Home advantage for Hamilton?

"Excuse me whilst I say something mind-bogglingly stupid..."

It’s a tough time for Brits in Formula 1.

Both British teams, McLaren and Williams, are a million miles away from their championship-dominating glory years. McLaren are in a perilous 6th place, and Williams 10th. In case you’re unfamiliar with F1, and think that sounds OK-ish – there are only 10 teams.

Whilst brilliant British drivers have won many titles (Hunt, a couple of Hills, Button, Mansell etc.), 2018’s championship boasts just one driver from our fair isles – Lewis Hamilton. To be fair, he is pretty handy, having bagged four titles himself.

With the British Grand Prix taking place at Silverstone this weekend, if you want to support your home team or driver, you’re probably going to need to back just Lewis. If either of the two teams manage to have the first car past the chequered flag, I’ll be talking next week about the most dramatic race in history, whilst bookies sob uncontrollably.

It’s been a rocky road to his home race for Lewis. Despite multiple wins in the preceding nine races, his arch-rival, Germany’s Sebastian Vettel, has been pretty much equal throughout the year so far. Last weekend’s Austrian outing looked set to further advance Hamilton’s slim title race lead, with his Mercedes car bristling with upgrades and considerably faster than all but his team-mate.

Once upon a time, watching an F1 race involved seeing at least a quarter of the field breaking down, but recent years have showcased increased reliability. Unusually, both Mercs conked out in Austria, and whilst Seb in his shiny Ferrari didn’t win, his second place gave him enough points to put him back in the lead. By one point.

Fast approaching half way through the season, there’s just about nothing between the two veterans, both chasing their fifth title.

The other 18 drivers? Mathematically some could still do it, but that’s pretty unlikely. Kimi Raikkonen may be third, but no-one’s expecting him to beat his team-mate Seb. Lewis’s garage-buddy, Valterri Bottas, appears to have walked under multiple ladders whilst kicking black cats, and the Red Bull duo of Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen are grabbing the odd win, but will need a carbon-fibre magic wand waved vigorously to see them catch-up.

So, tune in on Sunday and see if Hamilton can salvage a bit of motor-racing national pride. Love him or loathe him, he’s all we’ve got until the next generation of drivers grow up enough to reach the pedals properly.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 6th of July 2018. It did make it onto their website again as well as appearing in the print edition.

Great race it was too, with Hamilton denied victory after a first lap tangle with Kimi Raikkonen. Remarkably, Lewis claimed afterwards (when finally interviewed on the podium after dodging his media obligations on track) that Ferrari were using "interesting tactics".

He subsequently back-tracked, saying his comments were "dumb", and brought-on by exhaustion post-race. What. A. Knob. It's remarkable how many times I've started to like the guy again, only for him to pull some pouty-faced man-child crap like this.

Sorry, Lewis fans and those hoping for a British win - the spoilt brat doesn't deserve it.

(CD A-Z: A "Sounds of the Summer" compilation, that came with a copy of The Big Issue in May 2003!)

"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...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog