There was one moment here on Thursday when a small cloud hovered above Lewis Hamilton's serenity. Relaxed and smiling in the Mercedes motorhome, the driver who is many people's favourite to win the Formula One world title for the second time answered questions with the same confidence he shows at the wheel.
But he showed a flash of something approaching pique when he was asked if he had been born in the wrong era, if his standing as F1's fastest and most instinctive driver somehow disadvantaged him from getting his head around the sport's most complex set of rule changes.
It is perceived in many quarters that his team-mate Nico Rosberg's stronger engineering background could give him the edge in the fight for the title. It is almost as if Hamilton's mental resources are being questioned.
He answered quickly, with the air of a man who was anxious to unburden himself. "It's strange how a perception of one driver is that he's massively technical and one driver's not," he said. "I really can't imagine how that idea comes around. How can anyone say that someone is smarter than someone else?
"No one has ever seen me sit with my engineer, and what I did at McLaren to get the car to where it is, all the extra bits I helped to design. No one knows that I pretty much designed our steering wheel. No one sees those kind of things."
He added: "I didn't win the championship [in 2008] with sheer luck. I didn't win with sheer speed. I had to get my car set up, I had to know how to get my car set up, I had to dictate what my set-up was. You can't not be a technical person. Someone that's not very technical can't set a car up to win championships. What baffles me is I don't know how stories evolve about an individual."
I dont
know why Lewis bothers to react to same old stuff - Just do talking on
the track.
The clever stuff is
the easy part, its not rocket sience to have an idea of how everything woks together or to
know what
the engineers have programmed. Whats hard is ripping around a corner with 800 BHP and little grip and knowing what and when to press. That will come very quickly to
the best drivers - how to deploy best what
the engineers have preset.
Its ridiculous that people think fast drivers cant think and drive when
the truth is that
the best drivers can do more and drive.
The slower but cerebral drivers cant think and go as fast full stop. A Prost will be beaten by a Senna because a Senna can learn to do what Prost does but a Prost cant learn to go faster or increase
the size of his goolies