Lewis Hamilton

Every champion worth his salt has had to climb off the canvas. Lewis Hamilton finished the Bahrain Grand Prix much like a boxer on all fours searching for his gumshield. The blows were entirely self-inflicted, and served to make the work of posting an ominous one-two straightforward for Felipe Massa-led Ferrari.

Hamilton, who finished the race in 13th position, described the afternoon as “disastrous”, the worst of his short grand prix career. The adage about how one responds to adversity demands of Hamilton an immediate answer in Spain.

It is far too early to start re-writing the Hamilton fairytale. Given the standards set, he needs no one to tell him that over the past two grands prix those standards have not been met.

In Malaysia his offence during qualifying cost him five places on the grid. On Sunday, a button pressed at the wrong time during the starting sequence flipped Hamilton’s car into anti-stall instead of launch mode. While he laboured off the line his rivals bolted. As he strived to recover lost ground he clipped the back of Fernando Alonso through turn four.

A lap later, as he tried to jump Alonso on the straight out of turn three, the bridge of the front wing came away and his McLaren ploughed into the Renault’s rear.

This was just the kind of error we expected to see in Hamilton’s rookie year. Twelve months after his historic, record-breaking debut, he suddenly appears mortal. Though he came in for a new nose he spent the rest of the race two seconds a lap off the pace of the front-runners with no hope of a top-eight finish.

A lead over world champion Kimi Raikkonen that stood at nine points after Hamilton’s opening victory in Australia is now a deficit of five and he has slipped to third in the championship.

“It was a very poor performance. I let the team down today,” Hamilton said. “It went bad from the beginning. As a professional, you start off bad and you need to pick up the pieces and deliver points. I didn’t do any of that for the team.

“I had the collision with Fernando which cost the whole race. I'm always the first to blame it on myself. That's the right way to go.”

Hamilton left the circuit almost immediately, chastened by the experience and pledging to come back stronger for it. “Confidence is still there. It was inevitable that [something] was going to happen because I’ve such a good run in F1. This is all part of it. There’s still a long way to go, don’t count me out yet. It’s not a huge concern for me, to be honest. We have the pace and I know in the ext race we’ll be quite a bit quicker than we’ve been here.”