Debate: can Lewis be as good as Michael Schumacher? | Simon Barnes on Hamilton's risk | 2008 race-by-race | Hamilton's win in his own words | Graphic: the most thrilling championship finish ever?

Lewis Hamilton and McLaren Mercedes left it very late. So late, in fact, that some television networks thought he had lost the Formula One World Championship and the father of Felipe Massa, his Ferrari rival, thought his son had won.

With two corners and only the pit-straight left on the 71st and last lap of a thrilling Brazilian Grand Prix, Hamilton was going down as one of the biggest chokers in world sport. But in the closing seconds of the 1½-hour race and the eighteenth and final contest of a rollercoaster season, the 23-year-old Briton stole past Timo Glock, the German Toyota driver, to make himself the youngest champion in Formula One history.

Watching it was agony, not just for Hamilton’s fans but for Massa, too. He must have thought during those closing three laps, after Hamilton had been overtaken by Sebastian Vettel in a Toro Rosso, dropping the Briton to sixth place, that his dreams of becoming his country’s first world champion since Ayrton Senna in 1991 had come true. He had won his home grand prix and beaten Hamilton on countback.

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Then behind him in the deepening gloom came Hamilton’s last-gasp pass on Glock and what was possibly Massa’s best chance of Formula One glory slipped through his fingers. In the Ferrari garage, the premature celebrations among his family stopped as abruptly as they had begun.

In real time, it looked as if Hamilton had blown it and millions of his fans back home in Britain were staring dumbfounded at their television screens, wondering how their man could have lost out yet again. With four laps to go as the rain came down and having come in for wet tyres like all the other leaders except Glock, Hamilton was running in fifth place and everything was looking good. Behind him, Vettel was close, but not too close and the situation looked containable to the finish.

What no one could have known outside the secure communications network that links Hamilton’s car to the McLaren pitwall and links the pitwall, in turn, to the team’s strategists at their headquarters in Woking, Surrey, was that Hamilton was not throwing the title away when he allowed Vettel to go past him on lap 69, but was executing what will go down as the biggest gamble in McLaren’s history.

It is no exaggeration to say that a team who are infamous for overcomplicating their race operations and for sticking rigidly to pre-race planning whatever the circumstances, came within 1,000 metres of racetrack of choosing defeat over victory.

All day the watchword on the pitwall had been to play a cautious game and do no more than was absolutely necessary to secure the championship. Watching Vettel close on Hamilton, the team strategists and managers — Ron Dennis, the team principal, among them — decided that the German was presenting too much of a risk. They were worried that he might make a lunge at Hamilton and take them both off, or leave the man who became the sport’s most successful rookie last season in a crippled car in sight of the finish.

The McLaren data showed that if Hamilton let Vettel through, even as late as the third lap from the end, there was enough time left to catch Glock, who, alone among the leaders, had not pitted for wet tyres and was struggling as the rain fell on the outlying areas of the circuit.

Vettel duly went by Hamilton and then passed Glock, leaving the Briton in mortal danger of finishing as World Championship runner-up for the second season in a row. But Hamilton kept his nerve as he stole round the final few corners until he was able to move into position to make the pass, which came between Turns 12 and 13, when Massa had already finished.

McLaren’s gamble had paid off and the celebrations could start, led by Hamilton, who almost climbed out of his cockpit to thrust his right hand into the air to salute a crowd that had greeted him with boos and catcalls when he arrived on the grid.

Glock, who eventually finished sixth, revealed that there was nothing he could do to defend his position. “I was on dry tyres at the end of the race when it was raining quite badly and it was just impossible on the last lap,” he said. “I was fighting as hard as I could, but it was so difficult to just keep the car on the track.” His words were supported by the deteriorating performance of Jarno Trulli, his Toyota team-mate, whose final lap time was practically the same as the German’s.

Were McLaren correct in their analysis? Was it a reckless and needless intervention? If it had failed and Hamilton had lost the title, the team would have been flayed alive. But that is all water under the bridge and, one way or another, they and Hamilton did the job they came to do. They had managed to beat Massa in the championship race by one point in front of his home crowd and on a day when the weather made tactics, strategy and driving extremely difficult.

The drama in the closing stages apart, Hamilton did all that was asked of him after starting from fourth on the grid in a race that was delayed for ten minutes by a sudden downpour six minutes before the scheduled start.

While Massa got away well from pole, Hamilton was a little slower off the grid, but the feared snarl-up at the first corner did not materialise. Behind him Fernando Alonso, who started sixth in a Renault, was overtaken by Vettel and Hamilton was safe from attack from his arch rival. The first three corners, the famous “Senna S”, resulted in David Coulthard, in a Red Bull, bringing his 15-year career in Formula One to a safe but sudden end as he was hit from behind by Nico Rosberg, in a Williams.

If the climax to the race was agony for Hamilton’s fans, the early stages were never easy, either, as the McLaren driver kept station through early pitstops for dry tyres and took his chances with everyone else as the track dried unevenly. He had several “big moments” coming into Turn 1, but managed keep his car on the tarmac and his dreams alive.