Lewis Hamilton punched the air with a pair of gloved clenched fists when he finally swept past the chequered flag to win the Hungarian Grand Prix yesterday and he cut an ecstatic figure as he graced the top of a Formula One podium for the third time this season.

His brother, Nicolas, led the cheering by the McLaren Mercedes mechanics. Alongside him, Hamilton’s father, Anthony, was struggling to keep his own feelings in check as he savoured a few precious moments of joy at the end of what, until then, had been a nightmare of a weekend for Hamilton and his team.

But all that had gone on in the build-up to the race – the row over the attempt by Hamilton’s team-mate, Fernando Alonso, and the team to stop the Briton from taking pole position and the punishments handed down to them by the stewards – quickly came back to haunt Hamilton.

By the time he came into the postrace press conference just half an hour after he had stepped out of the car, he looked and sounded like a young man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. We heard about his battle with Kimi Raikkonen, of Ferrari, about how the steering on his McLaren had played up in his second stint and how he worked hard to conserve his soft tyres over the final laps.

But the 22-year-old seemed just as keen to talk about the embarrassment for McLaren that was partly of his making. Hamilton admitted that he had made a mistake on Saturday, when he disobeyed team orders and did not let Alonso go ahead of him in the early laps of the final stages of qualifying, and he said the whole episode was hanging over him before the race, as it plainly was afterwards.

“I think going into the race it felt like a big cloud over my mind and it was difficult to stay focused because obviously you had this feeling in the team. The team weren’t getting any points, so you didn’t know whether the team hated you or just hated the situation or who they blamed,” he said with disarming candour.

He revealed that in the build-up to the race, he had gone to speak to everyone in the team, with the exception of Alonso, to talk to them and explain what had gone on. Earlier, he had sat down with his own race engineer, Phil Prew, with the McLaren chief executive, Martin Whitmarsh, and with Alonso and his race engineer to try to thrash out the issues.

“We went through what the programme was and they asked me why I didn’t do the part they wanted me to,” Hamilton said. “And so I explained to them; I said ‘look I made a mistake – I apologise, it won’t happen again. But it’s happened, let’s forget about it and move on. We’re both on the front row, so we can still smile.’ ” That, of course, was before Alonso was handed a five-place grid penalty.

Listening to him, you almost felt that Hamilton had concluded that he was the one who had committed the more serious offence of the two McLaren drivers when the team and Alonso, as the stewards put it, were punished for actions “prejudicial to the interests of the competition and to the interests of motor sport generally”.

Having said that, Hamilton was still openly and aggressively critical of what he believes was his teammate’s role in the attempt to stop him getting pole, remarking at one point: “I wouldn’t have thought Fernando would do something like that but I have reasons to believe otherwise.”

He also threw light on the state of their relationship, which certainly does not fit the old “official” McLaren imagery of them playing basketball on PlayStation together and popping into each other’s rooms for a chat.

Hamilton said he still respected Alonso for what he had achieved in past seasons but implied that he could not say the same for what he has been doing more recently.

All communication had now ceased. “He doesn’t seem to be speaking to me since yesterday . . . so I don’t know if he has a problem,” Hamilton said, adding that he was not going to break the ice himself. “If he doesn’t want to speak to me again, that’s for him to decide but I’m open.”

As for Hamilton and Ron Dennis, the team principal with whom he had a very colourful exchange at the end of qualifying, the two have now “started on a clean slate”. Dennis himself sounded as worn out by his weekend as his young protégé, describing it as “full of stress and emotion”. He said he felt “a bit of emptiness at the end of an extremely difficult weekend. I’m so drained, it’s difficult to have any emotion left.

“What happened [on Saturday] was really unacceptable. We have a very, very strong commitment to parity. But this was one of those times where, as hard as you try, there’s always a deviation from our plans, that put the team in an extremely difficult position.”

Dennis also suggested that the team may withdraw their decision to appeal against the stewards’ ruling that, in addition to demoting Alonso on the grid, cost McLaren their constructors’ championship points from yesterday’s race.