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It’s the best fake China has ever seen. And they should know.

Lewis Hamilton charged to an historic Shanghai hat-trick only to see his moment of glory lost in a chaotic flag blunder.

In the land of the rip off it was only natural the sport was treated to a fake finish.

And to be fair they did a good job. It looked just as authentic as the real thing.

A dozy official leaned out of the control tower a lap too early and furiously waving the finish flag.

It certainly confused Lewis Hamilton who has seen a few chequered flags in his time.

“I thought I was starting my last lap, glanced up and saw something waving and realised it was the chequered flag,” said Hamilton.

"It was very strange. I was thinking 'am I seeing things?'

“I slowed but the team said ‘no, no, keep going’.

“If the radio had failed, I had slowed and Nico came past, that would really have sucked. Thank God, it didn’t.”

And Hamilton laboured under that misapprehension for a few hours after the finish.

Stewards then wiped another lap from history and decided the result would stand after 54 tours.

Only in a sport as shambolic as Grand Prix racing could a bungling official plunge an international event into chaos and anonymously escape with his reputation intact.

A sport who can appoint an official who could cock-up the simple act of waving a flag needs to take a good hard look at itself.

That FIA officials should attempt to sweep the incident under the carpet afterwards, without an official statement or explanation, beggars belief.

A paddock source said: “The guy is devastated. He doesn’t know how it happened.”

FIA rules state that if the flag is waved early the race will be deemed to have ended the previous lap finished by the leader.

The only losers in the debacle were Caterham and Japanese driver Kamui Kobayashi who had overtaken Jules Bianchi for 17th place on the deleted lap.

Should Bianchi’s team, Marussia, win the £30m battle for 10th place in the team’s championship cash-strapped Caterham might have cause to question the way F1 is run.

By then it may well be too late.

“Until we found that out about the lap it had been good to see what a small victory like that does for the team. It lifted everyone,” said Kobayashi.

After the thriller in Bahrain there was so little drama in this race fans would have had every right to ask if the entire event was a fake masquerading as a Grand Prix.

Hamilton won by 19 seconds to notch up the first hat-trick of his career with his third win in the Far East.

Again he was untouchable as he closed to within four points of championship leader Nico Rosberg who had a weekend to forget and still salvaged second thanks to his superior car after plunging to sixth.

It was down to Red Bull to provide a modicum of entertainment as Sebastian Vettel bristled on the radio at being told to move over for teammate Daniel Ricciardo for the second race in a row.

“Tough luck,” he said of his teammate at one stage.

Team boss Christian Horner did an unconvincing cover job for his outclassed champion.

“He’s a race driver. We employ these guys because they have that fighting spirit. Of course, he’s going to question it to understand, but as soon as he understood the reasoning, bang, he moved aside,” he said.

Jenson Button was 11th and Max Chilton 19th.

But it was another day that belonged to Hamilton.

There is, at least, nothing counterfeit about his talent or his domination and if Rosberg wants this title he is going to have to get real.