A year ago he was a rookie who smiled for the cameras, gave appropriately self-deprecating answers to the obvious inquiries and was thought to be remarkable chiefly for the colour of his skin. Now, for a large proportion of formula one's worldwide following, the new season is all about one question: can Lewis Hamilton go one better than he managed last October, when he blew the chance of becoming the first man to win the world championship in his first year in grand prix racing?
The speed of Kimi Raikkonen's Ferrari in recent tests suggests that the Finn will be feeling confident about repeating last season's outcome, when he dashed the champagne from the young Englishman's lips. Nor will it be known until after the opening race in Melbourne whether the McLaren-Mercedes team has made a sufficient recovery from last year's spying scandal and other distractions to provide Hamilton with a car capable of mounting another serious challenge.
"If I can get decent odds, I'll take a bet on him," says Sir Stirling Moss, one of Hamilton's most ardent and vocal admirers, whose enthusiasm first made itself apparent in the paddock at Albert Park a year ago, a few minutes after the young man had finished third on his formula one debut. "He's the best thing I've seen in formula one since I came into it in the early Fifties," the great man said then.
Has anything subsequently occurred to make him doubt his instinctive judgement? "No. He's a racer," Moss says - which, coming from a man who battled against Ascari, Fangio, Brabham and Clark, can be taken as the ultimate endorsement. "He's still forming himself, but he's certainly got it. A few years ago the drivers were getting a bit big-headed - they seemed to have to tell everyone how good they were just to give themselves confidence. That seems to be changing, and Lewis is a very good role model. What he's done so far amazes me."
There may be another link with Moss. If Hamilton were to secure the title at the second time of asking sometime between the season-opening race in Melbourne and the finale seven months later in Brazil it would be the ideal way of celebrating the 50th anniversary of the triumph of Mike Hawthorn, who pipped Moss by a single point in 1958 to become the first of Britain's eight world champions.
On that slender margin hangs a story illuminating the difference half a century can make to the behaviour of people in sport. It may even be of interest to Hamilton, whose season was disrupted when he and Fernando Alonso indulged in a dispute over which of the team-mates deserved preferential treatment. Harsh words and blocking tactics probably cost both drivers the chance to prevent Raikkonen from snatching the title.
There are few obvious similarities between Hamilton and Hawthorn. A tall, dashing and debonair, blond-haired figure whose customary racing uniform featured a cotton windcheater and a bow-tie, Hawthorn died in a road accident, aged 29, only three months after winning the title and announcing his retirement. Controversy, however, was and is no stranger to either of them.
Hamilton was pilloried last year for publicly claiming that his move to Switzerland had been inspired by a desire for a life free from paparazzi and autograph-hunters (his father eventually admitted that it had been to avoid UK taxes, as everyone else had always suspected). And Hawthorn found himself at the centre of a storm in 1954 when he managed to avoid being called up for the national service required of all able-bodied young men between the ages of 17 and 26. His success in evading the obligation provoked questions in Parliament and an editorial in the Daily Mirror carrying the headline: "Catch this dodger!"
Of the quartet of top-line British drivers active in grand prix racing four years later, Hawthorn would not have been the purists' favourite to win a title monopolised, since the championship began in 1950, by men whose names ended in vowels: Farina and Ascari of Italy and Fangio of Argentina.
Moss was perhaps the greatest all-round driver ever born, his Vanwall team-mate Tony Brooks was a brilliant stylist, and Peter Collins, Hawthorn's friend and partner in the Scuderia Ferrari, would have won the championship two years earlier had he not obeyed a request to hand his car over to Fangio during the final race of the season. But it was the fun-loving, beer-drinking Hawthorn, from Farnham in Surrey, who clinched it in Morocco, in a race which Fleet Street called the "Showdown in the Sun".
But the decisive moment, and one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of the sport, had come two rounds earlier, in Portugal, where Moss won the grand prix and Hawthorn was originally threatened with disqualification from second place for having restarted his car against the direction of the Oporto street circuit after spinning and stalling on the last lap. That night Moss appeared at the stewards' meeting to volunteer his opinion, having seen the incident, that there had been no danger involved. The points retained by Hawthorn were enough, along with two more seconds at Monza and Casablanca, to give him the narrowest of margins over Moss in the final table.
Half a century later, Moss doesn't miss a beat when asked if he regrets the chivalrous gesture that cost him his best chance of a title that was destined to remain forever out of his reach.
"Not in the slightest, old boy. In fact I'm quite pleased. It gave me the reputation of being The Man Who Never Won The Title, rather than being just another of the fellows who won it once." That's the kind of man Lewis Hamilton has for a No1 fan. "It couldn't and wouldn't happen today," Moss adds, "because it's not the type of thing people are used to doing. That was yesterday."
But at least the experience of last season suggests that grand prix racing has managed to retain something of its drama, witnessed by a vast international television audience which was increased last year by the arrival of Hamilton, who even restored the faith of fans disenchanted by the sport's increasing cynicism during the Michael Schumacher years. Now, in the final season before the introduction of green, energy-recycling technology to formula one engines, and with a first-ever floodlit race in Singapore scheduled for late September, it has a chance to build on that renewal of interest, with a rampant Ferrari team intent on retaining the edge they found towards the end of last season and a chastened McLaren desperate to refurbish their image by propelling a driver to the title for the first time since 1999.
Others will be keen to break up the two-team duel and widen the contest, including the BMW-Saubers of Nick Heidfeld and Robert Kubica, whose steady improvement has been quietly impressive, and Renault, with Alonso back in the fold after his unhappy year in the more formal environment at McLaren. The venerable Williams team, slowly emerging from a 10-year trough, and the comparative upstarts at Red Bull look the best of the rest, with the Japanese giants Toyota and Honda still struggling to mate Japanese technology with European formula one expertise. At Honda, Jenson Button now has Ross Brawn, the mastermind of Schumacher's campaigns at Benetton and Ferrari, overseeing the operation, but it would rash to expect signs of progress before the middle of the year.
At the front of the grid, however, there must be a good chance of a rematch of last season's epic battle, its outcome uncertain until the very last lap of the final round, after 3,410 miles of racing. Most of us would settle for another helping of that.
