Lewis Hamilton’s wonderful Formula One debut towered above every other news story from last weekend’s Australian Grand Prix. It wasn’t so much the third-place result but the way he achieved it, putting the pressure on reigning double world champion and teammate Fernando Alonso with a dazzling blend of speed, racecraft, confidence and coolness. All at a track he had never seen before.

If you were being brutally realistic, you would say his McLaren was the second fastest car after the Ferrari and had a substantial margin of superiority over the third fastest, the BMW, so the worst it should have finished was fourth, but Hamilton’s performance was good enough to seriously furrow the brow of Alonso. He understood only too well what a threat Hamilton posed and in contrast to the Briton’s beaming, puppy-dog delight, the champion wore the look of a worried man that was probably only partly to do with the superiority of Kimi Raikkonen’s winning Ferrari.

The first two tracks on the F1 calendar, Melbourne and Sepang in Malaysia, are two of the most difficult to learn. Hamilton will have experienced Sepang from three days’ testing at the circuit before the race in two weeks’ time. But at Melbourne he was starting from cold. Cold and wet, as it turned out, because his first experience of the layout came on a rain-covered track. If ever there was a situation designed to spit a rookie into the wall, this was it, but he drove as if this was his 100th grand prix. His smoothness and assurance were outstanding. If anything, he looked more at ease in the car than Alonso. It seemed inconceivable that this was the “lad” I shook hands with the day before.

The Albert Park circuit is a high-speed track in places, punctuated by tight chicanes and a sequence of high-speed bends. You are hemmed in by the walls and hoardings, making a lot of the turn-in and braking points unsighted. After getting a feel for it in the wet, there were a few minutes at the end when the track had dried enough to fit dry weather tyres. Hamilton had time for one flying lap on them — and it was the fourth fastest of the session.

Watching him during his qualifying laps, it was clear he has the confidence and strength to let the car move around a lot underneath him. Even in the high-speed corners he often had the back of the car way out of line. It reminded me of Michael Schumacher or Mika Hakkinen.

He qualified fourth to Alonso’s second, albeit with what turned out to be a heavier fuel load, but turned the tables on his teammate within a few seconds of the start of the race with an audacious swerve from one side of the track to the other. It looked brilliant, but with those tiny aerodynamic mirrors you cannot see if the track is clear beside you. He must have somehow just sensed that it was; on another day it could just as easily have put him in the wall or ripped off a front wing. But it was indicative of an exuberance he carried all weekend. We saw it again after the first pit stops when he began to pull away from Alonso. I winced a few times as he approached at 185mph into turn 11, skimming the wall at a place where Alonso was giving it about a metre of respect. If he had dropped it there, or locked a brake going into one of the chicanes, we would have dismissed it as inevitable, but he never did.

Alonso eventually got the upper hand, but only because of a favourable race strategy. Fuelling Alonso longer at the first stops put Hamilton on the back foot. I asked McLaren boss Ron Dennis why Hamilton’s crew did not respond to what Alonso had done and he said that the strategy was preplanned. In the past, they have operated a policy of whoever is faster in qualifying gets first call on race strategy, and that is probably what happened here. With McLaren having the second fastest car on the day, they got the perfect result if we accept that over the season Alonso is probably going to be their title-chasing driver. Hamilton was just delighted to have made the podium, but once the initial gung-ho has subsided, and we get into the grind of a world championship battle, heat-of-the-moment calls are going to come fully on to his radar.

Alonso repeatedly made the point that he is not yet properly attuned to the Bridgestone tyres after years on Michelins. The exciting thing is that, after Malaysia, Hamilton will know the next few tracks intimately, and should be on fire at a time when Alonso is still trying to get to grips with the car. It’s going to be fascinating, but Alonso’s brilliance is unquestionable.

But let’s not forget that McLaren have a lot of work to do to close the gap to Ferrari. Raikkonen gave the impression of hardly raising a sweat to win easily. Had he really pushed it, I am sure he would have won by half a minute. He even fell off the track at one point because he was “thinking about something else”. Already there is mischievous talk of Ferrari wings that flex at high speed to reduce the drag of the car.

BMW confirmed their winter testing pace, although they made a curious call on race strategy. Toyota looked respectable after beginning the weekend looking slow, but were beaten by Nico Rosberg with the Toyota engine in the back of his Williams. But for Jenson Button it was a nightmare. Aside from getting a starting grid kiss from Kylie Minogue, he had a horrendous time. The Honda was behind Toyota and Super Aguri, which is effectively last year’s Honda run by a tiny independent team. He was also beaten by teammate Rubens Barrichello. For Button, Hamilton’s sensational F1 debut can only have felt like the final blow, but Button will be back when they sort out the car later this year.

Despite a poor showing from Heikki Kovalainen in the Renault, it is one-nil to the new boys in the battle against the established drivers.