Home is where 'huh?' is

One guy carried a Union Jack flag and shouted occasionally. Two guys played pool obliviously. Two people canoodled at the bar even more obliviously. Video games flashed lights. About 15 people, mostly around the bar, paid attention to the race. Easily audible were the ITV commentators, once crediting Hamilton with "a very mature race indeed" but eventually warning that only an onslaught of rain might help.

Suddenly, on the many screens, Massa's Ferrari team exulted in a championship apparently nigh.

Yet in the kind of teensy twist that can decide these things after seven months on five continents, Timo Glock's Toyota team had opted not to stop for wet tires, and so he spent the last lap foundering on his dry-weather ones so that Hamilton slipped past breathlessly just before they sped uphill to the finish line.

Massa wept a bit. Hamilton rushed to hug his populous coterie, including the 16-year-old brother who has cerebral palsy and inspires him, and his father/manager, Anthony, who once held down three jobs to sustain the dream. When a microphone found him, Hamilton gasped that he needed to "get my breath back."

Dave Ryan of McLaren said, "The kid is magic." Rain poured in Sao Paulo.

And in the heavy dark of 7:30 p.m. here at 51 North latitude, where Hamilton's parents divorced when he was 2, where he lived with his mother, later his father, where he attended the Peartree School and John Henry Newman Catholic school, a little cheer went up in the huge downtown bar.

Then, just outside the woodsy town around the well-tended government-supported housing of Hamilton's childhood, the whole world seemed indoors. Nobody walked the sidewalks except a few teenagers here and there. A promising little neighborhood pub sat almost empty. And a rotund guy at a bus stop didn't give his name but said of watching the race from his house, "My haht [heart] was pounding."