It's as if Lewis Hamilton knows time has sped past him... his sad deterioration began long before he became Ferrari's £60m-a-year vanity project, writes JONATHAN McEVOY

It was one of the saddest sights I have seen at a track, mortal tragedy aside. Here was one of the gods of motor racing holding his gloves over his visor to hide his tangled emotions from scrutiny.

A few minutes later, he stood before the television cameras inviting Ferrari to sack him from his £60million-a-year job, after qualifying in 12th place for Sunday’s Hungarian Grand Prix.

At 40, it was if he knew time had sped past him on the outside.

Not quite monosyllabic but brief in his answers, he told Sky: ‘I’m useless, absolutely useless.

‘The team have no problem. You’ve seen the car’s on pole.

‘So we probably need to change driver.’

And he walked off to do his print session, which lasted all of 59 seconds. While he was hiding his visor, Charles Leclerc was putting the identical machinery on pole position, one so unexpected that the Monegasque said he no longer understood sport.

How Hamilton can compute what is happening to him is impossible to know. He has been outgunned by Leclerc in qualifying 10 times to four. Now, Leclerc is as fast as a bullet over a single lap as there is. But since when was Hamilton, aka the GOAT, excused by any comparison?

Leclerc has scored 30 points more than the Englishman in 13 races, not the most damning statistic actually. But week after week, circuit after circuit, it is Leclerc with the greater speed. You look up and, lo and behold, there is three-tenths between them.

And here of all places! Where Hamilton has won a record eight times and taken pole nine times. It has been a shrine of revival in dark seasons. Where he won after a previously podium-free 2009 campaign. That day he climbed out of his troublesome McLaren and asked how far he was off the championship lead.

Hamilton was thinking of launching an absurdly impossible title challenge. It’s how his mind works. He is hard-wired for winning. Second place kills him as badly as last. But is the flesh still willing?

A slight, almost imperceptible, deterioration has set in over the last four years. Little bits fell off the old invincibility. Did his nerve wane, or were his eyes the culprits, when he was no longer threading his silver Mercedes through vanishing holes with the elan of old?

His move to Ferrari was a vanity project, rustled up by president John Elkann, a scion of the Agnelli clan, with no appreciable liking of motor racing. But Hamilton’s allure lay in his fame, the most recognised driver in the world in the red car of legend. What could be better?

Except they failed to notice Hamilton was beaten across two of the three seasons he spent as team-mate of George Russell. He was carted into the confectionery store and back out again in qualifying last year, 19-5 to be luridly exact. Yes, Russell is a very fine driver, but whither the GOAT?

That was the question, too, when Hamilton drove so abjectly in rain-soaked Sao Paulo last year that I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. Could this possibly be the same Hamilton who once had webbed feet? At Silverstone in 2008 he won by more than a minute in a pool of danger, building his own monument to sporting greatness. Hamilton needed a new beginning to kickstart him, or so he tried to convince himself, refusing to give in to the truth that his powers were dimming.

He shocked Mercedes by terminating his contract, forgoing the status as a Mercedes man for life and the trappings that would come with such loyalty, to fulfil a boyhood dream at the Scuderia.

Toto Wolff was dumbfounded at Mercedes. But Elkann and co sounded the trumpets in Maranello. I was there when the bridge over Ferrari’s Fiorano test track was crammed a dozen deep and passing lorries hooted their horns in his first outing in a Ferrari. He, his father, mother and stepmother then went out for dinner with Enzo Ferrari’s son, Piero, in the back room of the Montana restaurant that Michael Schumacher called his favourite, supping in the genius loci, the magic of the place.

But it was typical Ferrari. What about the car? Or the fact Hamilton was three years older than Schumacher when he was pensioned off to make way for Kimi Raikkonen?

And so the season started, with Hamilton overwearing the excuse, proffered early, that nothing special should be expected soon. He factored in adjustment to his new environment, to a non-Mercedes engine for the first time and to an unfamiliar car.

Fine up to a point, but not knowing where the wet switch was on his steering wheel when he made his debut in Melbourne seemed a touch negligent.

He conspicuously failed to hit it off with race engineer Riccardo Adami. They were constantly squabbling over the team radio.

Warning signs flashed. In recent weeks, Hamilton has been jotting ideas down for improvements for the car and to the team’s operation. But last night he was beyond hope. Asked if rain would be welcome today, he said: ‘I don’t think anything can help me right now.’

It has been a Lewis trait all his career to pick himself up from sloughs of despair. ‘Still I Rise,’ he is apt to say, citing Maya Angelou. ‘It’s not how you go down, but how you get up,’ is another favourite.

Can he still do that? Conversely, might he even quit over the summer break? Will he get to finish his ‘masterpiece’ on his own terms?

Stubborn, resilient, essentially talented, he might. But I fear not.

His despondency here, woeful form all season, and his advancing years suggest that we may have witnessed a staging post in Hamilton’s journey to the destination he cannot contemplate. Retirement.