Hamilton has drive to make history

MOTOR SPORT: Justin Hyneslooks at the short career of Lewis Hamilton who is just a minor-points placing away from becoming the sport's youngest title winner

LIKE BASEBALL, Formula One is a sport that encourages the spewing forth of statistical minutiae. Each grand prix weekend is awash with cross-referenced numbers hauled out of dusty record books, all driven by a crushing need to find some rhythm in the way seasons unfold, how drivers and cars are developed, refined and sculpted in to machines that with each iteration work faster and better.

But amid all the petty number-crunching there are statistics that tell of achievements that actually merit the marking. Juan Manuel Fangio's five world titles, Ayrton Senna's six Monaco wins, Michael Schumacher's record-breaking seven championship wins.

Tomorrow, Lewis Hamilton has a chance to write his name beside one of those signal achievements. Aged just 23, in only his second season of Formula One racing, with, at flag fall, just 35 grands prix under his belt, he stands just a minor points placing away from becoming the sport's youngest ever title winner.

The ascent appears miraculously swift and in some regards it has been. Hamilton made his Formula One debut in March of last year in Australia, claiming a race drive with the McLaren team on the back of dominating F1's feeder class, GP2, the previous season. As an unproven rookie little was expected. He was team-mate to a double world champion in Fernando Alonso.

A steady learning curve beside a big-name team-mate seemed the most plausible outcome. Hamilton detoured from that roadmap from the start. He finished third and on the podium and from there launched a championship challenge that only expired on the final day of the season, again in Brazil, and again when he had a seven-point title lead.

Hamilton's progress to tomorrow afternoon's golden opportunity though, isn't quite the meteoric ascent it appears, but a more prosaic and altogether more regular tale of a young driver clambering through the ranks, albeit if aided, from a young age, by some of the most powerful personalities in Formula One.

BORN IN STEVENAGE in January 1985, Hamilton took the route of almost all modern racers, slotting himself into a go-kart at age eight. The oft-told tale then has the 10-year-old accosting McLaren team principal Ron Dennis at an awards ceremony and introducing himself as a future McLaren driver. Apocryphal or not, Dennis supposedly gave the youngster his autograph, adding : "call me in nine years and we'll work something out."

Hamilton didn't have to wait that long. With a string on karting titles behind him, he was signed by Dennis to McLaren's driver development programme in 1998, a deal which included a future option for a Formula One drive.

Others were noticing the young talent too. In 2001, Michael Schumacher, fresh from claiming his fourth F1 title entered himself, for fun, in the world kart finals, where he raced a 16-year-old Hamilton. The Briton climbed from 26th on the grid to seventh, to finish three places behind Schumacher. "He's a quality driver, very strong and only 16," noted Schumacher. "If he keeps this up I'm sure he will reach F1. It's something special to see a kid of his age out on the circuit. He's clearly got the right racing mentality."

It was a mentality that took him, six seasons later and via dominance of Formula Renault, Formula Three and GP2, to the grid in Australia as Formula One's first black driver. The Tiger Woods comparisons weren't long coming. The comparison though is lazy. Aside from driven parental guidance and a seemingly unbreakable belief in his ability, and destiny, to win, there is little to link the pair.

Hamilton, himself, has made little of his roots in the Caribbean post second World War Diaspora and any concentration on his background has often come about solely by association, be it the racial taunting he received at the hands of Spanish fans earlier this year, his appearance at Nelson Mandela's birthday celebrations or simply through his celebrity acquaintances with musicians such as Pharrell Williams and rapper P Diddy, more the product of youthful fan worship on his part rather than any kind of strategic alliance.

IF THERE IS a link beyond the obvious, it is simply Hamilton, like Woods, has converted raw talent into dominance in an incredibly short span of time. From just 34 Formula One starts there have been nine wins and a staggering 22 podium finishes. Of a possible 340 points he has taken 203. With Hamilton there is no internal doubt in his ability to win and to win big. Video filesharing websites are replete with footage of a young Hamilton greeting a poor race finish with all the grace of John McEnroe accepting a bad line call.

