F1 used to be all cash, supermodels and private jets but now drivers are stuck in slow lane – and I know who’s to blame
YOU may fancy the idea of being a Formula One racing driver. All that money. All those supermodels. And all that world travel on private jets. Heaven.
No, it isn’t. Not any more.
Because when you are a Formula One racing driver, you spend three hours a week driving your car and three hundred hours being interviewed by every damn herbert with an iPhone.
You don’t get this in any other sport.
Footballers arrive at the stadium and scuttle off a bus into a dressing room.
After the match, maybe one player has to answer one question and then that’s that. They’re all back on the bus.
But in Formula One, everyone is interviewed all the time. On the way to the track. On the track. Before the race. After the race. It’s constant.
And if you finish in the top three, it’s worse because then you are interviewed after the race before being put in a room with the other podium-finishers so we can hear what you are saying to one another. And then there are more interviews.
If I were an F1 driver and on course for a victory, I’d cruise round the last lap and deliberately come fourth.
And in between all of these TV interviews and press conferences, there’s an army of damnfool “influencers” who stick a phone in your face and ask whether you prefer biscuits to cheese, and whether you prefer pink or brown.
And you are forced, by the small print in your contract, and because your lawyers aren’t as good as your team’s lawyers, to face this onslaught with a smile.
Not any more, it seems.
In Australia last weekend, Fernando Alonso pointed out to an interviewer that he would be polite but say nothing. Max Verstappen did much the same thing.
When asked how rain would affect his race, he said: “It will make the track more slippery, and I’ll have to take that into consideration.”
This new thinking definitely had an effect on those most recent series of Drive To Survive.
In the early days, we were regularly treated to hissed altercations, as people didn’t realise they were being recorded.
Now, whenever anyone sees a Netflix microphone, they go into PR mode.
Aston Martin didn’t take part at all. It’s like they simply weren’t there.
And I approve of this.
A Formula One driver should have some mystique.
I actually don’t want to know what they’re doing after the race or where they go on holiday or whether they prefer biscuits to cheese.
I like to use my imagination because, in my head, they’re all James Hunt.
And not some model in a toothpaste commercial.
SIR STARMER wants to weigh me. And you. He wants to weigh us all.
And if the scales say we are too heavy, he wants to force- feed us with drugs to make us slim again. For once, I’m with him on something.
We do need to do tackle obesity because it costs the NHS a fortune and – having seen myself in a mirror – a fat person is revolting to look at.
I do have one suggestion, though. Instead of using drugs to make us thinner and fitter and healthier, why not get people to eat locally grown food?
ZIP IT, UNCLE SHAM
A FRENCH politician announced recently that France should take back the Statue of Liberty – which it gifted to the US in 1886 – because America is no longer deserving of such a thing.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded by pointing out that if it weren’t for America, people in France would now be speaking German.
I’m not sure she understands how the world works. Because when you invade a country, you may nick its mineral reserves and alter its laws.
But you don’t force the people there to change the way they speak.
And another thing. America was two years late for World War Two. And could only liberate France by setting off from Britain.
Which had been punctual and there from the start.
THANKS FOR THE CRAIC, EDDIE
MOTOR racing lost one of its greats this week when, at the age of 76, Eddie Jordan succumbed to cancer.
His wife, Marie, said he “lit up a room” and she’s absolutely right. He did.
But usually because he’d set fire to it. I have spent very many happy nights with Eddie over the years.
And I can’t remember any of them.
BANG TO RIGHTS
I GUESS we’ve all seen those dashcam videos of drivers reversing into the car behind, saying that they’ve been rear-ended and then claiming they’ve got terrible whiplash.
Well, how’s this for a plan If you’re in a car and you reckon someone’s about to do this.
Don’t just sit there. Let them start reversing, then engage ramming speed and give them some real whiplash to moan about.
SOCK IT TO THE SLOTHS
THERE’S been talk all week that Sir Starmer is going to cut benefits.
No, he isn’t. It’s not in his DNA to do that.
Like all good Marxists, he believes that those who work hard are duty-bound to pay for those who won’t work at all.
Which brings me on to the man who works tirelessly every day in my garden.
He came to work on Monday this week with a terrible eye infection.
It looked like he’d been hit in the face with a cricket ball, and he was so dizzy he could hardly stand up.
And what he did was a lot of shouting. You may have heard him. Even if you were in Scotland.
It seems that he’d been unable to get a doctor’s appointment and had been forced to sit at home all weekend, watching his jobless neighbours, who live in social housing across the street, take delivery of a new flat-screen television.
And then break off from installing it to open the door to the man who comes round every week to valet their car.
FARCE CLASS TRAVEL
A HUGE fire at an electrical substation closed Heathrow Airport and you may ask why there was no back-up generator.
Well, it turns out that there was. But they’d installed it so close to the main power supply system that it, too, was engulfed in the flames.
Of course it was.
And the second back-up? Why didn’t that start up? Well, according to Ed Miliband, who’s responsible for airport sub-stations not catching fire, no one knows.
I do. It’s British. So like the roads, the mobile phone coverage, the trains, the water supply, Hammersmith Bridge, HS2, the health service, the Army and our border security, it doesn’t work.