Why Lewis Hamilton's gift also curses him to be sport's most under-appreciated champion

How good is Lewis Hamilton? I don’t really know, and to be honest you probably don’t either. Not unless you’ve sat in that cockpit and squeezed the throttle and felt that immense, godly power rising out the floor, rattling your insides, fondling your sphincter. Not unless you’ve taken Eau Rouge at full whack and felt the G-forces ripping you to shreds. Not unless you’ve taken fractionally the wrong line into a corner and felt the sickening thud, the dreadful crunch of metal, the terrifying feeling of spinning, and spinning, and spinning, and not really knowing whether these blurry, swivelling vistas will be your last glimpses of Earth.

To become Formula One world champion, as Lewis Hamilton has just done for the fourth time, you need to conquer 20 circuits and 19 other drivers over eight months. But most importantly of all, you need to conquer your own survival instinct, which would probably much rather you had a nice lie down on the sofa in front of Bake Off. The judgement to know when to push and when to sit; the genius to spot the line that nobody else is taking; the red-blooded nerve to brake just a millisecond later than the guy behind you; the intuition and sophistication to understand what your car is telling you, as plainly as if it were speaking into your ear.

The bare facts of Hamilton’s triumph are impressive enough. Having trailed Sebastian Vettel by 25 points after his qualifying nightmare in Monaco, he has wrapped up the title with two races to spare after a breathtakingly dominant autumn. You could put it down to his new vegan diet, a revived relationship with Toto Wolff at Mercedes, or the exemplary engine and tyre management that has seen him go 23 races without a retirement.

But the truth of it, one suspects, is slightly more commonplace. Hamilton is simply the most talented driver in the sport at the moment. At times during this season, some have been tempted to offer even higher praise. Wolff believes he may be the greatest ever one day. Felipe Massa believes he is already on a par with Schumacher and Senna. Add to that the fact that Hamilton has become only the fourth driver in history to record three grand slams in a single season, after Alberto Ascari, Nigel Mansell and Jim Clark. Schumacher never did it. Nor did Fangio or Senna.

Clark actually did it twice, in 1963 and 1965. Comparing greats from different eras makes even less sense in Formula One than in other sports, but Jackie Stewart still rates Clark ahead of Hamilton as the greatest British driver of all time, as does Murray Walker, and that’s good enough for me. And perhaps the highest praise you could pay Hamilton is that some of the effortless, intuitive mastery he has exhibited at points during the season has reminded some older observers of Clark at his best, even if outside the car they could scarcely be more different.

Yet even as he cruises into Formula One immortality, Hamilton’s triumph will make relatively few waves outside the sport. He remains a faint second to strong favourite Anthony Joshua in the bookmakers’ odds for this year’s BBC Sports Personality. And this is a phenomenon that goes beyond the gradual recession of Formula One from the mainstream consciousness, beyond decreasing terrestrial television coverage and global audiences, beyond even the dispiriting annual deluge of new rules and specifications that have made the sport harder and harder for the casual fan to follow.

In reality, the shift has been cultural as much as anything else: a culture not merely of decreasing attention spans, but of a generation significantly less in tune with the automotive world than its predecessors. A report by the RAC last year found that Britons were making fewer car journeys than at any point since records began. The number of teenagers learning to drive has fallen by 30 per cent in a decade. In an age of driverless cars and Uber, it is possible to glimpse a future where the very concept of driving is alien to large swathes of the population.

It’s hard to empathise with Hamilton’s insuperable ability to harness a motor car if you have never actually driven a motor car yourself. And this, arguably, is Hamilton’s gift and his curse. His gift - the preternatural skill of extracting the very maximum potential from a vehicle - is at its absolute peak. But his curse is to have come to prominence at a time when that skill is less well understood - and less appreciated - than at any point in recent history.