If he is to put right the wrongs of 12 months ago and become the youngest Formula One world champion, Lewis Hamilton will have to drive the race of his young life at Interlagos today. Hamilton might have bargained on the pace of the Ferraris on this sweeping track in the Sao Paulo suburbs and on Felipe Massa, his title rival, taking his third consecutive pole here at his home, but to be relegated to fourth place on the grid alongside Kimi Raikkonen and behind the Toyota of Jarno Trulli, a surprise gate-crasher on the big four, was not part of the plan laid down by his McLaren team.

The calculations for the first two corners now become complicated. Hamilton wanted to ease the pressure on himself by claiming pole and, as he did in Shanghai two weeks ago, controlling the race from the front. He could then steer clear of potential dangers not just from the Ferraris but the Renault of Fernando Alonso, which will be directly behind Hamilton on the third row.

Hamilton must finish in the first five to be sure of his first title but he will be mindful of the trouble he had a year ago, being pushed wide by Alonso and then suffering an electrical problem, which ultimately cost him the title. Hamilton will certainly be winning a world title the hard way, not just in the home city of Massa, his main rival, but at the track that has defined so many of the great Brazilian champions.

This is a duel between the two race-mad nations as well as two supremely talented drivers, between the 12 world titles won by British drivers and the eight of Brazil. Nel-son Piquet is as familiar a figure in the paddock here as Jackie Stewart at Silverstone. And if the city itself is a madhouse and the infrastructure at Interlagos beyond redemption, the view from the back of the pits with the track below and the skyline of Sao Paulo in the distance remains one of sport’s true wonders.

Interlagos is a track that has to be tackled head on, from the narrow pitlane crowded with promenaders to the choking traffic and the street hawkers selling merchandise through car windows. Nicole Scherzinger, lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls and Hamilton’s celebrity girlfriend, must have wondered about the glamour of Formula One as she ate her lunch in surroundings more suited to a backstreet cafe in her home town of Louisville.

There is no respite from the mayhem. Hamilton’s every appearance yesterday was greeted like a pantomime villain by the crowd opposite the McLaren garage. Ferrari, as reigning champions, occupy the quieter end of the pitlane. David Coulthard, who is racing for the final time here, says Interlagos is the one track where you can hear the crowd. Hamilton has to cope with a country, a very particular track and the unusual luxury of being able to lose and win at the same time. Nothing much in his career has prepared him for such a delicate equation.

“We don’t have to win this race,” said Martin Whitmarsh, team manager of McLaren-Mercedes. “But we mustn’t be too driven by that.” Hamilton was quickest for much of the free practice yesterday morning until, horror of horrors, Fernando Alonso appeared from nowhere with the fastest lap of the weekend. The Spaniard was quickest in the second Friday session, too, which says nothing other than he is full of confidence and itching to have a say in the outcome of the title race, particularly if it might deny McLaren, his stated enemy, a constructors’ title in favour of Ferrari, his potential employers in 2010. Conspiracy theories were rife at Interlagos yesterday.

Hamilton, in contrast to the withdrawn, edgy figure of a year ago, has parried the understandable jingoism with grace and wit, accepting the ambush of a local television journalist at the launch of an anti drink-driving campaign on Thursday night - the offer of a black cat, which is bad luck in Brazil, and a Vasco da Gama football shirt, which, apparently, is an even worse curse - with the air of a man who will not be stopped now, not by mere superstition or even by the racist website unleashed on him in Spain.

Publicly, Hamilton has been taking refuge in the cliche that he will treat this as just another race; privately, he knows the truth and is learning not just to accept the challenge but to relish it.

Driving to finish fifth is not in his character or he would not be here in Interlagos, again within touching distance of becoming the youngest world champion in grand prix history. But he is certainly more aware of the fragility of a seven-point lead. At one press conference last week, he said a strange thing. “This would be the biggest achievement of my career,” he said. “But I’ve got plenty of time to do it. It’s not like it’s my last year.” It did not sound right. Hamilton has never used his age as a crutch for failure. To lose another world title might destroy him. It has helped Hamilton’s peace of mind that his rival this time is not the enigmatic Fernando Alonso, but the chirpy, likeable Massa.

