Lewis Hamilton's candid admission yesterday that he doubted whether he would come out of Sunday's Australian grand prix with a single point highlights just how difficult it is for a driver to win the title in consecutive years.
Not that Hamilton is in any way conceding the championship before the first race of the season. With 17 races on the schedule, there may well be time for McLaren to resolve their aerodynamic problems but at the moment it is difficult to see the 24-year-old emulating the achievements of Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna and Mika Hakkinen in winning back-to-back crowns for the team. The trio are among only eight drivers who have achieved the feat, sitting alongside Juan Manuel Fangio, Alberto Ascari, Jack Brabham and, in more recent years, Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso.
Fangio won four of his five world championships consecutively between 1954 and 1957 through the expedient of continually changing teams signing one-year contracts along the way. It was a luxury not available to today's drivers who have usually to submit to multi-year deals. Nonetheless they have found other ways of channelling a ruthless streak, with the likes of Schumacher, Alonso andHakkinen achieving their second successive championship titles by effectively subjugating their team-mates into supporting roles.
Just as Heikki Kovalainen believes that Hamilton has successfully harnessed much of the McLaren firepower to his own good effect, so David Coulthard felt the same about Hakkinen when he was team-mate to the Finnish driver in 1998 and 1999. Gaining that inside track, that extra advantage, can be achieved by many means, not all of them intentional.
Practising for the 1995 Australian grand prix at Adelaide, Hakkinen crashed heavily after a tyre failure and had to undergo an emergency tracheotomy at the trackside. For a few anxious days it seemed as though his life might be in danger.
Ron Dennis, an honourable man, felt deeply responsible. The relationship between him and Hakkinen was strengthened but Coulthard admitted that he found it something of an emotional road block. "I can obviously see why people might think I took second best position to Mika," said Coulthard, "but there was a personal dimension, getting round Ron's relationship with him. It wasn't always easy to deal with when I would see the pit wall erupting with enthusiasm when Mika would take pole position from me, not from Michael. And then I had to hype myself up to go out again and try to beat him, even though I was sometimes thinking 'do they want me to beat him?'"
Not that Hakkinen found it easy to string together a second championship in 1999 after winning for the first time in 1998 even though his arch-rival Schumacher missed several races after breaking a leg in the British grand prix. "The pressure was high in '99 as I had to defend my title and keep the momentum," said Hakkinen. "I had some incredible incidents. I'll never forget what happened at Hockenheim when I lost rear tyre pressure and lost control at 300kph."
For Jo Ramirez, team co-ordinator of McLaren from 1984 until 2001, that second title was a nerve-racking experience. "Mika made mistakes in his second championship – in Monza he put the car in third instead of first and spun," he said. "But in the last race in Japan he was fantastic." Ramirez remembers too, how even Prost needed luck to achieve back-to-back titles. The Frenchman won four world titles during his career, three for McLaren and one for Williams. Having lost out on the '84 title by the wafer-thin margin of half a point to his McLaren team-mate, Niki Lauda, he then went on to thrash Lauda in 1985 and did much the same to Keke Rosberg who succeeded Lauda as the French driver's team-mate in 1986.
"In 1986 Prost felt confident he could do it again but the car was not quite as good as the Williams, so he was suffering," Ramirez added. "He showed how strong he was in the last race but he was a bit lucky. [Nigel] Mansell had the big blow out, so Prost won the title. In six years Alain had brought his wife along only twice and that was one of those times. I remember taking Anne-Marie to the back of the podium and the pair could not speak because of the tears."
Pat Symonds, the executive director of engineering at the Renault formula one team, worked with Schumacher when he won consecutive world championships with Benetton in 1994-95 and with Alonso in 2005-06. "With Schumacher at Benetton 1995 was easier than 1994," he said. "There were few seasons more difficult than 1994, in fact. In 2005 and 2006 with Fernando Alonso, it was more difficult in 2006 when compared to the previous year. That was nothing to do with psychology; it was sheer relative competitiveness. To me it's bloody difficult the first time and bloody difficult the second time."
Symonds added: "But once a driver has won the championship, the mind- set changes. They are then a winner and that confidence helps them to succeed again and again and again. That is true of all sportsmen. So, it was the same for both Michael and Fernando; they were no different."
