Hamilton heads for GOAT

Five v Four

You’d have been a brave F1 fan to have bet against Lewis Hamilton winning the Formula One World Championship last Sunday in Mexico.

He’d almost managed it the previous weekend, and arrived in Mexico in the comfortable position of only needing to finish seventh to bag the trophy, even if his rival, Sebastian Vettel, won the race.

As it turned out, it was a challenging race for the British star for a rare change, and Vettel came reasonably close to winning. Hamilton might not have stood on the podium, but his fourth place was enough for him to be crowned a five time champion.

That 5th title really is something special, putting him on equal footing with the great Juan Manuel Fangio from the sport’s early days, and bettered only by Michael Schumacher’s seven titles.

I may not be Hamilton’s biggest fan, but even I have to concede that what he’s achieved is something genuinely special... even if he does have a silly haircut and some questionable fashion sense.

Is the Greatest Of All Time (GOAT) moniker appropriate, or even achievable? He, and the Mercedes team that he drives for, do seem to be have been at the top of their game for a while now and, much like Schumacher and Ferrari a few years ago, able to consistently get the better of their rivals.

I didn’t expect to see anyone getting anywhere near seven titles again in my lifetime, but this could be a genuine challenge from Lewis – he’s still young enough, and whilst he’s performing at this level, he’s hard to beat.

True, Vettel and Ferrari could be strong enough next year to beat him... maybe even one of the up and coming youngsters, like Verstappen or Leclerc, could better him some of the time. But consistently? Over a full season? When he’s this strong?

There are big regulation changes coming up in a couple of years’ time. It might mix things up a bit, but it may also be too late to stop Lewis becoming the GOAT.

Disappointingly for those not paying for Sky’s F1 coverage, this title-deciding race was a highlights only affair, shown after many people’s bed-time, on Channel 4. Like Lewis winning everything, we’d better get used to that. Next year, all but the British Grand Prix will be highlights only.

You might love F1, but unless you’re willing to pay, you’ll be getting less laps, later. What a shame.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 2nd of November 2018. The version used on their website was re-titled as "Has Lewis got the stuff to be GOAT?".

Unfortunately, the print edition suffered some debilitating format errors. The title appeared as "Has Lewis got the stuff to be" and the final line missed "a shame" off, leaving the last word of the column as "What". Schoolboy mistakes, really.

Disappointing that a Brit becoming the 2nd most successful F1 driver of all time was reduced to a highlights package late on a Sunday night, but that's the way all sport seems to be going. Unless you're willing to pay for the bells and whistles coverage, you either get slim pickings or nothing at all.

(CD A-Z: A homemade compilation of randomness - currently an unofficial extended instrumental version of ELO's "Another Heart Breaks". Soothing.)

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 ...

"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 ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog