Lewis Hamilton: Giant Awakening

Lewis Hamilton said he was living the F1 dream. The season might have ended with a nightmare, but he's ready to be the greatest driver of his era, says MARK HUGHES

"I'm living the dream," said Lewis Hamilton early in the year. It was, of course, a reference to his delight at becoming a grand prix driver, and with no less a team than McLaren. But almost all season he locked himself into a dreamlike state that allowed him full access to his awesome ability, despite no Formula 1 databank.

It was almost as if Hamilton was walking on water because he didn't realise it couldn't be done, that a rookie couldn't just walk in and claim the sport's biggest prize at his first attempt. But something shocked him out of that dream prematurely and it was almost as if he woke up from it, found himself sitting on the front row of the Interlagos grid in a world title showdown, and thought, 'What am I doing here?'

Despite looking like a rookie for the first time all season in the opening two corners in Brazil, Lewis Hamilton has staked his place among the greats. Yes, of course it's premature to give any sort of definitive judgment on just where he stacks up. But he's got to be up there somewhere, having gone up against as great a driver as Fernando Alonso and, as a rookie, equalled him over a full season.

But it isn't only the direct comparison to the double world champion in the same car that stakes Hamilton's claim, it's also the many outstanding qualities he has demonstrated that make it more than obvious that, even by the hallowed terms of history, here is a very great driver indeed.

It seems salutary to think that a year ago Ron Dennis only agreed to take the chance of putting Lewis in a McLaren because he had the no-risk, rock-solid, brilliance- guaranteed Alonso in the other car. Otherwise Hamilton would probably have been farmed out to a lesser team for his rookie season. It was Alonso's place in the team, in other words, that guaranteed Hamilton the chance denied other greats: a rookie season in a potentially title-winning car.

Ayrton Senna didn't enjoy that privilege, nor Alonso himself, Michael Schumacher, Alain Prost, Niki Lauda, Jackie Stewart, Jim Clark - or anyone else. Nor did they get almost 6000 miles of testing before their debuts. So we don't definitively know that they couldn't have gone one better than Hamilton and won the title at their first attempt. He's simply the first driver of this calibre ever to get that opportunity - unless you count Jacques Villeneuve, which most people in the sport don't. But statistically you have to.

Standing with Patrick Head post-race in Australia, someone asked him if Lewis's sparkling debut reminded him of Villeneuve's in '96. Knowing Patrick's opinions on the relative merits of Villeneuve and the devastating '96 Williams FW18 - the fastest car in the field by a huge margin - it was amusing watching him wriggle out of giving it straight. "Jacques, er, had a car that erm... no, it doesn't really remind me of that."

Hamilton has had a competitive car, but not a superior one, over the season. This year's Ferrari and McLaren had diametrically opposed qualities which tended to make one or other of them dominant on any given weekend, but over the season Hamilton's been up against three rivals with a car at least as good. Villeneuve had a dominant car and only his team-mate (Damon Hill) to beat - which he failed to do.

There's the opportunity and the achievement - and they are of course vastly different things. The spotlight of being in a car quick enough to fight for race wins brings with it huge pressures, intensified enormously for a rookie.

Yet until the title decider in Brazil they were barely visible on Hamilton. Racing down to the first corner in Melbourne, he treated the opening seconds of his F1 career as if it were a karting heat at Buckmore Park, deftly vaulting from fourth to second, outflanking his double world champion team-mate along the way.

He had somehow stripped away the enormity of the moment, the immense opportunity that was there to be blown, and tuned into the essence - that this was just another race, the same thing he had been doing for the past dozen years. The very same feel of where to put himself, where the gaps were going to open up, how to fill them, was simply triggered. No thought, just instinct.

And it is that which has formed his backbeat all year. He's just locked himself into the same racing groove as ever. All that's changed have been the surroundings, the attention - and until Brazil he was able to keep those as peripheral.

Similarly, legends such as Alonso and Raikkonen were, in Lewis terms, merely other drivers. He had tough rivals in karts, in Formula Renault, F3, GP2. Now he had tough rivals in F1. What's the difference? The difference between racing Fraser Sheader in JICA karts as a 13-year-old? When Lewis made his debut in that category, Sheader was the big star, a couple of years older, already established as a hotshot, the championship favourite.

Hamilton stepped up, got in his kart and just did all the same things he'd done in Cadets and Juniors - and won on his debut. That was as big a deal to a 13-year-old as an F1 debut against Alonso was to a racing-seasoned 22-year-old. Stripped of the peripheries, F1 is still essentially the same game as all the other categories. At a profound level, Lewis could encompass that fact because he has enormous self-belief.

That belief is based on a huge level of raw talent, and the two become entwined. The talent repeatedly reinforces the belief, which in turn gives him fuller access to the talent. Combine with a rigorous mental discipline and he can just relax into his gift once in the car. Underlining all this is a huge desire. His former karting mechanic, Kieran Crawley, saw that close-up.

