It was the first time I had seen Lewis Hamilton completely stunned. Having been on board the mean-looking, all-black racing yacht Hugo Boss for all of five minutes, Britain's newest Formula One star witnessed a dangerous collision with another boat and was dumbstruck.

Not sure whether what he was looking at was right or wrong, normal or exceptional, this most famous of sailing novices was reduced to a stream of expletives as he first felt the impact, then watched the drama unfold as the £70,000 mast on a yacht named Atomic plunged slowly into the sea just feet away from us. “Oh no!”; “S**t”; “Christ”; “Oh no, look at those guys...” “Oh noooo...” was about the sum of it as Hamilton tried to comprehend something that had happened so soon after he got on board that he had hardly got his bearings.

He looked ahead at where the collision had happened — our boat shuddered right to her core as Hugo Boss's bow tore through Atomic's rigging - then back at the stricken yacht drifting quickly away from us, and you could see Hamilton trying to work it out.

After being up all night, having attended the birthday bash for Nelson Mandela in London, the McLaren Mercedes driver had climbed aboard in high spirits, buzzing with the youthful optimism of a young man who can barely believe what life is bringing him. It was 5.45am on a grey and blustery Saturday morning on the Solent and we were just minutes from our official start for the annual 50-mile Round the Island Race, off the Isle of Wight.

This was Hamilton's first experience on a sailing yacht and he (or his sponsors) had certainly picked some boat on which to get his sea legs. About as far removed from a Mirror dinghy or family sailing cruiser as you can get, the 60ft Hugo Boss could well be described as a Formula One car of the sea, a superfast, highly dangerous machine with a bewildering complexity of rigging and sail controls.

To start with, Hamilton looked wary as he staggered from one side of the boat to the other in his black sailing gear, topped off with a black ski hat and the inevitable McLaren branded jacket. He spent the first few minutes before the crash taking pictures with his mobile, sending texts and muttering about how “funny” it would be if someone fell overboard.

Then came the drama as the big yacht, with Alex Thomson, her solo round-the-world race skipper, at the wheel, approached the busy startline and found itself squeezed in between two smaller boats and with nowhere to go.

After the incident there was no time to discuss it or the £30,000-worth of damage to the front of Hugo Boss. Thomson and his team, who included Ben Ainslie, Britain's double sailing gold medal-winner, simply got their heads down and focused on the start, which they pulled off superbly well.

Hamilton watched it all in silence and quickly began to get the hang of it. This was a serious racing machine, these guys meant business and yacht racing was a highly technical sport. The PR people had told him about the similarities with Formula One and he was beginning to see them for himself.

As we raced up the Solent, leading our class from the start, with Hugo Boss tipped up at a crazily steep angle on one side or the other, Hamilton learnt how to move across the boat, becoming more sure-footed with each tack.

Thomson was an easy skipper to understand. “I don't care what nationality you are, go and sit on the f***ing rail (side of the boat),” was his memorable instruction to one miscreant. McLaren were worried that Hamilton would immediately succumb to sea-sickness, but the Monaco Grand Prix winner was fine and the extra bucket stowed on board for that purpose was not used by him.

Halfway to the Needles - a sort of hairpin in the course - he joined crewman Shaun Biddulph on the “grinder”, which winds in the ropes controlling the sails, and Hamilton was cursing with exhaustion at the end of his first two-minute session.

“I'll have to have a word with McLaren about his fitness,” Biddulph quipped.

Then it was Hamilton's turn on the steering wheel. Now there are two types of novice on a sailing boat. Some people are all over the place and cannot grasp the relationship between the boat and the invisible force of the wind; others pick it up quickly and seem to have an instinctive feel. Hamilton was in the second category. Thomson wanted to win his class in the race, which we did (until we were subsequently disqualified for our part in the crash). But he was happy to let Hamilton drive for a good 25 minutes. Had he been a “numpty”, as they say in sailing, he would have been relieved pretty sharpish.

Admittedly, Hamilton had a world-class sailing master to guide him in Ainslie, who explained the significance of the information on the digital read-outs showing boat speed, wind angle and wind speed and quietly prompted him — “a little to the left (port) Lewis, a little to the right (starboard)” and so on.

Hamilton seemed to jerk the wheel a bit initially but he gradually found a smooth rhythm and was able to hold his course and switch the boat from one side of the wind to the other with some confidence.

“You do feel part of the boat - you do feel what it's doing,” said the man regarded as one of the most instinctive drivers in Formula One. “The boat suits my driving style, quite smooth and responsive. It's a similar feel to driving the car.”

He found the yacht hugely impressive, in general. “This is the first time for me on a sailing boat,” Hamilton said. “Although I have known for a while I was doing this, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. The boat is very, very technical and the cool thing is it's got a lot in common with Formula One — it's fully carbon-fibre and it's very, very complex. I don't know what half of these things do on it. The whole experience has been mind-blowing.”

When David Coulthard drove for McLaren, he used to go down for a day on Thomson's yacht — a previous Hugo Boss — but there was never any wind. Hamilton seems to kick up a storm wherever he goes and there was no shortage of natural horsepower for his nautical debut. Racing down the outside of the Isle of Wight, he and everyone else on board got a taste of the Southern Ocean as Ainslie ripped the boat down big waves at full speed (25mph) while the island shore passed us by in a blur of fog and spray.

Hamilton had another go on the wheel as we came back into the Solent and at the finish sprayed his crew-mates with the obligatory champagne. It had been a cracking day that, the pre-start crash apart, had gone as well as Thomson could have hoped.

“I know it's a bit slower than Formula One but there is so much going on back here,” Hamilton said in the cockpit afterwards. “I've had a go at a few things and it's just phenomenal what's going on. You just have this buzz the whole time — it's really cool.”