Pressure is hotting up for Hamilton, but Mosley is still out in the cold

The second demanded to know whether Lewis Hamilton can relaunch his world championship challenge.

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Big noise: Hamilton is struggling to silence his critics, though not as much as FIA boss Max Mosley

A compelling answer to the former was delivered when the Israeli government yesterday withdrew Mosley's invitation to meet them in Tel Aviv, just 24 hours after the offer was made.

Apparently, the sports minister who made the arrangement, Galeb Majadle, was unaware that his intended guest was engulfed in a scandal involving five prostitutes.

In a statement, the government confirmed that the FIA as an organisation were still welcome, but not their president.

It is a devastating blow to Mosley's contention that he can continue in office. Already spurned by the Bahrain royal family, how can he discharge his role when nobody will do business with him? Sure, he promises to be at the Monaco Grand Prix, but he lives in the Principality, so that was only to be expected.

The sadness is that the whole unedifying spectacle of his own self-preservation cast a shadow over the countdown to tomorrow's Formula One race in Barcelona, even as he was conducting an ill-received charm offensive at the low-key Jordan Rally.

Back, thankfully, to the Hamilton question. Firm answers must wait until the competitive action starts in qualifying this afternoon, but the signs are not propitious. The Ferraris of Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa were one and two in practice yesterday. Hamilton was third.

It was not meant to be like this. Not after he cruised to victory in the opening race in Melbourne. His second season would build on the glittering promise of his first. McLaren, fined and humbled for spying on Ferrari, had put their troubles behind them.

Think again.

Pushed back on the grid for an infringement during qualifying and hindered by a sticky wheel nut in the next race in Malaysia, he failed to engage the launch control on the grid in Bahrain. He then crashed into Fernando Alonso and finished out of the points. He lost the championship lead.

Yesterday, he was far from happy with his running. He said: "We struggled with the car throughout both sessions. There was too much oversteer and we tried a lot of different things to improve but didn't make the progress we wanted."

It is the theme of Hamilton's season. We are light years away from writing Hamilton off as a one-season wonder. He shines like a sapphire in the seedy habitat his sport has become. But it still has to be asked: what is up with our boy wonder?

Down at the track, he was asked what he and McLaren could do to get level with the Ferraris. "I don't know," came a flash of honesty among more bullish pronouncements.

Is the technical know-how lost when the experienced Fernando Alonso departed for Renault missed? Can he and another second-season driver, Heikki Kovalainen, make up for the loss?

Is the pressure of being de facto team leader weighing on him? Has his move to Geneva left him with too much time to ponder and too few friends to see?

Or, whisper it, does he flicker under the weight of expectation?

Remember the botched pit stop in the frenzied atmosphere of Silverstone last July when he fluffed in the pits. Then there were the two other nerve-janglers of 2007, when he put it off the track on bald tyres in China — for which he accepted at least partial responsibility — and then a needless skirmish with Alonso before a faulty gearbox mysteriously wrecked his title dream in Brazil.

Maybe it is a bit of all the above.

You doubt even he knows. He is too inexperienced to have total faith in his own rationale for now, but ultimately his mental fortitude will surely see him reclaim the high road to history, Sir Jackie Stewart, the three-times world champion, urged patience.

"Lewis has accumulated more knowledge than he had at the start of last season but that is still a very small pebble on a very big beach," he said.

"The thing everyone thinks is that as he had such a fabulous first season, with four wins, he would be able to dominate. People are treating you as a man but you cannot be the total man too soon. Sometimes you need to speak to other people other than within the team.

"Motor racing is one of the few sports where you don't have a coach. Even the great Tiger Woods has a man with him. Football, tennis, athletics and rugby, they all have a coach. It takes time to get experience in F1. You cannot go from the kindergarten to university overnight."