Just as Shakespeare once wrote that there are seven ages of man, so Gary Neville once said that there are five stages of life as a British sports star. This being Lewis Hamilton, he has raced through the first two at 200mph. Yesterday, in a performance of quite stunning nerve, he entered the third.

We will call it maturity and, as Hamilton made unbelievably light of conditions so wretched that the drivers could hear but not see their rivals (a bit of a challenge heading through Becketts at 180mph), he had never looked less like a prodigious youngster and more like a man capable of fulfilling his talent.

The first stage is being the bright young thing, the new kid on the block, and Hamilton played it so well that the second, when everyone starts wondering if you really are as good as they had proclaimed, had hit him with a vengeance.

He came into his second British Grand Prix with questions about whether he was putting more effort into living like a racing driver than actually being one. He could not argue that performance was everything because zero points in his previous two races, including an embarrassing shunt in Canada and subsequent penalty, followed by “terrible” qualifying at Silverstone (his description) had given him a vulnerable, defensive air.

Hamilton admitted that the tension had been mounting and that he needed a performance. To pull off such an assured victory under that pressure, in front of 90,000 home supporters, in conditions so treacherous that there were more pirouettes than an afternoon of ice dancing - only Jarno Trulli stayed on the track throughout - was so impressive that perhaps only a World Championship-clinching drive could top this masterpiece of control and concentration through the wet and the wild.

It was such a stunningly composed win that, having established a commanding lead, his McLaren team had to tell him to slow down rather than keep pushing. Hamilton was finding it so easy it was “silly”, he said, and he was worried that easing up might make him complacent.

All of this in conditions that turned the fields around Silverstone into Glastonbury. Hamilton talked of having to lift his visor up and down between corners once a lap so that he could see beyond his nose cone. Adrian Sutil's Force India car aquaplaned so deep into the grass that it disturbed a startled hare and there were so many spins that it was a miracle that half the cars did not end up as scrap.

Hamilton, aside from one brief excursion over a stretch of grass, was loving it. He had only one concern. “Imagine if you were a minute up and came off,” he said. “There'd be no coming back from that. You'd have to retire.”

It was a question of attitude. While rivals' shoulders slumped in the conditions - Felipe Massa drove so badly it was as though he had never seen rain - Hamilton relished the opportunity. He talked about “the top drivers coming to the top” in the wet and he knew that the downpour had given him his best chance.

The fans knew it, too, so never had the great British public been more pleased to have been caught in the great British downpour. Whatever the benefits of moving to Donington Park, Bernie Ecclestone would be advised to transport yesterday's dark clouds both to boost domestic hopes and create maximum excitement.

It was a famous victory; one that ushered Hamilton into the third age of Neville's cycle, when everyone settles down to see how good you truly are. It is the one that Wayne Rooney inhabits, perhaps Andy Murray, too. For all too many British sportsmen, the fourth stage is when you are revealed to be good rather than great, and then comes the fifth, the end, when the fans and media decide that having picked holes throughout your career, they actually miss you after all.

At a time when there had been questions about whether Hamilton was more interested in hanging around with celebrities, this was a good time for him to be back on top.

“Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” is how Shakespeare (not Neville) declared we will all end up one day. Many left Silverstone certain that, long before then, Hamilton will be world champion.

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