Hamilton struggles to be popular | 2008 race-by-race | Hamilton in his own words | Graphic: the thrilling finish | Do you believe in the conspiracy theories? |

As Lewis Hamilton and his McLaren team celebrated the success of an extraordinary tactical gamble to win the F1 World Championship, one of motorsport's most famous figures claimed that – far from a stroke of genius – the 23-year-old driver had triumphed through "luck" alone.

Eddie Jordan, founder and former boss of F1 constructors' team Jordan, said Hamilton's success had been a "miracle," adding that the Hertfordshire-born driver had placed himself in a hopeless position with a misjudged, defensive performance, before pulling it out of the fire at the death.

The Irishman claimed that only Timo Glock’s slow last-lap had got Hamilton out of trouble as the Brit – aided by wet-weather tyres – surged past in the nick of time into the fifth place he needed to sneak the title.

“I don’t think he went into the race in the best frame of mind. He was very defensive,” Jordan said today. “Going into the last lap, I was thinking ’This is a disaster’. He didn’t really give himself the best chance of winning the championship - and was very lucky.”

While stressing that Hamilton is potentially a world-beating talent, Jordan added that his Sao Paulo victory once again displayed his one worrying weakness.

“Lewis is a great street-fighter on the track. But when he becomes defensive and does not get pole position, I am concerned that his guile is always a lap or two too late,” he said. “His team should have seen that (Giancarlo) Fisichella was almost doing the same time - and that was the moment to change (tyres). He put himself in a massively precarious position. It is a miracle he won the championship.”

Hamilton and his McLaren Mercedes team left it so late yesterday that some television and radio commentators thought he had lost the title to Felipe Massa, his Ferrari rival, who won the race and lost the World Championship by just one point.

With only two corners and only the pit-straight left on the 71st and last lap, he stole past Glock, causing wild celebrations within the Brit's camp and devastation for the home supporters, many of whom were throwing their hats in the air in celebration.

The Hamilton team's incredible tactical gamble took place with only three laps to go, when he allowed himself to be overtaken by Sebastian Vettel in a Toro Rosso, dropping the Briton to sixth place. 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.

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.

The team's 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.