa were originally on the same basic strategy, starting on the super-softs, then switching to the softs, the length of Massa's first stint, three laps longer than Hamilton's, gave the Williams driver a genuine shot at victory.

By then extending what had originally been planned as the first of two stints on softs, Massa was able to bolt on the super-softs for a short, maximum attack, final stint.

"His pace was really good coming up to that first stop, so we decided to leave him out," explained Williams performance chief Rob Smedley. "It was only when we were getting to mid-30s [in terms of laps] and there was no degradation whatsoever that we thought about it.

"There wasn't any big threat from behind, we knew if we dropped off it was not going to drop off dramatically and that we would probably get 13 or 14 laps out of it. So that's what we did, we put the super-softs on and started hunting it down. It was proper racing."

With the second Williams of Bottas holding fourth place having lost time in the first part of the race following his bad start, Massa had carte blanche to attack. But first, he had to ensure he could go far enough to make the super-soft gamble work.

Massa went 12 laps longer than Hamilton on his second set of tyres. It was an outstanding stint, one that allowed him to stop and rejoin 11 seconds behind. With 12 laps to go, the equation was very simple. And Massa pushed hard.

During that charge, there were times when he was as much as 1.3s faster, but even an average gain of three quarters of a second a lap was not enough. There was always the feeling that Hamilton had enough in hand to respond.

Hamilton took the title in style, with his 11th win of the season © LAT

Even though Lewis had stressed over the radio after his final stop that he was not interested in racing Massa - this was before Rosberg had definitely slipped out of contention for a top five finish - it was clear that he was keen to close out the second title with a victory.

Massa ultimately fell two and a half seconds short of his first victory since the 2008 Brazilian GP, the race in which Hamilton had clinched his first title. Once again, the Williams was impressively quick, but not quite quick enough to beat the mighty Silver Arrows.

So Hamilton did it in style, claiming his 11th win of the season. Most importantly he did it while avoiding the myriad pitfalls along the way. He could so easily have buckled, but there was no sign of any error.

"When you are going through the race, coming here this weekend, there's so much pressure around you," said Hamilton. "You are just trying to ignore it, trying to keep your eye on the ball.

"I didn't sleep last night. I went to bed at about 1am and woke up at 5am. I went for a run this morning and a massage and I thought I was going to be tired when it got to the race but somehow I felt composed."

This was Hamilton's race, Hamilton's weekend, Hamilton's year. It was the perfect way to crown a remarkable season. As Rosberg said, "He deserved to win today and he deserved to win the championship."