But his current predicament has echoes of fellow Brit Nigel Mansell 21 years ago.

That was the last time the F1 championship went down to a three-car chase for the title, Mansell leading Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet going into the final round in Adelaide.

And pictures of the rear tyre of Mansell's Williams exploding on the straight as he led the race are still vivid in the memory.

It couldn't happen to Hamilton, could it?

Sadly, it could because this is motor racing and nothing is guaranteed.

Who, for instance, would have imagined that a team as experienced as McLaren would have left Hamilton out on a drying Shanghai track so long that the tread would strip off one of his Bridgestones?

Or you could have envisaged that a driver who has steered his way through his F1 rookie season with barely an error would have dumped his silver machine in the gravel as he belatedly headed for the pitlane?

Or, indeed, that a double World champion like Alonso would have spun into the wall a week earlier during the Fuji monsoon?

But this has been no ordinary F1 season. Instead it has been a season of intrigue on and off the track, a season in which Britain has thrown up the ultimate golden boy - a young coloured boy from a modest background who, in just nine months, has single-handedly revived Formula One racing.

The fact that he has been caught up in an inter-team spying scandal; that his illustrious team-mate has thrown his toys out of the pram; that his boss has been reduced to tears and that Hamilton had the title in his hands and blew it, is the stuff of grand prix fiction.

Expect it all to be captured on film coming to a cinema near you next year.

Hamilton, who a year ago was racing alongside Ulsterman Adam Carroll in the F1 feeder series GP2, has astonished everyone including the man who gave him the chance to step up to grand prix level.

McLaren chief Dennis, who is famously said to have given budding kart racer Lewis his telephone number when he was 11-years-old, admits he agonised over the decision of whether to put Hamilton into his No.2 car alongside Alonso at the start of the season.

His initial inclination was to promote test driver Pedro de la Rosa to replace the departed Kimi Raikkonen and give Hamilton a year acclimatise to an F1 car with the test team.

In the end he chose Hamilton but could never have predicted the impact the 22-year-old would have or that it would lead to a total breakdown in his relationship with the two-time World champion he has signed at a reputed cost of £15m a year.

But now it has all come down to one race on the bumpy, undulating, anti-clockwise circuit in the Interlagos suburbs of the teaming Brazilian city of Sao Paulo next weekend.

It is a track where Alonso has never won before but where Ferrari scored so many victories in the past, thanks to Michael Schumacher, Alain Prost, Carlos Reutemann and, yes, Nigel Mansell.

They also have an ace card in Felipe Massa, the local hero who won there last year. His role will be to ride shotgun for Raikkonen and, they hope, provide a buffer between his team leader and the McLarens

Hamilton? He has never been to Interlagos before.

He'll have seen many races there on TV and will have driven it over and over again on his Playstation but the Autódromo José Carlos Pace, named after John Watson's former Brabham team-mate, is a difficult place.

And by running in the 'wrong' direction, it puts additional strain on neck muscles used to the G-forces of turning right rather than left.

But Hamilton remains confident he will be champion next Sunday night and few would doubt he has the strength of character to bounce back from his Chinese disaster.

But he should be warned - history is not on his side.

Aside from Mansell's blow-up in 1986, records since the creation of F1 in 1950 show that the title has been decided in the final race on eight occasions and in just three of them has the driver leading the championship become champion.

In four of those showdowns, the glory has ultimately gone to the man who had been in second place.

Hamilton has specialised in bucking the trend this year - it seems he may have to do it one more time.