Dennis impressed by Hamilton's maturity

McLaren boss Ron Dennis hailed Lewis Hamilton’s Japanese Grand Prix victory at a rain-lashed Fuji Speedway but refused to rule Fernando Alonso out of the championship picture.

Hamilton produced a drive beyond his years to claim 10 crucial championship points in atrocious conditions and put himself firmly in the driving seat to claim the Formula One world driver’s title after defending champion Fernando Alonso crashed out on lap 42.

It means the 22-year-old holds a 12-point advantage over the Spaniard going into the final two rounds of the season, and he can become the first rookie to win motorsport’s ultimate accolade at Shanghai next weekend.

The first 19 laps were completed behind the safety car due to persistent heavy rain making the track a dangerous prospect to race and came out again after Alonso’s crash.

With visibility poor and drivers struggling to stay on the track, Dennis was full of praise as to how his young driver maintained his composure to secure his fourth win of the season as he fought back from sixth place at one point after Robert Kubica drove into the side of him and the pair spun on lap 34.

Nevertheless, the 60-year-old still feels team-mate Alonso has an outside chance of taking the driver’s crown.

“Lewis did an excellent job,” Dennis said.

“Obviously there were a lot of incidents in the race but overall, of course he did a great job.

“His racing performance has shown that he’s very, very mature and very disciplined. I don’t think anyone can question his ability.

“It was a tremendous result for him but it’s not over for Fernando and we will continue to give both drivers every opportunity to win the world championship.

“Obviously Lewis is in a strong position but it’s certainly not over for Fernando.

“The challenge for a driver in these conditions, especially leading the race, is to not drive too quickly and the challenge for the team is to not go over the top on slowing him down,” Dennis added.

“So the message was not to take risks and keeping him informed of where the puddles were, where the heaviest part of the water was.

“We were encouraging him to back off at Turn Four and Turn Ten where we could see was the most standing water and of course we had to look after the tyres, it was a long stint to do on the ’Monsoon’ tyres.

“We had to be very careful with information overload, there was so much.

“The visibility was so bad, he couldn’t rely on his pit signals, so we were feeding him the data and it was difficult to know how much to give him.

Dennis was also relieved the incident with Kubica did not mean a premature end to Hamilton’s afternoon.

“Kubica sort of made life very interesting,” he added.

“It was a bit of a strange thing to do in such poor conditions, very lucky not damage the car badly.

“There was some vibration coming from the car which we were monitoring but we could see it wasn’t suspension so we anticipated some bodywork damage.

“But Lewis was very disciplined and it was a tremendous race.”