By Alexander Wolff

	After his win the rookie soaked up the moment. Simon Bruty/SI

Hamilton shares Woods's self-possession and steady temper, even if he earns a living amidst earsplitting noise and hot asphalt, not hushed galleries and lush fairways. Like Woods, he also has a piebald racial background (his mother, Carmen, who split from Anthony when Lewis was two, is white). And Tiger was hardly more precocious than Lewis, who at age six had already appeared on a BBC children's show, Blue Peter, to showcase his ability to race remote-controlled cars that his father had assembled for him. (He still races those cars with his 16-year-old half-brother, Nicholas, who has cerebral palsy.) Lewis graduated from the remote a couple of years later, after discovering karts during a family vacation in Spain. At an awards banquet in December 1995, wearing borrowed black tie, 10-year-old Lewis -- by then Britain's youngest-ever Cadet Class Karting Champion -- famously walked up to McLaren chief Ron Dennis to ask for an autograph and told him, "I want to race for you one day."

"Phone me in nine years," Hamilton remembers Dennis replying.

"Confidence, devoid of all arrogance," Dennis recalls, "is the best way to describe Lewis's approach to me that night."

Not three years later, Dennis made Hamilton the youngest driver ever to land a Formula One contract, signing him to apprentice in McLaren's young driver development program. Anthony Hamilton no longer had to moonlight to support his son's career. Lewis progressed smartly through the ranks after that: world No. 1 ranking in Formula A Karting in 2000 (again, the youngest ever); the British Formula Renault title in '03; and championships in F/1's Double A and Triple A circuits, Euro F/3 and GP2, in '05 and '06. The pressure wouldn't get to him on the F/1 circuit, Hamilton told an interviewer back in March, because "I control it and filter it," as if he had long ago been fitted with something from an auto parts store.

By signing Alonso and giving Hamilton its number 2 car for this season, McLaren is facing challenges of its own making, albeit problems that any racing team would love to have. In the preseason McLaren executive Martin Whitmarsh sketched out what he called an ideal scenario, in which Alonso, 25, bagged another world championship and Hamilton was groomed as the driver to take the team into the future. Fine in theory, but reality set in two weeks ago in Monaco. With Alonso and Hamilton running one-two late in the race, McLaren radioed Hamilton to make a pit stop. Several British journalists inferred from the rookie's postrace comments that Hamilton, who finished second, was upset that he hadn't been let loose to go after the win. The tabloids became so indignant that they briefly suspended their excavation of Hamilton's love life (LEWIS GAVE ME GRAND PRIX ON THE BACK SEAT OF HIS MINI blared News of the World in late May) to howl over the injustice of it all.