It was a phone call from my mother that started it. Coming from a motorsport-mad family, it seemed entirely normal for my mother to ring up to talk about Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren race drive. He’s far too young for a race drive, she said firmly. Better to have him as a test driver for a year, learn how F1 works. These days drivers are pushed into F1 far too soon, there are too many very young drivers.

And this got me thinking. Certainly some drivers have been pushed into F1 far too soon and suffered as a result, à la Christian Klien, who was woefully unprepared for the Jaguar experience. But then again there’s Kimi Raikkonen - and let’s not forget the uproar, the calls for the FIA not to issue a superlicence to this kid with so little racing experience back in 2001. Kimi, of course, went on to make a mockery of the doubters and Ron Dennis must be hoping that Hamilton follows that path rather than Klien’s.

I can understand that, when you’ve spent as much time and money on a driver as McLaren have on Hamilton, you don’t want that all to go to waste, but the truth, so often demonstrated, is that success in lower formulae does not guarantee success in F1. The history of F1 is littered with the careers of drivers who shone brightly in F3 (Jan Magnussen, anyone?) or F3000, and yet did nothing in F1. Sometimes it was bad luck, bad timing, sometimes the spark that made them so special just didn’t translate to the big league. There are also drivers who got into F1 through circumstance, with no expectation surrounding them, and went on to win seven world championships.

McLaren could lose out with Hamilton. He might not cut it, he might spend most of 2007 in the wall. Or he might be the next Kimi Raikkonen. As from now, his GP2 title means exactly nothing. All that matters now is how he races an F1 car, and you can’t learn that in testing.

Finally, to satisfy my own curiosity I did a little comparison. At the time of the French GP, 1987, the average age of the top ten drivers in the world championship was 30.9. In 2006 it was 29.8. Plus ça change.