Lewis Hamilton's Biggest Challenge Is Yet to Come After 2015 Formula 1 Title Win
After recovering from 14th on the grid to finish fifth in the Brazilian Grand Prix, clinching the 2009 Formula One title, Jenson Button would have been forgiven for partying long and hard into the night.
Without a race victory in four months, the British driver had been under the most intense pressure as Rubens Barrichello, his Brawn GP team-mate, and Sebastian Vettel both threatened to steal a title that appeared to have had Button's name on it since his relentless winning streak at the start of that season.
Yet having produced a champion's drive at the time he needed it most—moving out of reach of his main rivals in the standings and becoming the second successive British title winner after Lewis Hamilton's success the previous year—Button was now free to unwind and release all of that simmering, pent-up emotion.
.jpg?w=256 "Colts Jaguars Football")
Rather than drinking until the Sao Paulo sun came up, however, the man once dismissed as little more than a "lazy playboy" by Flavio Briatore, per Crash.net, proved his former team principal's assessment was only half-right.
Explaining why he retreated to his hotel room after spending just 45 minutes at his own celebration party, Button told the Guardian's Mikey Stafford:
"I wanted a bit of alone time. I think most drivers, when they have the possibility of winning the World Championship, they go crazy.
But we all celebrate it in different ways and for me to just chill on my own was the best thing. I obviously wanted to go out and congratulate the whole team, which I did, and then I got home, relaxed and just took everything in. It was perfect. It was just time by myself, relaxing and thinking about what I had achieved. That was the best place for me.
"
Button, of course, had always exuded the aura of someone content with just the one world title, but the restrained, almost unbefitting way he marked the greatest day of his professional life offered a reminder of the crisis facing champions in top-level sport.
When an athlete wins a major honour or realises a lifelong ambition, it is not uncommon for any feelings of satisfaction, fulfillment and joy to be eclipsed by a strange sense of emptiness, their minds preoccupied by not what they have achieved but what is to come.
Having climbed to the summit of the mountain and secured the one accolade their entire lives had been devoted toward, just where are these people meant to find the inspiration and motivation to continue the search for more?
It was a question worth pondering as Hamilton celebrated his third world championship, his second in succession, after taking his 10th victory of the 2015 season at last weekend's United States Grand Prix.
As he charged around the pit-and-paddock area of the Circuit of the Americas with a British flag sitting on his shoulders and the winners' trophy tucked under his arm, scaling the pit-wall fence and leaping into the arms of his race engineer, Hamilton was indulging in the kind of celebrations you would expect of a newly crowned champion.
Yet behind the high-energy craziness, as his former McLaren team-mate might put it, was the inescapable fact that Hamilton had achieved all he had ever wanted to achieve. At the age of 30.
Almost since his arrival in the sport as a 22-year-old in 2007, Hamilton had made no secret of his desire to match the title tally of his boyhood inspiration, Ayrton Senna, telling the Mail on Sunday's Jonathan McEvoy, for instance, how the Brazilian was his "only landmark."
And after matching Senna's race-victory total of 41 in September's Japanese GP, before edging clear with wins in Russia and the United States, Hamilton's third title, in statistical terms, has placed him truly alongside his idol.
While he, not for the first time in recent weeks, spoke of his intention to carry "the baton" for Senna, Hamilton—on his day of celebration—admitted the sheer magnitude of his success has left him with no direction, and no clear goal in mind, for the remainder of his career.
"For me the target was always to get the three Ayrton had," Hamilton told BBC Sport's Andrew Benson. "I don't know what's coming next. There is no-one else I want to equal or emulate."
His comments have attached greater significance to the final three rounds of the 2015 campaign, starting with this weekend's Mexican GP at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez.
Having sealed each of his previous two championships, in 2008 and 2014, in last-race title deciders, Hamilton now finds himself in the unfamiliar position of being able to race for fun in the closing weeks of season, with no real pressure to rack up the pole positions and victories, and it will be fascinating to observe whether this will impact his performances.
With the job already done and title No. 3 in the bag, will he—subconsciously or otherwise—revert to something of a comfort zone, allow himself to be distracted, make mistakes and depart for his off-season holidays a month in advance?
Or—as the debate regarding his place among F1's all-time greats continues—will he, much like last year, gain even more confidence from his success and advance to an even higher level, increasing his focus and taking the opportunity to reinforce his superiority even when he doesn't necessarily need to?
The championship fight, if one ever existed in 2015, may be over, but Hamilton's biggest battle of the season is yet to come. Not with Vettel, you understand, or with Nico Rosberg, his Mercedes team-mate—but with himself.
This is the beginning of the rest of his career.
.jpg?w=480 "Colts Jaguars Football")
