On a special date came a special moment. With just fractions of a second left of the qualifying session yesterday at Silverstone, Lewis Hamilton produced a flawless and unanswerable lap that would have been fitting from his hero, Ayrton Senna.
The comparison is not glibly made. The last-minute flying lap was a speciality of the great Brazilian and, on the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the millennium, a date accorded mystical significance, Hamilton stirred a few ghosts. But if he manages to conjure up a win for the British Grand Prix today, he will set his own record. No British driver has ever won the race in his debut season.
Any suggestion that Hamilton might be unsettled by the absence of McLaren’s chief designer, Mike Coughlan, who was suspended by the team on Tuesday morning as part of investigations into the case of industrial espionage with Ferrari, was dispelled in just under 80 seconds of blurred brilliance. When the time of 1min 19.997sec was posted, Anthony Hamilton, Lewis’s father, burst out of the McLaren garage arms raised to acknowledge the standing ovation of the packed grandstands. In the car, Hamilton turned off his radio and screamed so loud and for so long that his voice went hoarse. The McLaren mechanics joined in the celebrations, aware not just of the critical importance of taking pole on this ultra-fast circuit but of the significance of the moment for their driver.
Lying in fourth place for much of the session, Hamilton took his third pole of the season ahead of Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen, who lost precious time when he ran wide into the final corner of his last lap. Fernando Alonso, last year’s winner, will be on the second row of the grid alongside Felipe Massa, a Brazilian, in the second Ferrari after leading both the first two phases of qualifying and will need no reminding that his 22-year-old McLaren Mer-cedes teammate has driven to victory from his two previous poles, in Canada and the USA.
Alonso was asked whether at this big British party he would have a fair chance of victory. “That’s a good question,” he said before side-stepping the reply. But the demeanour of the world champion suggested that, not for the first time this season, he perceived a whiff of favouritism within his team.
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“I had to dig as deep as I’ve had to for a long time to find that lap,” admitted Hamilton. “It was an extremely intense qualifying session. Pole on my first British Grand Prix? I don’t think I have got used to it. This whole season has been a very difficult experience to get used to.”
In his first season in Formula One, Hamilton has performed with the assurance of a veteran. Yet nothing that he has faced in his fledgeling career had prepared him for the full force of his home crowd’s commitment to the cause or to the weight of the demands placed on him inside and out of the car over the past week. Hamilton has come into his home grand prix with a 14-point lead in the drivers’ championship but aware too of the potential for a Ferrari recovery after Raikkonen’s handsome victory in France. All morning, the fans streamed into Silverstone, hanging their Union Jacks and banners over the railings so that Hamilton, in the McLaren garage at the top end of the pit lane, was left in no doubt of what was expected of him.
A mere twitch of a glove or fleeting glimpse of their champion brought cheers cascading from the stands. Hamilton admits that he hates to let people down, but this must have been the first time 80,000 people, a record crowd for a Saturday at this meeting, had been relying on him. If he was overawed by the understanding, he did not let it show, though he trailed Raikkonen, Massa and Alonso through much of an afternoon blessed with blue sky and a gusting wind. Two British drivers failed to make the cut at the end of the first phase of qualifying, Jenson Button not finding any stability in his Honda and Anthony Davidson spinning off into the gravel in his Super Aguri.
Unhappy with the handling of his car during the Friday practice, Alonso and his engineers made significant changes overnight and the Spaniard flew out of the pits to record the fastest single lap of the session in the opening quarter on soft tyres. Hamilton shaved his own time in the second phase, which saw the Red Bull of David Coulthard run 12th, thus putting him out of the final qualifying session, but still seemed crucially short of pace in the opening sector as the two number one drivers, Alonso and Raikkonen, lined up for their first real shootout of the season. The Finn won that duel, despite making a mistake on the final corner, but just as he was about to claim his second pole of the year, his first since the opening race in Australia, Hamilton dashed into the pits for a fresh set of tyres and headed out for his final lap.
“I had been struggling in sector one, losing two-tenths all the way through qualifying, butI just had to pull it all out on that one,” he explained. “I didn’t hold my foot down through the first corner, but I nearly did and then I just had to maintain my speed through the rest of the lap. I could see the reaction of the crowd and I got a real buzz from seeing all the flags and banners. I like to make people happy.”
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The hard luck story, if there was one, came from Raikkonen, who had confirmed the revival of the Prancing Horse with his evident pace on Friday and through the practice session in the morning, but paid the penalty for a loss of concentration yesterday. No less than Alonso, Raikkonen has been disconcerted by the sudden emergence of Hamilton and the dominance of the McLarens through the first half of the season. Being outdriven by Hamilton and Alonso was bad enough, but being consistently outpaced by his teammate Massa was an indignity which finally stirred the placid Finn into action. He will be the biggest danger today to Hamilton’s, and the British public’s, dreams of a debut home grand prix win.
Alonso put a brave face on his third place on the grid and he at least had the good grace to shake Hamilton’s hand in the garage at the end of qualifying. He has yet to expose a weakness in his teammate’s psyche and the frustration is beginning to tell. Coulthard, the last British winner here, back in 2000, will start from the sixth row; Button, who endured another miserable day in his Honda, has only the two Super Aguris and a pair of Spykers behind him.
“I was only six when Nigel Mansell was here and I met Damon Hill the year I won my first British Championship,” said Hamilton.
“But when he was around, actually I was watching Ayrton the whole time.”
Yesterday at Silverstone, it showed.