Hamilton’s toughest and best

The Briton raced on the edge of his prodigious talent, thrilling the rain-soaked crowd with a masterful display of wet-weather driving. Alan Henry reports.

It is a year too early for Silverstone’s epitaph to be written but Lewis Hamilton has provided Formula One with an immortal memory of the old track. On July 6, he raced on the edge of his prodigious talent, thrilling the rain-soaked crowd with a masterful display of wet-weather driving.

The tone was set within seconds of the start when Hamilton, who had qualified in a disappointing fourth place, tried to force himself inside his pole-positioned McLaren team-mate Heikki Kovalainen as they jostled their way through the tricky Copse right-hander in a cloud of spray.

Hamilton had his left front wheel level with Kovalainen’s right front side pod when the Englishman’s car began to slide wide. Hamilton just touched his team-mate’s machine at 150mph as they slipped and slithered their way across the deep puddles which were building all round the circuit, a frighteningly fast venue on a sunny day let alone when viewed through clouds of spume on a grey July afternoon.

It was a heart-stopping moment which, fleetingly, looked as though it might end with both McLarens in a crumpled heap against the trackside barrier. But after a momentary twitch, Kovalainen found some extra grip and the two silver cars rocketed away at the head of the field.

Hamilton led every lap bar four, looking as relaxed and confident as ever as he picked his way through the slower traffic to win by a huge 68sec from Nick Heidfeld’s BMW Sauber and the Honda superbly driven by Rubens Barrichello, these being the only three cars to complete the full 60-lap distance.

“It is definitely and by far the best victory I’ve ever had,” said Hamilton. “It was one of the toughest races I have ever done. I was thinking out there that if I win it, it will be the best race I have ever done, not just because of the home crowd.

“On the last laps I could see the crowd starting to stand up and I was praying, praying ‘Just finish’. You can imagine the emotions going on inside and I wanted to get it around.

“It’s been a tough few weeks but it’s been a great weekend and I’m a great believer in things happening for a reason.” Hamilton admitted there were moments when the conditions were almost impossible, with heavy rain hitting the track during the second half of the race. “It was so extreme out there, probably as extreme in some cases as Fuji last year. Obviously not as much rain, (but) such tricky conditions — the first sector would not be so bad, but in the second sector there were big drops.”

He added: “I couldn’t see through my visor, so through turn one and two I had to clean my visor, put it up and back down again. I had to do that on every lap, especially when it was raining.

I couldn’t see anything. It was so extreme, so tough, a real mental challenge.”

After just five laps, Hamilton took charge and shot past Kovalainen at 185mph as they hurtled into the braking area for the tricky Stowe right-hander. From there the result looked certain as his fast-maturing genius dominated as convincingly as he had done in the equally rain-soaked Monaco Grand Prix two months ago. By lap seven Hamilton was 2.8sec ahead of Kovalainen with Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari holding third ahead of Nick Heidfeld’s BMW Sauber and the Renaults of Nelson Piquet Jr and Fernando Alonso. Initially the track conditions began to dry out, but before the first round of refuelling stops the clouds were gathering over the circuit and it was a real puzzle which tyres would be chosen as the competitors ducked into the pit lane.

Hamilton and Raikkonen came into the pits together at the end of lap 21, but while the McLaren was fitted with a fresh set of Bridgestone intermediate tyres, the Ferrari driver was sent back into the race still on his original worn set of intermediates. That would have been the ideal choice had the track remained dry, but it became drenched within a couple of laps of their return. It took only a couple of laps for Raikkonen to realise that Ferrari had gambled wrongly as from 4.6sec behind Hamilton on lap 23, he slumped to 9.8sec behind next time around, 15.1sec down on lap 25, then to 21.8sec on lap 26.

So at a stroke Ferrari’s Silverstone challenge had been effectively wiped out and Raikkonen’s championship campaign severely dented. His team-mate Felipe Massa seemed to be spinning in all directions whenever his car appeared on a television screen.

Barrichello was absolutely delighted to claim his first podium finish since joining Honda at the start of the 2007 season, the Brazilian being followed across the line by the lapped Raikkonen, the acutely disappointed Kovalainen and Alonso’s well-driven Renault.

As for the remainder, seven cars lay strewn around the Silverstone gravel traps in various states of disrepair. The most embarrassing incident of all was when David Coulthard’s Red Bull speared into Sebastian Vettel’s Toro Rosso on the opening lap.

“I’m extremely disappointed and sorry for the team,” the veteran Scot said. “I’ve taken out two Red Bull cars so that’s obviously the worst-case scenario. You have to take your opportunities when they come in a race like this and I thought I saw a gap.” His team-mate Mark Webber qualified second in the other Red Bull only to have the first of two spins on the opening lap, trailing home 10th. It was as far away from Hamilton and McLaren as it was possible to be.