Hamilton's triple title achievement lauded after US GP proves an 'unpredictable melange'
Monday 2 November 2015 11:18, UK
Lewis Hamilton has confirmed his place among F1's greatest drivers - and joined Britain's sporting hall of fame - by winning his third world title, the British press have declared.
Less than 12 months after ending his six-year wait for a second drivers' crown, Hamilton has now become just the 10th man in history to become a three-time champion - and the second Briton after the legendary Sir Jackie Stewart.
Hamilton's dual success in Austin on Sunday - the race win, his 10th of the year, and the championship itself - dominated Monday's back pages, with the Briton declared 'the history man' by one newspaper.
But it's not just the F1 pantheon which Hamilton has now joined, according to The Sun's chief sports writer Steven Howard.
'World champion Lewis Hamilton is now up there with the best. And not just one of the best F1 racers of all time," he wrote.
'The boy from Stevenage is up there with the greatest British sportsmen of all time. The 1966 World Cup legends, the 2003 rugby boys, Denis Compton and Ian Botham, Fred Perry and Andy Murray, Seb Coe and Daley Thompson, and golfers Henry Cotton and Nick Faldo. The Bulldog Breed.'
Although the race in which Hamilton sealed his place in history was jam-packed with incident and unpredictably - with the victor running as low as fourth at one stage - the narrative of the wider season itself has been "a simple hegemony", according to the Guardian's Paul Weaver.
'Hamilton took the lead after the very first race, in Australia, and kept it throughout the season. In the technically complex world of F1 his triumph can be explained in the most lucid of terms: he was faster than his most serious rival, his Mercedes team-mate, Nico Rosberg," he said.
'He started the year as a very brilliant racing driver and towards the end of it he has become an indisputably great one.'
In The Times, Kevin Eason suggested that the late error from Nico Rosberg which ultimately meant Hamilton was crowned champion in the United States, summed up the team-mates' respective years.
'In one moment, the season was encapsulated with Hamilton victorious - and Rosberg no more than a plucky second to the world champion,' Eason wrote.
'Rosberg should have been Hamilton's only realistic challenger in a season dominated by the Mercedes car, yet he cannot race alongside a young man at the peak of his power and one who can now claim to be one of the greats of the sport.'
Hamilton's 10 wins from 16 races will already go down as one of F1's most one-sided seasons, but the Daily Mail felt it was fitting that the race in which clinched the Mercedes driver his third crown at least served up the kind of drama that has followed much of the Briton's career.
'The race itself was an unpredictable melange, a see-sawing affair with four safety cars, virtual or real. For sheer mind-twisting complexity, few grands prix of recent memory have matched what unfolded on the Circuit of the Americas in the gloom of a Texan afternoon,' said Jonathan McEvoy.
'Drama has accompanied Lewis Hamilton every lap of his life, and it did so again on Sunday in excelsis as he emerged from Formula One's longest day crying his eyes out as a triple world champion.'
