Lewis Hamilton has written Formula One's most glorious chapter

Watching Lewis Hamilton should come with a health warning. Dish the sedatives. After the closest finish in grand prix history, one that made Manchester United's Champions League win in 1999 appear routine – Jonny Wilkinson's World Cup winning dropped goal in 2003, too, for that matter – Hamilton redefined our ideas of what is possible.

He was dead in the water, literally. Felipe Massa crossed the line first in a wet Brazilian Grand Prix believing he had nailed a remarkable victory of his own. With only two corners of the race remaining he had. The BBC website declared it so and the scenes in the Ferrari garage, where Massa's father was in the early stages of delirium, appeared to confirm it.

What they couldn't see was Hamilton arrowing in on history and the fading Toyota of Timo Glock. Hamilton had surrendered the fifth place he required to secure the title to Sebastian Vettel with two laps to go as returning rain forced a chaotic finale. Glock chose not to come in, a move that seemed to have torpedoed Hamilton's coronation.

Then, as the rain started to pour, the world came back to Hamilton. Glock lost 18 seconds in that final lap before surrendering in the dying moments. Hamilton might not even have known he had pulled the mother of all rabbits out of the hat as he crossed the line. The message eventually filtered through on his in-lap.

Hamilton fell into the emotional embrace of his mechanics. Ecstasy fizzed through the McLaren garage. And then the meeting with his father in the weighing room. The import of what he had achieved took his legs away. His father put an arm around him as he sat in the chair and the tears flowed. Hamilton had won by the same margin, one point, by which he had surrendered the championship a year ago.

At 23 Hamilton has changed the grand prix world. His youth is the least if it. A frontier has fallen, the last great colour bar in mainstream sport shattered by a mixed race kid from Stevenage.

It was the outcome motor sport needed. No disrespect to Massa. He contributed fully to the piece, pushed Hamilton to the limits of his talent, to the last seconds of a compelling duel. But this was the kind of historic moment that a Massa championship could not have delivered.

Nerves cannot survive a career full of this. An hour before the race began lightning ripped across a leaden Sao Paulo sky. Peels of thunder momentarily drowned the din urging Massa forth. This was one race that had no need of a celestial atmosphere boost.

As the clock counted down, Hamilton talked quietly with his father at the back of the garage. At the front a couple of mechanics high-fived. Team-mate Heikki Kovalainen wished Hamilton well. How different the scene a year ago with Fernando Alonso fomenting alongside.

Hamilton was at the sharp end of the most expensively constructed championship campaigns in F1. Since his win in China a fortnight ago McLaren had thrown the GNP of a minor monarchy to get across the line first. All sleep was cancelled. Every nook and cranny of the car was re-considered in pursuit of extra speed. Engines ran 24/7 on space-age dynos.

Team principal Ron Dennis claims the gargantuan effort put an extra tenth of a second in Hamilton's tank. You wondered if this were not overkill. If any team can overcomplicate a simple equation it is McLaren. A better response after China might have been to send Dennis, an inveterate control freak by his own admission, on holiday for a fortnight. McLaren's ranks here were swelled by extra staff, including heightened security to protect against the threat of skulduggery.

There was a lot resting on the result. A barren run stretching back 10 years in the constructors' championship and nine in the drivers' was becoming an increasingly toxic detail for a team who spend on the high side of £200 million a year. As F1 would have it, all the planning was rendered meaningless by a shower on the stroke of kick-off. "Typical," said Bernie Ecclestone, "nothing in Brazil arrives on time."

A 10-minute delay allowed a change to wet tyres. When the lights went out Nelson Piquet spun through the Senna Esses ending his race and, cruelly, the career of David Coulthard. Heart rates soared. The safety car was out for three laps, nowhere near long enough for the pulse to dip back below a hundred. That would take a little longer, until the cars began to spread and Vettel drew back from Hamilton's tail pipe.

After eight laps the dash for dry tyres began. The variable Hamilton didn't want was in play. Massa was the first of the leading group in after 10 laps, Hamilton 11. The episode dropped him to seventh. Jarno Trulli went wide a lap later. Hamilton was up to sixth. Then a move reserved for heroes to dispatch Giancarlo Fisichella.

The manoeuvre through turn one, and the one at turn 12 that accounted for Glock, bookended a process that began a year ago. The long march to the summit started in a Sao Paulo hotel room 24 hours after falling off the 2007 championship cliff. Food poisoning and heartbreak had brought Hamilton low. It was an act of cruelty to force him to answer for his nosedive. He took his lumps and, between lunges for the toilet bowl, mapped the coming weeks. "There are 22 until Melbourne," he said. "When I get to Australia I'll be a better driver; fitter and stronger than before."

Too right, blue. Hamilton won from pole. What followed was typical of a season that would contort through any number of narrative twists. The blue sky script perished immediately in Malaysia and Bahrain. What had been a nine-point lead over Raikkonen after the first race was now a five-point deficit after three.

Hamilton's confidence evaporated. He talked of trying too hard. At a dinner in Brazil last week a McLaren executive opened a window into Hamilton's churning psyche in April. He believed the trauma of the championship failure five months earlier had cut deeper than any imagined. He could not offer a definitive account, but felt the matter had not been resolved. Hamilton was knee deep in his first crisis in F1. He was the man on whom responsibility rested. His team-mate, Kovalainen, was new to McLaren. Hamilton was growing up on the front line. His challenge then was not the championship but to rediscover himself. We got him back in Monaco.

Reputations are forged in the rain. Hamilton raced in Senna's orbit that day; peerless. It was a display to end all debate about his credentials as a grand prix man. Or it should have been.

Hamilton polarises opinion. When he shunted himself and Raikkonen out of the race in the Canadian pits Hamilton thought he had simply made a mistake. He hadn't. He had folded in battle, according to the anti-Hamilton lobby. Questions about his temperament were raised. It is the reductio absurdum of F1 that Hamilton cracks under the cosh, but on his detractors raged.

He erred for sure. It was not pressure that did for him but youth. Enthusiasm for the fight was his failing, not a vulnerable psyche. A susceptibility to pressure inhibits performance. Hamilton wasn't shrinking in the Canadian pit lane, he was surging. Hamilton was back in the stocks on the eve of his home grand prix after two pointless finishes. The best story to drop in British sport for years was rapidly turning rank. This was it, a career litmus test with the potential to break him. If ever a bloke was under pressure it was Hamilton at Silverstone. His answer was emphatic, the critics smoked, as they were in Sao Paulo. Hamilton is a winner. Get used to it.

Massa was magnanimous in defeat. It cannot have been easy to have had a lifetime's achievement yanked from his grasp in such circumstances. He was three corners into his lap of honour when he was told his dream was over.

A year ago Hamilton's world had spun similarly off its axis. He didn't deserve to sink as he did. A new chapter opens with his championship success. The way he took his chance reinforced his credentials as an athlete of singular standing. No Muhammad Ali? Flavio Briatore might wish to reconsider. This was Hamilton's rumble in the jungle, a timeless moment in the history of sport.