Having started back in 10th place on the grid after two penalty sanctions in the preceding days, Hamilton worked his way through the entire field, finishing with the current World Championship leader Max Verstappen, whose margin over the 36-year-old Briton with seven titles to his name is now trimmed to 14 points.

Hamilton took a decisive lead with 12 laps to go - and 11 laps after the prodigious 24-year-old Belgian-Dutch driver had diced with a penalty sanction himself by forcing his British rival off the track when he appeared to be on the point of being overtaken.

Hamilton’s 101st grand prix win - a record - moved Toto Wolff, Team Principal and chief executive of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team for which he drives, to tweet: "Hang this in the Louvre".

As Richard Williams, the long-time sportswriter for The Guardian who has written several books on Formula One, commented in the breathless wake of this victory: "Superlative drive by Lewis Hamilton today. Kept his head, made his moves. A real champion at work.

"And none of us out here can have a clue about what it’s like to line up a pass on Max Verstappen, knowing what the consequences might be."

As so often, Williams gets to the core of human truth, and courage, within a towering sporting contest.

Hamilton had received a five-place grid penalty for taking a new engine at the start of the weekend and then had to start sprint qualifying on Saturday (November 13) - the third time this innovation has taken place this season - from 20th and last place after Mercedes were found to have breached the regulations on their drag reduction system.

He responded by moving up to fifth in the sprint qualifying, which earned him the right to start yesterday’s main grand prix in tenth place.

At which point he began chopping down the odds in characteristically single-minded fashion.

"I was pushing as hard as I could," Hamilton said afterwards. "From last on the grid and then another five-place penalty was the hardest weekend I've had."

Each overtaking manoeuvre in the course of Hamilton’s testing weekend will have required judgement and courage - but that second, conclusive challenge to his ruthless young rival will reverberate in the collective F1 memory long after other race details have faded.

Yesterday all the acrimony, debate and furore over the penalties imposed and - in the case of Verstappen, not imposed - served merely as gesso to a canvas that eventually showcased a masterpiece.

The contest followed a classical pattern in which audience attention focused on two keen and apparently unbeatable rivals.

In athletics terms, it was the final straight of the men’s 10,000 metres final at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where Paul Tergat of Kenya and Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie gave extended respective impersonations of immoveable object and irresistible force until the latter won by less than the margin that decided the men’s 100m title at those Games.

In terms of tennis, it was the 2007 Wimbledon men’s singles final, where Switzerland’s then 25-year-old defending champion Roger Federer defeated his 21-year-old rival Rafael Nadal 7-6, 4-6, 7-6, 2-6, 6-2 to equal the Open era record of five titles held by Björn Borg of Sweden.

In terms of boxing, it was the 1974 heavyweight title bout in Kinshasa, Zaire, otherwise known as the "Rumble in the Jungle", between 32-year-old Muhammad Ali and the 25-year-old defending champion George Foreman.

Deprived of his world title seven years earlier after he refused to serve in the Vietnam War for the United States Army, Ali became only the second man to regain the heavyweight title.

After absorbing five rounds of sledgehammer blows from his huge opponent, backing himself into the ropes and blocking as much of the incoming as he could on with his arms, Ali wore the younger man out, and down.

In the eighth round he moved into pro-active mode and a flurry of punches concluding with a hard left and a clubbing right sent the mighty oak to the floor and out for the count.

Opinion is still strongly divided within the world of Formula One over the introduction of the sprint event, which made its third and final scheduled appearance of the season at Interlagos after being included in the Silverstone and Monza Grand Prix weekends.

The idea has been to add extra entertainment value to F1 weekends, with the new distance - one third as long as a Grand Prix - taking place on Saturday and enabling drivers to qualify for the following day’s main event in the position they finish.

Six more sprint events are due to be incorporated into next season’s Grand Prix programme, although several changes look likely to be made to the format before then. It might even be that the sprint racing breaks away to form its own competitive entity.

But while the organisers tweak and trim at their programme, the over-arching truth remains obvious.

What does Formula One want? What does sport want?

Simple. It wants more of the kind of no-holds-barred, intense, personal rivalry for which this year’s Sao Paulo Grand Prix will always be remembered and celebrated.