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!)

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog