'The kid is as cool as a cucumber'

After that performance in Montreal, it's now a case of 'the king is dead, long live the king!' Lewis Hamilton has taken all the press away from Michael Schumacher and nobody cares about him anymore. He's gone. He's old news. There's a new kid on the block now who's ready to take the sport by the scruff of the neck and raise it to new levels.

Lewis is an amazing character and seems to have it all together. Perhaps he was a little lucky with qualifying because Alonso was going to beat his time until he had a problem into the last corner but he's been up there consistently and when you're up there that often, you're going to win.

There were a lot of awkward circumstances that put him under extra pressure and gave him the opportunity to screw it up a number of times but he just drove serenely amidst the chaos going on around him. The kid is as cool as a cucumber and has nothing to lose.

Alonso won two world championships, looked like a legend and climbed to the top of the tree. But Lewis has taken a chainsaw to that tree. Alonso was standing at the top of a Giant Redwood and he's come crashing down from a very great height! Now the whole championship has swung hugely towards Lewis. What is more, Lewis doesn't make mistakes. Even if he finishes second in every race, it's going to take five races of Alonso winning just to get back on parity.

It's a great situation but Ron Dennis must be having mixed emotions at the moment. On the one hand, he's paying a guy a fortune to do a shit job and on the other he's paying a guy nothing to do an amazing job. I guess he's come out even in the end! Ron seems to love making his life difficult by employing two super stars, as he did with Senna and Prost, Rosberg and Prost and Montoya and Raikkonen. And now, with Hamilton leading the championship by eight points, if there were to be team orders, it would have to be in his favour! Maybe Lewis should have kept quiet rather than speaking out on the team orders issue because he's the number one now!

As for Ferrari, they really are in a bit of a pickle at the moment. I can never understand how someone can get black flagged for exiting the pits under a red light. You're paid to stay calm and that's a very big mistake. I never once got done for speeding in the pit lane, I never once got done for going through a red light, and I never came in on the wrong lap for my pit stop. I just didn't make any mistakes because I stayed very calm.

That's where Lewis seems to have the edge over the others. He's just calm. Massa, Alonso and Raikkonen have all made mistakes this year and the kid who's just come in seems totally insulated into what he has to do.

But it's too early for Ferrari to panic. Kimi came back stronger and was on top of Massa for most of the weekend so it wasn't too bad for him. But whenever McLaren are bad, they're not that bad and just behind Ferrari. Whenever they're good, they're way ahead.

"It was a massive accident"

Montreal always provides incident-packed racing because it doesn't have fifteen thousand acres of sand traps either side of the track. You saw a lot of mistakes and several cars sliding into the 'champion's wall'. I've never hit that wall so maybe that's the reason I was never champion! I brushed it a few times but I never hit it. Maybe I wasn't pushing hard enough! It's about making the challenge as hard as possible and Formula 1 has done everything it can to make the challenges as easy as possible. If you f**k up now, you usually just drive across a sand trap and go back on. When you make a mistake, you should be hitting a wall. Having said that, I'm delighted Kubica got away with only a broken leg. It was a massive accident and it's testimony to the strength of the cars today. But Montreal is an unforgiving circuit and I think they should all be like that and demanding of respect. It says on the ticket 'motor racing is dangerous' but at many circuits I think you could take that warning off.

Next up it's Indianapolis and, although Alonso makes a big deal out of saying it's his least favourite circuit, I'd have to say it's probably everybody's least favourite circuit! It's not a circuit at all, to be honest. It's atrocious and should never be on the Formula 1 calendar. The top two percent of people in America that follow Formula 1 will not go to Indianapolis because it's a totally unacceptable venue. The organisers should just stop chasing the dollar and take F1 to a proper venue in America.

McLaren will definitely hold the upper hand there. Even if Alonso wins, Lewis will be a happy bunny coming second. It's advantage Lewis Hamilton!

Eddie Irvine.

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11th June 2007