Murray Walker has described Lewis Hamilton's mesmerising performance to triumph in the British Grand Prix at Silverstone as one of the finest wet-weather drives in Formula 1 history – but he admitted that it is BMW-Sauber's Robert Kubica who has been his star of the season so far.
Hamilton triumphed by more than a minute in front of his adoring home supporters just under a fortnight ago – the greatest winning margin since Damon Hill prevailed by two full laps at Adelaide back in 1995 – and in so doing vaulted himself right back into championship contention. It was, Walker contends, a drive of pure genius – even if he does acknowledge that he subscribes to the widely-held theory that the young Briton is going through the 'difficult second year syndrome' in the top flight in 2008.
“It's going to go down as a race that we'll be talking about in 20 years' time,” the veteran commentator – affectionately nicknamed 'Trousers on Fire' for his excitable nature behind the mic' – told
Crash.net Radio at last weekend's Goodwood Festival of Speed.
“I can remember Gilles Villeneuve at Watkins Glen in the Ferrari – an absolutely unbelievable drive, when he was making mincemeat out of everybody else in appalling conditions; Stirling Moss at the Nürburgring in '61; Michael Schumacher in '96 in the Ferrari in Spain; and Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone in 2008 has to go into that bracket. It was a quite phenomenal drive.
“Last year [Hamilton] didn't have any pressure, if you look at it logically – he'd got nothing to lose, it was his first year and everything was going for him. This year he's got colossal pressure. If you cross the media in this country you're in real trouble, and he's made some pretty inoffensive remarks which have been picked up and inflated beyond recognition. Yeah, he's having a hard time.
“Politically he put his foot in it with David Coulthard and Jenson Button at Silverstone over the £10,000 challenge. Sadly nowadays, if you're a racing driver you've got to be more than just somebody who's good at turning the steering wheel and pressing the pedals; you've got to be good at the politics and you've got to be good at the communication, and he's got a bit to learn there obviously.”
The 84-year-old had words of encouragement, however, for fellow Brits David Coulthard and Jenson Button – the former for quitting at what Walker reckons is the right time, at the end of the current campaign, and the latter for his stoic resilience at Honda in the face of what, for a former grand prix winner, must be a truly dispiriting situation.
“I won't be sad to see [Coulthard] go,” he underlined, “and I don't mean that unkindly. David has been in Formula 1 for 15 years. I've seen all his grands prix – he's won 13 of them, he's made a load of money, he's living very happily with a lovely girl, he's got a fabulous family up in Scotland, he's got his future all mapped out and he hasn't hurt himself.
“We all have to stop sometime, and I said to him at Silverstone 'you are stopping at exactly the right moment, because you could still win a grand prix – everybody knows that, you've got potential – but you're getting out while you're at the top', which is something that's very difficult to do.
