It was hardly what you would call a champion’s flourish, but Lewis Hamilton cared not one iota last night as he joined the giants of Formula One with his fourth world title. In the midst of Mexico’s Day of the Dead festival, it had appeared as if malevolent spirits were aligning to deprive him, when he punctured a tyre in an opening-lap scrap with Sebastian Vettel, his only championship rival. But cussed resistance, allied to Vettel’s failure to seize the second place he needed, ensured his coronation as Britain’s most decorated ever driver.

Even the greats have their off-days, and this was emphatically one of Hamilton’s. With his eyes on a precious prize, a third-corner shunt with Vettel had dropped him to the back of the field, threatening to defer his march to glory for another fortnight at least. But the German’s chances, too, had been holed below the waterline.

After an emergency pit-stop, he battled belligerently to surge from 18th to fourth, but it was not enough to dent Hamilton’s advantage. This raw homegrown talent, who grew up idolising Ayrton Senna on the wrong side of the tracks in Stevenage, now finds his name inscribed among the immortals.

Not since Brazil 2013 had Hamilton taken the chequered flag in so lowly a spot as ninth. But it was the best feeling of coming ninth he could possibly have wished for. As he crossed the line over a lap behind winner Max Verstappen, he put his hands to his visor, spent by the stress of it all.

Trailing the Union flag from the cockpit, he was almost too emotional to speak. In a noble gesture, Vettel followed him a few metres back to applaud. Theirs has been a fearsome back-and-forth this year but it has, save for the odd contretemps, been conducted in a spirit of mutual appreciation.

His mother, Carmen, sitting at the back of the Mercedes garage, could scarcely bear to watch as he inched his way through a tightly-bunched midfield, but the smile playing on her lips hinted that she already knew the outcome. Vettel was driving like a man possessed to deny Hamilton, but when Ferrari told him that he had a 23-second gap to bridge to Kimi Raikkonen in third, he all but gave up the fight. “Mamma mia,” he said. “That’s a little bit too much.”

Hamilton has ascended to an exalted gang of five, moving alongside Michael Schumacher, Juan Manuel Fangio, Alain Prost and, yes, Vettel himself with this quadruple triumph. He even indulged in a wonderful late skirmish with Fernando Alonso, his former nemesis at McLaren, for old times’ sake. Here were arguably the two purest racers of their generation, together at last.   

It was the opening act, though, that all but sabotaged Hamilton’s day. So long is the main straight here at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, it is a scene made for drama on the ragged edge. As many had predicted, a front row of Vettel and Verstappen – who had collided in Singapore six weeks earlier – was akin to throwing bicarbonate of soda into a vat of vinegar. With the title-chasing Hamilton behind them, the trio ran three abreast on the 800-metre run down to Turn One, inviting a crash.

Vettel, with grisly inevitability, was squeezed by Verstappen on the exit from Turn Three, and chaos reigned, the German clipping Hamilton with a force that shredded his nose cone and punctured his rival’s right rear tyre. “I’ve got a flat,” screamed Hamilton, forced into a pit-stop that brought him out dead last, just behind Vettel. The likelihood had always been that these two would wage a fierce confrontation all race – but nobody expected it to be at the back of the field.

source: AFP