Skip to main content

F1 star pulling a fast one

"Sorry, can't stop - busy saving the planet."

I love the smell of petrol and hypocrisy in the morning.

As a fan of the fast-moving circus that is Formula 1, I’m used to people pointing out that there’s nothing exciting about some over-paid guys driving round in circles for two hours. I’ve also become accustomed to being preached at about all that flying around the world and petrol-guzzling engines being terrible environmentally. Shame on me for supporting it, etc.

One of F1’s biggest stars, Lewis Hamilton, has certainly made my life a little harder when one of those conversations kicks off next. He’s told the BBC in an interview that he’s going to adopt a vegan diet, for health reasons and because he’s worried about emissions... from cows.

When he points out that pollution from the back end of our bovine chums is “more than what we produce with our flights and cars” he’s actually pretty much bang on. Our love of beefy stuff and the unfortunate by-product of guffage, does mean that we’re massively polluting the planet whilst we enjoy our burgers.

If I said it, you’d probably just ignore me. But Lewis’s chosen profession involves flying around the world all year, supported by hundreds of people, and driving a high-powered car around a track with 19 other guys for sport/entertainment.

Not only that, but he travels a lot by private jet, and regularly nips off between races to other parts of the world for a few days. He must do very well out of Airmiles.

His lavish lifestyle sees him wearing cool leather jackets, performing “burn-outs” on motorbikes and a thrilling range of other activities that aren’t exactly helping to prevent polar bears from trying to balance on ice cubes.

Dog ownership also contributes negatively to saving the planet – all that dog food for his four-legged friend, Roscoe, has to be made somewhere, from meat, from animals that ate crops, and did a fair bit of farting before winding up in a tin.

Car manufacturers provide their engines to, and participate in, Formula 1 because it allows them to fast-track the development of technology that will be on your car not long afterwards - because we all want greater efficiency and that warm glow of knowing we did our bit to help the planet by buying a ‘green’ car. The current energy recovery systems in F1 cars are improving the efficiency of hybrid engines in cars hitting the roads now, but let’s not kid ourselves.

Each driver gets through many sets of tyres per race weekend alone. The pace of development means new parts are produced at an incredible rate. F1 might be trying to do things that lessen it’s impact, but it’s a long way from environmentally friendly.

What we really need is a multi-millionaire sports star to suggest that his intention to go vegan might encourage others to do so, thus helping the environment.

You’re quick in a car, mate. Apparently you’re not so speedy when it comes to spotting irony.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in The Mail, on the 22nd of September 2017. It was re-titled on their website as "F1 star fuels environmental debate". 

You'll note that, due to the sensibilities of The Mail's readership, the line about guffage was removed, and 'farting' was toned-down to 'letting off wind'.

Hamilton may well be the best British Formula 1 driver we've ever had. Hell, he may even be one of the greatest F1 drivers of his generation... even of all time. But he is a bit of a championship-level dipstick, isn't he?

(CD A-Z: Paul Rogers - "Muddy Water Blues".)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...