Here are a headline and a picture caption you may not remember: “The boy racer challenge”. “Lewis Hamilton, with his little Smart Forfour, has his eyes on something bigger: a Formula One win”. They appeared in these pages a year ago and accompanied an article on the then virtually unknown 21-year-old driver from Hertfordshire.

Much has changed this year. Hamilton has got rid of his Smart car and exchanged it for the Mercedes in which he was nabbed doing 122mph on a French motorway last week. He has moved from Stevenage to Geneva and met his boy racer challenge, winning not just one F1 race but four, and in the process he has become a global superstar.

All this meant that when mulling over the options for the InGear Man of the Year award, Hamilton was in pole position from the start. And somehow the fact that he managed to blow his chance of winning the world championship in the last race of the season only made him more of a shoo-in. After all, nobody likes a smartarse.

We catch up with him in Scotland, where he is taking part in yet another round of commercial endorsements (this time at the Johnnie Walker whisky distillery to promote responsible drinking) to present him with a celebratory bottle of bubbly.

He is in relaxed mood and courteous as ever. “A big thank you to all the readers of InGear and everyone at the paper. It’s a great pleasure for me to receive the award,” he says, as if it is the first bottle of champagne he has cracked open. “It has been an amazing year, something I could never have dreamt of when I first started out.”

His extraordinary year began in January at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne where all eyes were on his teammate Fernando Alonso and the question on everyone’s lips was how Ferrari would cope without Michael Schumacher. “I didn’t know what was going to happen,” says Hamilton. “But I did every test from October all the way through to the first race. There wasn’t a day I missed. I got to that first race and I still had to accept that testing is one thing and racing’s another. But I remember I was pumped. I was quick in testing. I was getting quicker and I knew I was going to get quicker that whole weekend. And I did.”

He qualified fourth and finished third, leaving pundits speechless. In fact the only person who didn’t seem fazed was Hamilton. Did he believe he could win his first race? “I always try to win,” he says. “In the race I drive to win. I don’t drive to finish in any position, I drive to finish ahead of everyone.”

Proving Australia was no fluke, Hamilton notched up podium after podium as spring turned into summer. Then, one day in June, his promise came good. In Montreal, on a track named after one of the greatest of all natural racers, Gilles Villeneuve, Hamilton chalked up win number one. It was a race fraught with difficulty, not least because the safety car appeared four times, disrupting the flow. But Hamilton kept calm and took the chequered flag, as well as the heart of the nation.

“There was a tear from my mum when I won,” he says. “It was one of the most emotional moments of my life. I remember I was ecstatic when I got pole position and then the whole race was on and off, on and off and I was thinking, ‘Shoot, someone doesn’t want me to win this race.’ There were four bloody safety cars, cool tyres, cool brakes, and I pulled it off. I just felt I did it against all odds. I would do anything to live that day again, but you’ve got to move forward. And I’ve got it on tape, so I can always go back again.”

Hamilton won again a week later in the United States. Then again in August at the Hungarian Grand Prix. “The first one people say, ‘Well that’s luck.’ The second one, ‘Well, he was a bit lucky again.’ Next one, and it’s ‘What’s going on here?’ Then the fourth one it’s, ‘Okay, he’s good.’ It was very weird for me. The feeling was so good I wanted to make sure I did everything right the next time, but not get ahead of myself.”

By this time Hamiltonmania had taken hold on and off the track. But despite the flattery, you couldn’t help feeling that Hamilton was beginning to struggle with the attention. He claimed fame and the paparazzi were ruining his privacy and hinted that he was thinking of leaving Britain. “I can’t even stop at a petrol station any more without someone asking for an autograph,” he said.

Still, fame has its upsides. “I just can’t get my mind round it,” he says. “I’m now in touch with P Diddy, I’m in touch with Kanye West, Naomi Campbell, and am good friends with her now. She’s stunning. Who would have thought? And all these people, I’m just like you are today: I read the magazines, I see all these people, and I see a picture of me and ‘Who is that? That’s not me’.”

Back on the racetrack, however, things were turning sour. The World Motor Sport Council was called in to investigate claims that McLaren, Hamilton’s team, had benefited from Ferrari team secrets passed to it illegally. And the feud between Alonso and Hamilton was reaching boiling point.

Today, he is sanguine about the episode. “It wasn’t a low point,” he says. “It was just a heat of the moment thing and just a feeling that sometimes this is really crap. You know when you have that bar of energy – mine was overflowing, so any problems I had would take a little bit of the overflow. But it never got below full. Not even after the last race.”

The last race, in Brazil in October, was, of course, where he lost the world title to Kimi Raikkonen after a series of mechanical problems, team mistakes and a wild first corner. “[Next year] is another opportunity,” he says. “I am nowhere near my best, and as far as I am concerned the sky’s the limit. All I can do is think about the next race and be better than I was in 2007.”

I think we’ll all drink to that.