That youthful petulance has matured into the kind of self-belief all elite sports stars are expected to possess but which for observers often merely translates as unpalatable arrogance.

It is that uber-confidence that has been the defining feature of Hamilton's march to the brink of F1 title glory, and which for good or ill, has in part polarised opinion about him.

The unwillingness to settle for anything less than victory was the story of his first season in Formula One. Refusing to play second fiddle to Alonso, as McLaren and Alonso had expected, and the talent that brought nine consecutive podium finishes, made him the most exciting prospect Formula One had seen since Michael Schumacher.

By contrast, the ensuing bitter and often farcical feud with Alonso, played out against McLaren's public vilification as cheats and subsequent €79 million fine for securing development drawings of that year's Ferrari, painted Hamilton as villain.

The outcome was celebrity status like no other in Formula One. In an environment filled with rich-kid-makes-richer non-stories, Hamilton was a Godsend. Young, gifted and black, he was also a fiery rookie in a camp famed for the corporate blandness of its image. He was an outsider racing to improbable victory in a suspect car. Migration from back page to front was obvious and rapid.

And this is now the landscape Hamilton inhabits, and again defining the public perception is that Hamilton has embraced the front-page aspects of his career too fervently. He has, predictably, chosen widely from the well-thumbed menu of F1 driver accessories. There is the celebrity pop star girlfriend in Nicole Scherzinger of girl group Pussycat Dolls, the tax exile home in Switzerland, the diversification into property deals, the multi-million dollar sports shoe sponsorship deals. All have brought accusations they are to the detriment of his racing career.

Success too has bred, in some eyes, arrogance. Hamilton, that self-belief getting the better of him, has been guilty this season of sweeping statements that, far from giving the impression of coming from a man focused on his goals, have come across as a curious mix of the gauche and the egomaniacal. After claiming in August "when I'm at 100 per cent no one can touch us", ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix he reportedly likened himself to Ayrton Senna, a statement greeted with incredulity in the Formula One paddock.

Ron Dennis though has been quick to defend his young charge. "In any walk of life, if a young person comes in and is immediately successful, his or her competitors may struggle to come to terms with that. What would you expect? What would you expect them to say?

"They said it about David Beckham. They said it about others. These kind of people - young people who are instantly successful - always receive criticism."

And his competitors have struggled, with many rivals complaining Hamilton's self-confidence leads to dangerous incidents on track. From a wayward episode while leading under the safety car in Japan last year, to crashing into Kimi Raikkonen in pitlane during this season's Canadian Grand Prix, to an over-zealous overtaking move on Raikkonen in Japan this year, Hamilton has spent more time in front of the race stewards and explaining himself to colleagues and the media than most.

The on-track aggression though is hard to reconcile with the polite and courteous young man Hamilton is outside the cockpit. The McLaren driver is a fans' and sponsors' delight, signing autographs or selling mobile phones without any of the diva-like tendencies associated with his racing brethren. Often it seems the real dichotomy is not between street angel and track devil but between world championship contender and still growing up 23-year-old not yet comfortable in his skin.

Tomorrow though, any comfort zone will evaporate. Should he once again fail to secure the title, the critical bombardment will be savage. Few will recall the pressure Hamilton was under going into last year's title showdown, occasioned as it was by the circus attendant on his feud with Alonso and also McLaren's court battles. Failure at the final hurdle will simply denote an inability to deal with pressure.

Regardless of his five wins and 10 podium finishes this year he will be judged a choker, if not in the mould of Jean van de Velde then certainly as Greg Norman once was.

Success though will perhaps make those Tiger Woods comparisons real for the first time. Not just as the first black man to dominate a sport traditionally ruled by a rich, white elite, not just in the financial rewards that such precocious success bring, but as prodigious talent, a young man from the wrong side of the racing track who, with unseem haste, taught his elders and supposed betters that talent is all and that once in a while a competitor comes along for whom the normal rules of incremental gains on the long road to glory don't apply.

""In any walk of life, if a young person comes in and is immediately successful, his or her competitors may struggle to come to terms with that. What would you expect? What would you expect them to say?"

- Ron Dennis