Debate: can Lewis be as good as Michael Schumacher? | Simon Barnes on Hamilton's risk | 2008 race-by-race | Hamilton's win in his own words | Graphic: the most thrilling championship finish ever?

For years people have moaned about the dullness of Formula One motor-racing. Yesterday all British people with the remotest interest in the vroom-vroom game were praying for the dullest of dull races, one made still more tedious by a yawningly safe performance from Lewis Hamilton.

But instead, in a race of crazed action and labyrinthine plot, Hamilton’s chances of the world driver’s championship seemed to advance and recede with every lap of the final event of the season at Interlagos in Brazil. Hamilton lost all hope on the last lap and then, with the most extraordinary final flourish, he somehow came though to become, at 23, the youngest world champion in history.

Hamilton is the epitome of the traditional British boy-racer, with the small difference that the Afro-Caribbean blood of his Grenadan grandparents flows in his veins. He has always been a headstrong pedal-to-metal racer, from his time in go-karts until the start of the race yesterday.

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That’s when he found himself in one of those bizarre and convoluted situations that complicated sports tend to go in for: he had to finish in fifth place or better, so that Felipe Massa, his rival for the title, couldn’t win the championship even if he won the race – which he did.

Time, then, for the safest and most conservative strategy: take it easy, take no risks, and cruise to victory like the calm, calculating person that Hamilton is not.

He has previous for blowing a decisive lead. He should have won the championship in his first season last year, but after bad decision-making by himself and his team, McLaren-Mercedes, he contrived to lose from a situation in which defeat seemed impossible.

Was this a matter of youthful impetuosity, easily outgrown? Or was it a flaw that was personality-deep? In an attempt to answer these questions, Hamilton drove some sections of the race yesterday as if he was doing the school run: a caricature of caution, a man making an altogether unconvincing attempt to convince us that he was someone else. But rain fell at the beginning and the end of the race and that put the whole damn grid into a panic. Hamilton, at first too careful, then found himself making a couple of barnstorming overtaking moves that certainly weren’t in the script but turned out to be necessary.

Meanwhile, Massa cruised ahead, driving as cool a race as the one Hamilton yearned for. Hamilton was traumatically reduced to sixth place on the final lap and all was lost, while Massa’s Ferrari team was celebrating a championship victory as their man crossed the line.

Then, almost unbelievably, one of the drivers between Hamilton and the leader lost half his speed in an instant of time. On the very last turn of the 71-lap race, Hamilton somehow sneaked past him and stole back his own championship.

It was as good a bit of drama as sport can provide: and to be frank, Hamilton’s result owed a lot to luck. But it was the culmination of two years of brilliant driving in Formula One, and a short lifetime utterly dedicated to the task he completed yesterday.

He was a hothouse kid, his talent nurtured with almost religious care by his father, Anthony, a man who tried to walk the impossible tightrope between supportiveness and pushiness. “He’s the man,” Hamilton fils said more than once after the race yesterday.

It has been a long, hard season and Hamilton has made enemies as he consolidated his position. His aggressive style is something that few of his rivals like: partly because it unsettles them, and partly because it asks difficult questions about their own courage.

Hamilton is exceptional, both in his empathy with his machine and his nerveless love of wheel-to-wheel racing. The idea of playing the percentages goes against every fibre of his being. That is why he is loved by the British for reasons beyond his nationality, and widely hated elsewhere, for reasons that also concern his colour, his nationality and the way he walked into Formula One without a trace of humility. It was either the arrogance of someone about to get his comeuppance or the utterly alienating self-assurance of a champion, and yesterday Hamilton showed us which.

He had been claiming throughout the year that he had what’s called “a new maturity”, that he could pile up the points without duelling for every scrap of honour and crashing out in consequence. In the end, this new-found caution came close to costing him the championship.

“I can only thank God,” Hamilton said afterwards.

Now plans for another season of madness can begin. Hamilton has, once again, failed to do dullness.