THE first race of the season was, in some respects, a tale of two Englishmen. For one, Lewis Hamilton, a wheel-perfect race to cap a more or less perfect weekend. Chaos reigned behind him, but this extraordinary young racer was utterly, serenely unmoved.

Only when he bounced out of his car and up the steps to the podium - this after enduring nearly an hour and three-quarters of temperatures of 50 degrees plus in his cauldron of a cockpit - did you see something of the boy.

For the other, Anthony Davidson, the sort of race of which about the only positive thing that could be said is that at least his team, Super Aguri, made it to Melbourne at all.

Actually, scrub ‘at least’. In many ways the fact Aguri started the race was almost as big an achievement as McLaren’s in winning it. It was only about ten days ago Davidson knew he’d be flying to Australia, after a winter of agonising uncertainty over the financial future of the smallest team on the grid.

There were nights, he admitted, that he hadn’t been able to sleep, had even begun to show the symptoms of depression. He arrived with just one day’s testing under his belt, perhaps 100 laps, and knowing that Aguri were so short of parts that a bad shunt, however caused, would probably mean they wouldn’t be able to race in Malaysia.

Reliability problems allowed him all of 12 laps of running on Friday, and in the circumstances, he qualified closer to the back of the pack than he had any right to. To be punted into a barrier through no fault of his own after - what? 500 metres? - seemed cruel beyond belief.

“I am so frustrated I couldn’t do the laps that I wanted to and finish the race,” sighed Davidson. “We haven’t had much time in the car this weekend or in testing and it was really important to get that done today, so it is gutting not to have done that. I got away cleanly and through no fault of my own was sandwiched between two cars, trying to avoid the inevitable.

“I tried to brake to get away from it and the cars right and left just rode over my front wheels, so there was no where for me to go.”

But that of course is sport. The playing fields are rarely level. To the winner the laurels nonetheless, and no amount of the green stuff would be too much for Hamilton. What a performance it was, for all that he insisted afterwards it was not, in fact, as perfect as it looked.

Ferrari must have felt their collective heart crack within them when he appeared almost as fresh at the end of the race as he did at the beginning. He and his car looked more than capable of another race distance, and with the ruthlessness and that touch - a faint one, to be sure, but a touch even so - of arrogance that all great winners seem to have, how Hamilton relished making sure the Scuderia understood just how much he had in hand.

Quote one; “The car was phenomenal, a dream to drive compared to last year.” A year, lest we forget, in which he lead the championship by 17 points with two races to go.

Quote two; “I feel fantastic, I never would have thought it was as physically a breeze as it was.” A little ungrammatical, but with the adrenalin obviously still surging, forgiveably so.