Dodgy Business

Well, I went to Australia especially anticipating the performances of Lewis Hamilton and Anthony Davidson - and I wasn't disappointed!

Just about everywhere you go everyone wants to know about 'that new lad Hamilton'. Most had never heard of him pre-Melbourne which, sadly, tells you all you need to know about the profile of motorsport below F1.

I know it's something of a cliche, but more than once Lewis has been touted as potentially the Tiger Woods of motor racing. The analogy is perhaps a little uncomfortable in that today, in the noughties, skin colour should have no significance whatsoever.

But, without wanting to heap yet more pressure of expectation on Lewis - although I fear it's already too late - the analogy does appear valid. Forget skin colour, I'm talking talent level.

Jean Todt congratulates Lewis Hamilton the podium © LAT

When Woods burst on to the professional golfing scene he had already won everything going as an amateur and, among golf's insiders, there was no great surprise when he started to perform at the highest level as a pro. Ditto Lewis. Rapidly, Woods went from high level performer to phenomenon.

Tiger is tall but not what you might term a powerhouse. Fellow pros were stunned by his length off the tee and his accuracy. It was not unusual for young pros to display one or the other but not both, with such stunning regularity, straight away. And then there was the composure and the concentration, which were almost chilling.

Similar characteristics marked Hamilton's Melbourne weekend. Mark Hughes, out on the circuit on Friday making observations for Autosport magazine's 'Trackside View', came back highly impressed by the way Hamilton appeared. Fluent. Confident. Totally at home.

Turn 1 on Sunday told you just how at home.

It's one thing having the confidence to do that in an F3 or a GP2 race, but in your first Grand Prix, with your teammate, the world champion, in the immediate vicinity? Imagine if it had gone wrong. A couple of crumpled MP4-22s littering the boundaries of the season's first corner may not have gone down too well with Ron... But the thought won't even have occurred to Lewis. That's what he does, and he did it. Simple.

Reading some of the reaction post-race, a couple of things struck me. First, there was Keke Rosberg, telling Nigel Roebuck that Lewis was 'Gilles Brave'. I also remembered chatting to Nico Rosberg at last year's Autosport Awards and being told that there will be times this season when Lewis gives Alonso trouble.

Keke's quote brought to mind Hamilton's GP2 drive at Silverstone last year when he went around the outside of two cars through Becketts. Funnily enough, the moment I saw it I thought of Gilles Villeneuve. Get that wrong and it's an aircraft accident. Someone with the usual instincts of self preservation wouldn't go near it. Believe me, moves like that are very rare. You see it and you don't quite believe you've seen it. That's the impact.

I wondered that day if, perhaps, Lewis was a little too brave. The thought came back when I recently read a super piece about Villeneuve by Paul Fearnley. In it, the pragmatic Derek Warwick says: "The journalists who thought Gilles walked on water didn't see the nutcase we saw on the track, the road and in his helicopter..."

It's a tough one. Rosberg Sr loved racing Gilles, calling him bloody hard but entirely trustworthy. Others, citing Dijon '79, thought him ever so slightly unhinged. The fact that he appeared to get a buzz from running out of gas with his helicopter hovering two feet above ground tended to lend credence to the latter!

I suppose you'd call it controlled-brave versus reckless-brave. Nigel Mansell passing Gerhard Berger around the outside of Peraltada is the former - just - and Stefan Bellof trying to go around Jacky Ickx in Eau Rouge is the latter, for which, of course, poor Bellof paid the ultimate price.

Lewis Hamilton passes Robert Kubica and teammate Fernando Alonso © LAT

Controlled, skilled bravery is a priceless commodity in a racing driver. Few have it. Plenty can drive fast, few can overtake with such surgical precision. Fernando Alonso can. If you can't, you don't pass Michael Schumacher and Mark Webber in the way that Fernando did at Suzuka in 2005. But it seems that his new teammate could be at least a match.

Having bravery without what Jackie Stewart would call 'mind management' can be dangerous. But if Hamilton's demeanour and bearing throughout the Melbourne weekend are an accurate barometer, instinctive racing intelligence is an intrinsic part of the package.

Davidson's weekend turned when the anti-stall kicked in on the grid, which was a huge shame because that was when the world was watching. It was a pity the world didn't see what we saw on Friday and Saturday.

On Saturday morning, when everyone tends to do at least one run in something approaching qualifying trim, the press room was stunned when a Super Aguri appeared P4, and stayed there.

To put that in perspective, if Anthony had been able to reproduce the lap in Q2, he would have been seventh quickest, three tenths up on teammate Takuma Sato, who did actually make it into Q3 and gave the team the kind of celebration you'd expect from an outfit that had just won the race.

I caught up with Davidson on Saturday afternoon and asked if that had been a really special lap?

"Absolutely," he exclaimed. "We did a simulation to give me a chance to get used to those fuel levels. Afterwards someone asked whether there was any more to come in qualifying and I said absolutely not - it simply wasn't going to get any better than that. It just came together. In qualifying I did a 26.89 (0.15s behind Taku) and just didn't get anywhere near it."

Even so, he only missed out on the top 10 shoot-out by that one place. For Super Aguri, of course, Q3 was uncharted territory.

"It was like they'd won pole after Taku came in," Davidson grinned. "Someone said on the radio, 'OK guys, we're through to Q3. Let's just go out there and copy what everybody else does. We'll come in when they come in because we've never done this before!'

"It's a great team with a really good bunch of guys. Aguri [Suzuki] himself came up to me on Saturday morning before it all started, and said: 'This is a small team with lower expectations than you're used to, so just go out there and have fun. If you get through to Q2 that's our dream result...'"

Anthony Davidson chases the Honda of Jenson Button © LAT

The fact that they did rather better than that raises one or two fundamental issues, of course.

Had Davidson reproduced his morning times, John Howett could well have been faced with the somewhat difficult task of explaining to the Toyota board how precisely it was that they had spent zillions of dollars over the past few years and were now looking at the rear wing of a Shadow DN5 thrown together by a few guys who rapidly U-turned out of going to work for a sportscar team in the States when Honda upset Sato... Bit of an exaggeration there, but not much.

As it was, it must have been a difficult enough phone call for Nick Fry, whose Honda works cars did start the race behind Taku!

Jenson, of course, put the Honda RA106 on pole at Melbourne last year and, cognisant of the current problems with RA107, was actually quite surprised to find himself within half a second of the Super Aguri.

"I don't really know how these things can happen. Can't be quite right, can it?" someone at Toyota said. Obviously a sentiment close to Frank Williams and Colin Kolles too. And also a rather fundamental question for the future of F1. If it is the way forward, we urgently need a rule limiting customer car supply to a single team. Or else Ferrari will soon be selling more race cars than road cars. Funny old business, this...