Lewis Hamilton has been well tutored by the
McLaren team, whose chief executive Ron Dennis's most oft-quoted mantra is 'confidence is a weakness'.
That simply reflects the innate sense of caution from a team which last won a world championship in 1999. The notion that Hamilton might become only the second driver in
F1 history to win on his world championship debut, matching the achievement of the late Giancarlo Baghetti - who triumphed in the 1961 French Grand Prix at the wheel of a
Ferrari - is dismissed as a charming thought, but wholly unrealistic.
Despite this, you would have to say that Hamilton's performances in winter testing, preparing for his debut in Melbourne on 18 March, have been pretty much flawless. Okay, so he trashed one of the McLaren MP4-22s at Valencia as he probed the outer limits of his machine's performance, but this was all part of the learning process. In any event, this brief slip has been far outweighed by the poise, balance and maturity he has demonstrated outside the cockpit.
In that sense, the McLaren-Mercedes squad seems to have re-invented itself quite successfully. Watching Dennis over the past couple of years, presiding - with thinly concealed, yet abject frustration - over the disintegration of the team's relationship with
Kimi Raikkonen and
Juan Pablo Montoya was so painful you could almost share his angst. And, when their two cars collided on the first corner at Indianapolis last season, it was not difficult to comprehend the team's frustration.
Raikkonen was a raw talent when he first arrived at McLaren in 2002, like a wayward labrador which hadn't been tamed or trained. He gradually edged his way to maturity over his seasons racing with the Silver Arrows, but his wayward off-track behaviour developed to the point where one could have almost been forgiven for thinking that the Finn was being contrary for no other reason than it would up the McLaren top brass.
