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. 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. 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. In a noble gesture, Vettel followed him a few metres back to applaud.
Trailing the Union flag from the cockpit, he was almost too emotional to speak. 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. But it was the best feeling of coming ninth he could possibly have wished for. Not since Brazil 2013 had Hamilton taken the chequered flag in so lowly a spot as ninth. 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. But the German’s chances, too, had been holed below the waterline.Īfter an emergency pit-stop, he battled belligerently to surge from 18 th to fourth, but it was not enough to dent Hamilton’s advantage.
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 cussed resistance, allied to Vettel’s failure to seize the second place he needed, ensured his coronation as Britain’s most decorated ever driver.Įven the greats have their off-days, and this was emphatically one of Hamilton’s.
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. 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.
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