Lewis Hamilton was humbled by his 2021 Azerbaijan Grand Prix failure, but Mark Webber sounded absolutely terrified.

The Mercedes megastar was in the most intense title battle of his life in 2021 when he and Max Verstappen fought tooth and nail for the closest championship in history.

Hamilton was given an extraordinary open goal when Verstappen dramatically crashed out in BakuGetty

Just six races in and it was already clear the season was going to be unmissable, with Verstappen’s Red Bull finally level with Mercedes after seven years of complete dominance.

Hamilton and Verstappen had two wins apiece heading to Azerbaijan and when Hamilton overtook pole-sitter Charles Leclerc on the third lap, he looked set to cruise towards his third victory of the season.

However, everything changed when Lance Stroll crashed on the main straight and prompted a red flag, with bad luck on his strategy pushing Hamilton down to third behind Verstappen in first, and his Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez in second.

With four laps to go, it looked all over at the front, until Verstappen experienced the same fate as Stroll, flying into the wall at high speed on the main straight thanks to a tyre failure.

It was then an open goal for Hamilton to collect a mammoth 25 points on his retired rival, and at the restart he got away better than Perez to jump to first place.

Less than a second later, it was all over.

Hamilton dramatically locked up at the first corner making an error that not only cost him victory, but any points at all, as he finished the race in 15th.

So staggering was the mistake with just a lap left of one of the most drama-filled Grand Prix on record, that one of Hamilton’s former rivals, Webber, completely lost control of his vocal cords.

The ex-Red Bull man was commentating on the race for Channel 4, and when Hamilton went straight on at turn one, he let out a scream in equal parts hilarious and terrifying like something from a comedy horror film.

The broadcaster later released footage of the commentary box, revealing that Webber didn’t even have his microphone anywhere near his mouth, showing just how incredibly loud the noise must have been.

Webber’s scream was absolutely iconic

As it turned out, Webber’s scream was entirely justified as the moment would be absolutely key in the closest title race the sport has ever seen.

Hamilton would ultimately finish the season just eight points behind Verstappen after they entered the controversial Abu Dhabi finale level on points.

That means that finishing just fifth could have made enough of a difference for Hamilton to potentially grab his record-breaking eighth title.

It soon turned out that the cause of Hamilton’s critical mistake was him accidentally hitting a ‘brake magic’ switch on his steering wheel which drastically alters the brake balance to the front of the car in order to heat up the tyres.

That meant that he couldn’t stop for turn one, a moment that left him in shock.

“Naturally, it’s quite a humbling experience to be honest,” he said post-race.

“We’ve worked so hard this weekend to come back out of the top 10 and it was looking so good. I put everything on the line, I fought as hard as I could today.

“It’s very hard to take. Mostly I’m just very sorry to the men and women on the team, who have worked so hard for these points. We will rebuild and come back stronger for sure.”

Explaining the incident in full detail, technical director Mike Elliot said: “He made a fantastic start, he got himself up alongside Perez and as he and Perez were sort of shuffling position Lewis swerved and in the process of swerving he just clipped the magic button and unfortunately he didn’t feel he had done it. So, he had completely no awareness he was going to have a problem.

“The point he then braked, which was the normal point for him to brake, he was in the position where he got all of the brake balance shifted forward, which put all of the load through the front tyres and as a consequence they locked and from that point there was nothing that he could do than go wide.”

Mercedes would later confirm that they’d made changes to the No.44’s steering wheel to avoid a recurrence of the issue.

That turned out to be good news for Hamilton, and Webber, too.