It’s psychological warfare

With the World Championship set to be decided in Interlagos on November 2, many well-wishers, including former champions, will counsel Lewis Hamilton to exercise caution. But it would be best for the Briton to go with his instincts and try to win the race, writes Richard Williams.

For the driver at the front there are no fumes, actual or metaphorical, burning the throat and clogging the nostrils. By producing a statistically perfect performance in Shanghai — pole position, fastest lap, race win — Lewis Hamilton ensured that he sped clear of the noxious gases that surrounded him in the build-up to the Chinese Grand Prix.

Now there will be two more weeks of renewed outpourings from his enemies, aimed at destabilising a driver whose arrival on the grid last season undermined a lot of comfortable assumptions. On October 19, however, Hamilton demonstrated his ability to rise above the psychological warfare. In Shanghai the two Ferrari drivers simply had no answer to the speed of the 23-year-old Englishman and his McLaren-Mercedes.

It would have been fitting, in a way, for him to have secured his first World Championship 50 years to the day since Mike Hawthorn became the first British driver to take the title. Hamilton would have won it entirely on his own merits, as well, whereas Hawthorn required the gift of second place from his Ferrari team-mate, Phil Hill, in Casablanca on October 19, 1958 in order to secure the result that put him one point ahead of his compatriot and great rival Stirling Moss in the final standings.

That was the way they did things in those days, and no one complained because Grand Prix racing has always been a team sport, despite the efforts of a governing body that makes up its rules as it goes along. Six years ago, attempting to appease ignoramuses on the one hand and bookmakers on the other, the FIA outlawed internal co-operation after Rubens Barrichello handed Michael Schumacher a win under orders in Austria.

In Shanghai, Kimi Raikkonen relinquished his second place to Felipe Massa in the closing laps and admirably refused to dissimulate in the post-race press conference. “We work together as a team,” he said, and quite right, too, although Massa, the recipient of his generosity, appeared a great deal less cheerful about the implications of the day’s outcome.

Look out for a row about this in the coming days. Ferrari, it will be said in some quarters, may try to cheat Hamilton out of his title by ganging up on him. But the Drivers’ Championship has often been won that way. Even the great Fangio owed one of his five titles to a gesture by his Ferrari team-mate Peter Collins, a Hamilton of his day, in handing over his car during the race at Monza in 1956.

The best way to avoid such problems is always to get the lead at the start and stay clear of the pursuers. That was what Hamilton did in the Chinese GP, showing a genuinely magisterial presence, and it meant that Ferrari could reduce the damage to Massa’s chances only by manipulating second and third places.

It was interesting to see Fernando Alonso, who has expressed a desire to see Massa become champion at Hamilton’s expense, remain in fourth place behind the Ferraris throughout the race, keeping a safe distance in a car that had been good enough to win the two previous races. If I were Carlos Ghosn, the president of Renault and the man who signs the bills run up by Alonso’s team, I would be wanting to know why the driver did not mount a more aggressive challenge for a place on the podium.

No good asking Flavio Briatore, of course. The egregious Italian, who combines the job of supervising the running of the Renault team with that of managing Alonso’s career, stooped to new depths during the week when, in an interview with Gazzetta dello Sport, he expressed the opinion that Hamilton is “no Muhammad Ali”. Briatore was said to have apologised later, which only confirmed that there had been something to apologise for. Sometimes you don’t have to scratch these people very hard to discover what lies beneath.

Alonso, of course, nurses a serious grudge against his former McLaren team-mate. As Hamilton put it last week, in response to the Spaniard’s opinions, “He was a double world champion who came into the team and got beaten by a rookie. That says it all.”

No doubt Hamilton is guilty of occasional errors that sometimes damage other people’s chances. Mark Webber and Jarno Trulli are among those critical of his occasional displays of excessive ambition, but the criticism from younger drivers such as Alonso and even Robert Kubica is primarily motivated by a desire to stop their rival becoming world champion. Their fear must be that Hamilton’s first title will be merely the overture to a run of Schumacher-like proportions.

In Shanghai, Hamilton drove impeccably from the front, just like Jim Clark used to. It is when others get ahead of him, as Raikkonen did off the starting grid at the Fuji Speedway a week earlier, that his judgment can go awry. Now he needs only a fifth place at Interlagos to be sure of the title. In front of a fervent crowd trying to add a few more horsepower to Massa’s Ferrari engine, he and the team will have to decide whether to try to take the result out of the opposition’s hands by going for another Shanghai-type performance, or to play it safe. Simply sitting behind the Ferraris, however, would put him at risk of mixing it with Alonso, Kubica and others, introducing an element of unpredictability.

Many well-wishers, including former champions, will counsel caution. But Hamilton is a racing driver. Best, probably, to go with the instincts and just try to win the thing.