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@Bobbo
To the best of my knowledge, Alonso and Hamilton have both said publicly that they regard each other as their biggest threat. This is a long way from saying that Hamilton is the fastest and that Alonso is the best.
The margins are so fine, and variables so great, in formula one that if you put the top 10 drivers in identical cars with identical set ups they would probably complete 10 laps of a circuit within a half second of each other (if that). If you then went and changed the set up of the cars the spread of times would be the same but the order in which they finished would be different.
Part of being a great driver is being able to work with your mechanics to set up the car for you and the circuit, by the end of last season there were rumours coming out of McLaren that Button could work better with the mechanics than Hamilton, nothing really that special in that, until you consider that the team had been built around Hamilton to the point that Alonso had been kicked out of it after one season because he refused to accept it and had a ma-hooooosive barney with Ron Dennis over it. The fact that there were rumours to that effect coming out of a set-up that is as professional and successful as McLaren means that people were really pissed off, the guy obviously is not a team player, presumably due to his tendency to throw his toys out of his pram and blame other people when things do not go his way, and F1 is a team sport, the days of 1 driver going out and competing with his peers went out the window about fifty years ago. So unless he can sort this shit out he will never be the driver that he believes himself to be or is even capable of.
Lewis Hamilton is a world class sportsman, in order to get to the point where this can be said he needs to think in a certain way; he needs to believe that he has no equals. I have met a number of world class sportsmen over the years, no F1 drivers but many rugby players and athletics stars, and they all shared one thing, a level of self belief that I cannot even begin to describe to you, in other ways they were all very different; some arrogant, some not etc. The simple fact of the matter is that unless you have a truly unshakable belief that you are the best in the world at what you do you will never be the best in the world. As soon as someone starts to doubt this and think that they can be beaten their career is over, end of.
Therefore I stand by my statement that Lewis Hamilton is not as good as he believes he is.