The Brazilian, to his credit, has been walking around the narrow pitlane that separates the garages from the team’s cramped quarters with a jaunty step. Though genuine friendship is an impossibility in the confines of Formula One, Hamilton and Massa like each other. You could tell from the easy exchanges at the set-piece press conference before race weekend when the two of them were placed side by side, their every facial twitch greeted with an explosion of clicking shutters. The respect between them had everything to do with a mutual recognition of talent and achievement. They know each other’s psyche intimately but care nothing for how they were formed.

Asked if he saw a fellow traveller in Massa, somebody who faced similar struggles on his career path, Hamilton looked rather bemused. “I don’t know Felipe’s story,” he answered. “Things are cool with him. I respect him. I’ve always been good friends with him and that doesn’t change because of what’s happening on the track.”

Like Ayrton Senna before him, Massa is from the middle class, which in a poverty-stricken city such as Sao Paulo makes him privileged. But the family business, manufacturing buses, run by his father, Luis Antonio, went bankrupt early in Felipe’s youth and money was not always there for Felipe to race where and when he wanted.

The main difference between him and Hamilton, whose father, Anthony, worked for the railways, comes in the speed of their progress up the ladder. Massa had to fight his way through, coming to Europe, like so many young Brazilian drivers with a lot of talent and not much money, while Hamilton had the backing of Ron Dennis and McLaren - the motor racing equivalent of private education - to ease his path through the lower formulas. Both have arrived at the top by merit, though to very different fanfares.

Hamilton’s extraordinary debut season, starting with nine consecutive podium fin-ishes, lifted the standards for every driver in the pitlane and destabilised Alonso so completely the Spaniard became a shadow of a champion. “It’s just humans out there,” said Alex Wurz, the Honda test driver and one of the pitlane’s more intelligent voices. “People ask, ‘Is it jealousy?’ Human beings always tend to be jealous of someone else if they believe that person can do something more easily than they do.”

Hamilton has never gone out of his way to win friends on the track. Midfield drivers will tell you that if Hamilton is overtaking, no quarter will be given. The deal is that he asks no favours in return. When Hamilton’s unpopularity with other drivers came to the fore in China, he simply drove off into the distance. “I laughed it off,” he says. “I didn’t go out there to make a point. I said it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t affect me.”

Revelations of Hamilton’s flaws last year were greeted with triumphal glee - the slide into the pitlane gravel in China, the mistake on the opening lap here in Interlagos - but have become a more pronounced part of the narrative this season. Hamilton paid the price for making a complex sport look embarrassingly straightforward but his schoolboy error in Canada this year, when he shunted Raikkonen at the end of the pitlane, and the emotional jumble of his race more recently in Fuji have laid Hamilton open to the charge that he buckles under the pressure. At McLaren, they are more concerned with reining in Hamilton’s almost superhuman confidence after a victory than his ability to react to the pressure of a defeat.

Who else, for example, would dare to invoke the memory of Senna, let alone in Interlagos, just a few miles from the simple plaque that marks his grave in the Morumbi cemetery?

On a more practical level, Hamilton has drawn enormous strength from his dominance in Shanghai, such a contrast to a year ago and, more strangely, from the strong race he drove from the back of the field here in Interlagos a year ago. Seventh was not good enough to win the world title, but it is locked in the memory bank. “Last year, there was so much emotion going on, I thought it had to be here, do or die. This was the last race. I don’t feel that this year. I’m already enjoying the weekend. The last race in China was the best I’ve driven for a while and if people don’t take notice of that, then they should. It was a great achievement for myself and the team, but mainly on my part, because I did have all the circus going on and I dealt with it. I tried to do my talking on the track and I made things simple. It was easy as pie. Ah, there’s your heading.”

He needs to do his job on the track first.

WHO’S WHO IN TEAM HAMILTON

ANTHONY HAMILTON
Father who oversaw the rise of F1 star and is in the pits for every race. Second wife, Linda, helped to bring up Lewis and also takes care of his brother, Nick, who has cerebral palsy

CARMEN LOCKHART
Mother who broke up with Anthony when Lewis was two and brought him up until he was 10, when he went to live with Anthony and Linda

NICOLE SCHERZINGER
The Pussycat Dolls singer has been seeing him since 2007