Dodgy Business

It was hard for Lewis Hamilton to top Melbourne but, at Sepang, he managed it.

Ron Dennis has seen it all and done most of it, but there's no mistaking the different feel about McLaren. Ron may be in his 60th year but he's like a kid with a new train set. The smile is never far away, there's self-deprecating good humour in McLaren press conferences and the whole team radiates enthusiasm. The message seems to be: these guys are proper blokes, we're in great shape, this is going to be interesting.

We shouldn't get too carried away about Malaysia. Ferrari was hobbled in that Raikkonen had reliability concerns and his engine was turned down, allied to the fact that Sepang, with its baking temperatures, meant they were marginal on cooling. This is what Kimi was talking about when, afterwards, he said: "We had to make some compromise as a team and it cost us a bit."

Lewis Hamilton holds off the Ferraris of Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen © LAT

But even so, Michael Schumacher must have been sitting on a sofa wondering how Felipe Massa managed to reverse a Ferrari into fifth place from the pole. The answer was provided by Lewis Hamilton's natural racing instinct. Plenty of racing drivers can drive fast, far fewer are top-drawer racers.

When Hamilton was confirmed alongside Alonso, nobody with eyes for his GP2 performances could raise a quibble. It's fair to say, though, that the expectation was he would need time to learn...but Nico Rosberg knows all about Hamilton from karting and F3 days and told me that if McLaren came up with a good car Hamilton could give Alonso trouble.

As the Malaysian weekend developed it was fairly obvious that Fernando and Lewis were nip and tuck, and that they were going to give Ferrari a sterner fight than expected after Melbourne. Kimi's one-second cushion was not in evidence. How much of that was down to Ferrari's compromises we will discover in Bahrain, but when McLaren set the quickest low-fuel Q2 time, you knew that they were seriously in the frame.

"We knew our chance was to overtake the Ferraris at the start and we were lucky to do it," Alonso said.

He's not wrong there. You could have sailed a barge up the inside of Raikkonen's Ferrari at Turn 1 and if you offer a racer like Hamilton a gap like that, he's going to fill it. But how he did the next bit, going around the outside of Massa on the wrong line, was more puzzling. Let's just say that if M Schumacher had been in No5, the defence would probably have been somewhat more, er, robust.

The burning question for me was: how tactical was Hamilton's first stint? When Alonso charged in for his first pit stop after 18 laps, he was almost 16s ahead of Lewis. He'd run away at almost a second a lap on average. Lewis went as far as lap 20, so he was probably a couple of tenths a lap slower with heavier fuel. So that accounts for 3.5-4s, but not 16.

McLaren's fear was obviously that Kimi's Ferrari would jump Lewis at the first stop and then hunt Fernando down during the second stint. But Hamilton's defence with a heavier car, allied to Raikkonen's less than perfect technical situation, meant it didn't happen.

First though, Lewis had seen off Massa who, with more top speed than his teammate, was actually a bigger threat. But you did have to wonder at Felipe's lack of race craft.

Felipe Massa overtakes (briefly) Lewis Hamilton © LAT

"I was able to trick him into outbraking himself...to the point where he eventually went off, so I apologise for that," Lewis smiled, with all the cheek of a 10-year veteran. He might have said that he'd made Massa look like a bit of a berk. And he did it instinctively. It was kart racing in a Formula One car.

Afterwards I mentioned to Anthony Hamilton that perhaps it was a good thing it hadn't been Schuey in the Ferrari. "I don't know," he smiled, "I think the result might have been the same. What a boy!"

Watching Anthony observe his son on his second successive podium was one of those special moments. His shades had needed to go quietly back on to mask an emotional moment. In Melbourne it had been the Finnish anthem for Kimi and the Italian one for Ferrari, the winning constructor. This time God Save the Queen had an airing.

"I was overcome with emotion," Anthony admitted. "The thing is, Lewis always wanted to hear that on the podium at a Grand Prix. When it came out I could see that he was emotionally on the edge as well, and it hit me. It was great!"

I wanted to know what Anthony had made of that first stint. Was it tactical? Could Lewis have gone quicker? Because if so his drive was even more impressive. Resisting pressure at 95 percent is even tougher, if that's the way it was.

"I'm not sure is the answer," Anthony said. "As Joe Public, sitting watching the TV, which is what I do, I thought he was just heavy on fuel, a couple more laps, and when he did those couple of extra laps I thought, yeah, that's the answer. But it may not be, you know what I mean?"

Yes, of course we do.

I tried Ron Dennis with the same question. Had Lewis been driving that first stint tactically?

"No. I mean we raced end-to-end tactically and clearly Fernando broke away," he said. Was that a no, but yes?

Ron also said: "He could have gone quicker but the key is to finish and get the best result you can. So to keep his driving tidy, look after the car and do what was necessary to come second displays a level of professionalism that you would not expect to find from a guy in his second Grand Prix."

Perhaps the best coded message was Lewis's radio transmission when he congratulated Fernando but made it plain he fancies a win of his own sometime soon.

Lewis Hamilton © LAT

The perception that Lewis had driven the race for Alonso was heightened when he set the fastest lap on his first lap with a new set of softs at the beginning of the second stint. But you'd expect that.

McLaren had fuelled Lewis relatively light, for an 18 lap run, to try to keep him ahead of Kimi. Alonso, meanwhile, had taken on four laps more fuel when he stopped two laps earlier and actually set his quickest time on the golden lap with his last set of tyres. He was fuelled for just 16 laps but these tyres, remember, were the harder compound.

Wisdom suggests that a first year rookie can't possibly have the capacity to mount a world title challenge when he has a double world champion as team mate. And yet...

Just what is McLaren looking at right now? It has been said that never, ever, would there be a better driver pairing than Senna/Prost. But never say never.

"As you could see after the race, they were delighted for each other and if we can maintain that team spirit through the balance of the season we should have a great year," Ron Dennis said. I wonder how pertinent that might turn out to be.

We're only two races in and Hamilton, you suspect, will only get stronger. If they are fighting Ferrari and battling each other, Ron and his men could be faced with some rather delicate weekends. McLaren has always prided itself on publicly giving drivers equal opportunity, but it's looking like that might prove increasingly difficult.

On the one hand, you can envisage a scenario where Lewis cedes to Fernando this year and his reward is carte blanche in '08. But how many times does a driver find himself in a championship-winning Formula One car? Just ask Jenson Button.

Can you really ask a man with the talent and innate competitiveness of Lewis to throw that away when there is no guarantee it will happen again? Ron hates losing, that's clear enough, but winning could give him a headache too. I'm sure he'll take it.