Champion's Legacy; Lewis Hamilton opens up about his F1 career and his idol, Ayrton Senna.(NEWS)

Byline: NIGEL ROEBUCK

IN MONACO ON DEC. 12, 2008, LEWIS Hamilton received the Formula One world champion's trophy, and as he examined the inscribed names of previous winners, he skipped over those of legends until he found the one that meant most: Ayrton Senna.

Had heavy rain not fallen at the end of the Brazilian Grand Prix, the trophy would have gone to Felipe Massa, also a Senna disciple in childhood. Instead, Hamilton beat Massa by a point and at age 23 became the sport's youngest champion in only his second season.

"For me, Hamilton said, "Ayrton is the king and always will be. If I could ever get to a point of being anywhere near as good as he was, I'd feel great.

The year before Senna's death at Imola in 1994, Hamilton said, "I'd won the British [karting] championship and got the chance to meet him. I'll never forget that. As a kid, I was drawn to Ayrton because, for one thing, his driving style seemed to be different from anyone else's. And he seemed to be a daredevilwell, not a daredevil, exactly, but he always went out of his way to . . . make sure he was at the front. Compared with all the others, he appeared never to be afraid. He seemed to me to have that little bit of an edge.

"I've always felt like I had a connection with him, that we're somehow similar. I do crazy things that other people wouldn't do, and I feel like I have an edge, too.

Senna always went fast in the opening minutes of practice, and nowhere was that more evident than at Monaco, where the Brazilian won a record six times and where Hamilton won in May. Most drivers take time to get acclimatized to the circuit's unforgiving confines, but Senna would be perhaps two seconds faster than anyone else half an hour in. In 2007, when Hamil-ton drove an F1 car at Monaco for the first time, it was the same situation.