Lewis Hamilton should look away now. He goes into the Brazilian Grand Prix, the Formula One decider, on Sunday with frayed nerves, a grid of dissent and the burden of having it all to lose. Anything can happen when it comes down to a single, closing act and John Surtees’s title triumph in a blue-and-white Ferrari is a cautionary tale.

Hamilton leads Felipe Massa, of Brazil, by seven points going into the final race of the season. Surtees trailed Graham Hill by five points going into the last race of the 1964 season in Mexico. What happened next was a miasma of twisted fate.

Hill was taken out of the race by Lorenzo Bandini, Surtees’s teammate, and Jim Clark, who then stood to win the championship, was seven laps from the crown when oil began leaking from his Lotus. Bandini then moved over to let Surtees through into second place to give him the crown by a single point. If we get the same outcome at Interlagos you can expect to hear a gaggle of lawyers and Machiavellian conspiracy theories. Back then, Louis T. Stanley, the director of Hill’s BRM team, said: “Bandini was in tears. Everyone shook hands. As far as we were concerned that was the end of the matter.”

Surtees, the only man to win world titles on two and four wheels, has an intriguing take on what happened that day in Mexico City. “Frankly, I was astounded by what Graham did,” he said. “He decided that the only way to get out of the hairpin was to take a certain line, but it left the door open and Lorenzo said, ‘thank you’. Lorenzo had the corner because he was on the inside. Purely because I had appeared on the back of Graham, he momentarily forgot about Lorenzo. It wasn’t controversial from my point of view. We’re not pre-programmed machines, we’re humans and we all make mistakes.”

Rivers of muddy water have flown under the Formula One bridge since, but the capacity for the title to be determined by an oil leak or a rash manoeuvre remains. It is what makes Sunday’s finale so fraught with emotion. Surtees, now 74, has manifold business interests, but his history makes him perfectly placed to assess the McLaren Mercedes man’s much-maligned march towards the title.

“There is a degree of jealousy of Lewis which is very close to the surface,” Surtees said. “He invites some of that and comes across as an upstart which, of course, he is. He is an upstart who came in and immediately shook up a superb driver in [Fernando] Alonso. He’s also shaken up the system. There is no doubt that, from the time of karting, he has sat in the best seats, but a lot of the drivers had become a bit too cosy and, perhaps, they really needed to shake themselves up.”

Surtees is one of the few people who knows what it is like to go into the final race of a Formula One season with the title on the line. “It’s not going to be easy for Lewis,” he said. “Massa is going to be very quick, but Lewis can take it a number of ways - he needs to make certain of a good grid position to stay out of trouble, but at the same time he does not need to race Massa.

“He has to forget about the championship and think about the race. Maybe he has allowed championship issues to come into it – often that comes from people around you – because somewhere along the line, something happened in Japan [where Hamilton incurred a drive-through penalty after an aggressive move].

“McLaren will not be the calmest or most relaxing place to be, but Lewis made a mistake. I can understand him having a go, but it wasn’t particularly sensible. The good thing is he showed he learnt from it.”

What Hamilton should not do is listen to the psychobabble and change. “Judge him by what he does when he sits in the car,” Surtees, whose cussed manner did not endear him to all, said of the 23-year-old from Stevenage, Hertfordshire. “The world is made up of different characters and the last thing we need is stereotypes. To be a bit special you need to harness inner competitiveness with brain functions. And Lewis is an extreme competitor, like [Michael] Schumacher, but he is not a stupid person.”

The way things have gone over the past couple of years it is easy to envisage a controversial denouement. It was ever thus. In 1964, a row between Ferrari and the Italian Automobile Federation resulted in the famous cars racing in the blue-and-white livery of the North American Racing Team.

“When Enzo Ferrari was driving down to the coast in his little car he was virtually a normal person, but at Maranello [Ferrari’s base], he was king and you were his subjects,” Surtees said. “He played games, you were puppets on a string, and that was often to his own detriment. I didn’t care what colour the cars were, I just wished they’d made them better instead of waiting until after Le Mans to focus on Formula One. We won the title with one hand tied behind our back.”

Hamilton no doubt feels the same. He is 305km from freeing himself.