“Cool, calm and collected” was Lewis Hamilton's mantra when he climbed into his McLaren Mercedes MP4-23 before a packed house of his fans at Silverstone yesterday at the beginning of an afternoon when he was to produce one of the greatest wet-weather drives in Formula One history.

The young racer had been under enormous pressure to get his World Championship campaign back on track after two scoreless grands prix and over the past month he has been anything other than cool or calm in the car. Even as recently as qualifying on Saturday, when he could manage only a disappointing fourth on the grid, he was making mistakes through “over-driving”.

But with the help of the wise counsel of those close to him and his engineers at McLaren, he got his approach to one of the most challenging editions of the British Grand Prix exactly right, not trying to push too hard but letting his talent speak for itself and even admitting afterwards that he would have been quite happy to have scored just one point, let alone ten.

The 23-year-old multimillionaire, who is at the top of the championship for the second time in his rollercoaster second season in Formula One, drove imperiously on his home soil and was, in every sense, in a class of his own among motor racing's elite.

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Hamilton has shown us his mastery in the wet before, but around Silverstone's mix of fast, sweeping corners and tight, twisty turns, he was breathtaking. A fine touch combined with a rare instinct for the state of his car at every second of every lap kept him on the tarmac all afternoon while his rivals were spinning all around him.

He ended up thrashing the lot as he circled faster and more assuredly than anyone in a drive that Martin Whitmarsh, the McLaren chief executive, was to describe afterwards as one of the classics of the genre. One index of his crushing superiority was that, by the time he took the chequered flag before the thousands who stood to applaud him, Hamilton had lapped all but two drivers, Nick Heidfeld in the BMW Sauber, who was second, and Rubens Barrichello, of Honda, who took full advantage of the rain to record his first podium finish since 2005.

Among those left a lap down in Hamilton's wake were the defending world champion, Kimi Raikkonen, of Ferrari, who finished fourth, and the former double world champion

and acknowledged “rain-master”, Fernando Alonso, of Renault, who was sixth. No victory in Formula One is down to a driver alone and another feature of this ruthless display was the way McLaren and Hamilton combined on the day so powerfully. We saw the best driver in the best car and a pitwall team who did not put a foot wrong in tricky and unstable conditions.

From the moment the lights went out and the cars roared down the pit-straight towards the terrifying challenge of Copse corner taken at close to 180mph, we could see that Hamilton meant business. Cool, calm and collected it may have been in Hamilton's young and fiercely competitive mind, it looked anything but that from outside the car as he ripped away from his start box, immediately “undertook” the slower Red Bull of Mark Webber, who started second and finished tenth, and then almost got through his McLaren team-mate Heikki Kovalainen, who was on pole. This was Hamilton of old, the young tiger at the wheel we grew to know and love last season.

There were hearts in mouths under the McLaren awning on the pitwall as the pair duelled and briefly came together or “tapped” before Kovalainen pulled clear. From then Hamilton calmed down a little, biding his time before sweeping past Kovalainen's lighter and faster car four laps later to take a lead he was never to relinquish except during the rounds of pitstops. For Kovalainen this was the beginning of a slide through the field in which he would finish his first grand prix from pole in a lacklustre fifth place.

With Raikkonen chasing him, Hamilton drove metronomically in first place on a wet track when rain or the threat of it was constantly altering the strategic equation. It was during the first round of stops that Ferrari made a mess of this conundrum, not changing Raikkonen's tyres in the mistaken belief that the track would continue to dry out. In the event it got wetter and McLaren's correct call proved a match-winner as Hamilton, on new “wets”, drove away from Raikkonen and everyone else, recording lap times that were as much as five or six seconds faster than the Finn.

Hamilton had two “moments” of his own, when he briefly locked up his front wheels after hitting the brakes too hard mid-race, but other than those, he was faultless and kept going to finish nearly 1min 10sec ahead of Heidfeld.

He said afterwards that he had not slowed his pace too much because he was frightened that he might lose concentration and make a mistake that could ruin his dream of winning his home race. He described his afternoon's work as more a mental challenge than a physical one and his performance as his best to date, eclipsing even his win at this year's Monaco Grand Prix.

Almost all his rivals spun at various times. Kovalainen and Webber did twice, Raikkonen once, Robert Kubica, of BMW, also once and into retirement, while Felipe Massa, of Ferrari, was the worst offender. Starting from ninth, the Brazilian spun his car five times and finished thirteenth, the last of those still racing, and two laps down. Massa's consolation is that he remains tied on points with Hamilton and Raikkonen at the head of a beautifully balanced championship that has reached the halfway point with nine races to come.

Heidfeld will have done his battered self-belief no harm at all with a solid race drive to follow his best qualifying performance, of fifth, since the first race of the year, in Melbourne. Barrichello, meanwhile, owed the 62nd podium finish of his long career to some steady early driving and then a series of excellent strategy calls by Ross Brawn's team on the pitwall. Had it not been for a hold-up in the pits, the Brazilian veteran could have pipped Heidfeld for second place.