No collision can remove Lewis from his pedestal

THERE is a corner in a quiet part of Adelaide at the junction of East Terrace and Flinders Street that I always made a point of visiting when I was in the city for the Ashes. It sits on the edge of Victoria Park and it would feel like an unremarkable feature of a serene, sleepy residential neighbourhood were it not for the knowledge of what happened there on November 13, 1994.

Adelaide staged the Australian Grand Prix in those days and, at the end of a traumatic season dominated by the death of Ayrton Senna at Imola in May, Michael Schumacher had gone into the race on the street circuit leading the struggle for the drivers’ title by a point from Damon Hill. On the 36th lap, Schumacher crashed at the corner of East Terrace and Flinders Street.

Hill had been whittling away at Schumacher’s lead and saw him hit the wall and then drive back on to the track. He did not know how badly Schumacher’s Benetton was damaged. He tried to pass Schumacher but the German drove into him and the Benetton leapt into the air and almost flipped before it bounced back to the ground and nestled in a tyre barrier. Hill nursed his Williams back to the pits but it could not be repaired.

The stewards judged it was a ‘racing incident’. Schumacher, to much dismay, was exonerated from blame and won the title. There were more calls for him to be punished but they went unheeded. It was the first of his seven driver’s championships, a record which may be overtaken today if Lewis Hamilton holds off Max Verstappen in Abu Dhabi to win his eighth title and become the most decorated F1 driver of all time.

And so more history will be written today and part of the Yas Marina Circuit will be celebrated for what happened there. Maybe it will be the finish line, immortalised as the place where Hamilton took the chequered flag to be anointed F1’s king. Maybe it will be the site of a collision, as it was in Adelaide, the site of a melodrama that would fit the narrative of this memorable season.

This will not be the first time that title contenders have gone into the final race level on points. It last happened in 1974 when Clay Regazzoni and Emerson Fittipaldi arrived at the American GP at Watkins Glen on exactly the same total. Regazzoni put Fittipaldi on the grass at 170mph on the back straight on the first lap but Fittipaldi did not lift off the accelerator and went on to win his second title.

These things rarely end quietly. Bitter struggles like the one between Hamilton and Verstappen carry with them the potential for disaster. When so much is at stake, an entire season resting on one climactic race, some drivers are willing to do anything to win. And Verstappen knows, that if neither he nor Hamilton finishes in Abu Dhabi, then Verstappen will win the title.

We have been here before. Most famously, Ayrton Senna was twice involved in title-deciding clashes with his bitter rival Alain Prost close to the end of the 1989 and 1990 seasons.

In the second clash, when Senna smashed into the side of the Frenchman at high speed soon after the start of the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix, Prost articulated the difference between the two men. ‘I am not ready to fight against irresponsible people who are not afraid to die,’ he said.

For many F1 fans, nothing will ever match the intensity of the enmity between Prost and Senna but the duel between Hamilton and Verstappen this season has breathed fresh life into Formula One after so many years of clear dominance from Hamilton’s Mercedes team.

It had raced into a cul-de-sac of public apathy. Now it is front and centre in the sporting mind again. And if the rivalry between the two men does not yet have quite the same hinterland as the Jim Clark-Graham Hill, Senna-Prost, Nelson Piquet-Nigel Mansell, James Hunt-Niki Lauda and Schumacher-Hill struggles, there is less room for argument about Hamilton’s place in the pantheon of the sport.

Whether he adds an unprecedented eighth driver’s title to his collection today or not, the numbers already say that Hamilton is the greatest grand prix driver there has ever been. He has more race victories and more pole positions than any other racer, he is thrilling to watch, a risk-taker, a trailblazer and a master of whatever conditions are thrown at him.

Those who say Hamilton owes his dominance to the brilliant engineers and

designers who built his Mercedes chassis and its engine have a point but not much of one. Hamilton won a title in a McLaren, too, remember.

Whether history, as well as his numbers, will judge Hamilton as the G.O.A.T. is another matter. Win or lose today, there will never be a definitive answer to that debate just as there can never be a definitive answer to whether Pele is greater than Lionel Messi or Roger Federer greater than Rod Laver.

Hamilton is indisputably the greatest driver of his generation but is he greater than Fangio or Clark or Senna or Schumacher?

As he hurtles into today’s thrilling denouement, with all the potential for danger, confrontation and collision that it brings, it is enough to know that he walks in the same exalted company.