"I've run lots of karters," he says, "and it's inescapable that the kids with privileged backgrounds, who know they are going to be racing next weekend come what may, are always more up and down in their form than the hungry kid who's coming from nowhere. Lewis is the prime example of that.

"He has a grit, a real dig-deep grit, that is missing in most. Most others just don't have the same resilience, just don't even know where to begin to dig deep. I call it the council-estate grit. That background is part of his make-up, and it's something that ensures he is always a contender, no matter what."

But in Brazil it was almost as if he came out of his protective shell prematurely. Back in 2005 and '06, when Alonso was a Renault driver and free of distractions about his status within the team, he sensed his title opportunity early in the year and seemed to build a force field around himself - you could see him but you couldn't really connect; he was in a zone, focused on some distant, invisible thing.

He came out of it briefly at Monza last year to kick a few litter bins around Charlie Whiting's office, in rage at what he saw as the injustices being committed against him, but he was back in it again by raceday, when he put in a spellbinding performance. It was only when he clinched his titles - in Brazil both years - that he stripped away his protective shield and saw the world in its wider focus once more.

Hamilton, once the novelty of being an F1 driver wore off, put himself in a similar zone this year, but seemed to come out of it before the title was won.

It's difficult not to think he may have been shocked out of the trance by what unfolded in the race in China - and, as anyone who has tried to get back into a beautiful dream after being awoken knows, it's next to impossible to return. That failing rear intermediate, the dilly-dallying on the pitwall, the optimistic entry speed to that left-hander in the pitlane, all conspired to wake him. The swish of gravel splashing the underside of his car finally brought him to.

But when he was enjoying that dream, oh did he fly. He is probably the most visually exciting driver out there, thanks to his reliance on late braking and penchant for oversteer.

In this he drives very much like his hero, Ayrton Senna, used to: straight-line braking, geometrically perfect lines, a beautiful feel for the brake pedal, and total ease with pre-apex oversteer, enabling him to get the direction change from the rear, to have the yaw change completed well before the apex, allowing him to be early and confident on the power.

It's a style in sharp contrast to Alonso's or Schumacher's, both of whom prefer to load up the front of the car more, turn in a little earlier and use the brakes to pivot the car about the outer front wheel to get direction change.

There have been times when he's been able to run more front wing than Alonso because he's more comfortable with the oversteer balance this brings in high-speed bends. In the slower corners he's then suffered less understeer.

At most circuits the difference in style and set-up hasn't decisively separated their speed, but at Monaco it worked in Hamilton's favour. The instant direction changes his style brought allowed him to be fabulously early on the throttle and have an at-times outrageous degree of superiority over Alonso. But around the high-speed sweeps of Silverstone and Spa - where Hamilton seemed to overwork the rear tyres - Alonso's style gave much the better performance.

Overall, Hamilton had the upper hand more often than Alonso, but we have to allow for the fact that Fernando was making a big transition from Michelins to Bridgestones that required a very different driving style. It took at least half a season to complete this process.

But there can be no ambivalence about Hamilton's racecraft. His spatial awareness, his sense of where the gaps are about to be, is uncanny, and was seen to spectacular effect in the opening seconds of the first two races, as well as during his stunning pass for second on Kimi Raikkonen at Monza. He's braver than brave too - as his around-the-outside pass on Fisichella at the Nurburgring testified.

As yet his qualifying speed is a little more brittle than, say, Senna's or Schumacher's, even though it's very impressive at times. His China pole lap was a peach, a case study in perfection and that wonderful feel for matching the brake-pedal effort with how fast the downforce is bleeding off. His Monaco lap, before being baulked by Webber, was set to be in Senna territory.

Even with the delay, he was only 0.2sec off Alonso, despite carrying an extra 0.3sec-worth of fuel. Weight-corrected, in other words, the lap was still faster, despite following Webber from Casino down to the corner before the tunnel! But he doesn't yet have access to this level of performance every time out.

Predictably, there's been something of a Lewis backlash. He pushes the boundary of on-track etiquette - occasionally his instant chops off the grid, as he tries to compensate for the McLaren's inferior startline system over the Ferrari's, have invited comparison to Schumacher, not in a good way. His behaviour behind the safety car in China was singled out for criticism, then there was his possibly deliberate/possibly not interference with Raikkonen's qualifying lap in Brazil.

But he has yet to blatantly cross that line. There has been no driving another rival off the track, no mid-corner brake tests, nothing from the Senna/Schumacher school of blatant bad-boy antics. He loves the adulation of the crowd, and there's definitely something of the Mansell-style showman in him - and this too sometimes gets up the noses of the insiders.

But so what? Here is F1's brightest star of the foreseeable future. He may have awoken from his dream with a fright in China and got so shaken by it that he finally showed himself to be the rookie he is at Interlagos. But that doesn't alter the fact that here is someone with the potential to dominate the sport in the years to come. That rookie championship may end up being the only record of achievement he doesn't break.