Lewis Hamilton is clearly the real thing and we may be in for the best F1 season for many a year.

I hereby copyright the nickname, 'The Stevenage Rocket' (note the cunning reference to Stephenson) and will charge ten pounds every time it's used. That will render our TV darlings speechless. James Allen will have to hope that Kimi perks up so he can refer to The Flying Finn because that's what you do when you have very little brain. Hamilton does not need idiotic labels.

Lewis is in a car which allows him to demonstrate his talent and there may be several other drivers on the grid capable of podiums if they were in a McLaren-Mercedes, but they are not. Hamilton is the one and it is not by luck or happenchance, it is down to Ron Dennis.

The mass media in the UK is Hamilton crazy at present, we've hit a trough in almost every other sport. If they make a new version of The Invisible Man, Jenson Button should audition. Lewis is the hot sports story and he is very impressive, both in a car and out. His story is the stuff of dreams, not since Mario Andretti has there been such a good story in motor racing.

Three podium finishes from three starts is history of a sort. It satisfies the tele-faces. I remember that Alain Prost consistently out-ran John Watson, an established driver, during the first half of 1980. That is what I mean by 'history of a sort'. Lewis's three podiums are a statistic, but Alain finished in the top six in his first two races and the McLaren M29 was a dog.

I sincerely hope that Hamilton emulates Prost, but the headline is not real history. What will be real history is if Hamilton beats Alonso at Barcelona. Lewis is riding high, what will be interesting is how he reacts when he makes a big mistake. He will, everybody does. Massa made one in Malaysia and it wrecked his race. He made no mistakes in Bahrain and made Raikkonen look not that special. I rate Felipe very highly, but I am worried about his reaction to his mistake.

My newspaper of choice is The Independent, which is fairly sober. It does not go ga-ga over royalty or 'celebrities'. On the day I write this, its entire front page was devoted to a photograph depicting the drought in Australia which is a very important story, unlike David Beckham's latest visit to his barber.

Recently, the Indy ran a piece on how much Lewis Hamilton could earn from sponsorship endorsements and this disappointed me, I expect better. We have reached the stage where any sporting achievement which makes headlines is accompanied by fevered estimates of how much the person could earn from sponsorship.

I am not sure how you put a value on a person achieving what they set out to achieve or on the respect they gain from their fellow-competitors. Oscar Wilde once described a cynic as a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

It turns out that Lewis is paid a frugal £500,000 a year (Fernando is paid at least twenty times more) and he could sign mega contracts, but Ron Dennis won't let him. The deal with McLaren is that a driver works for the team's partners.

It may have been McLaren which first distinguished between a sponsor and a partner and it is not a matter of semantics, it is an expression of fundamental philosophy. Everything Ron Dennis does is for a reason.