Deep in my man cave last night, pondering on my next literary challenge, I found myself channel-hopping, mainly through the sports channels. There was precious little to stop for, unless American Football and F1 is your bag. I can take a bit of the former, but my powers of concentration simply cannot cope with the long gaps between action, but I can take even less of the latter. And when the best person Sky can find to interview is Gordon Ramsay, you know they are struggling.
This Grand Prix came from Austin, Texas and ended in the same way that all of them do, with the bloke with the fastest car winning. Sky, being Sky, start their programme long before the actual race starts and have plenty of time to fill. Martin Brundle chases around the paddock (is that what you call it?) and asks drivers extremely bland questions and gets even more bland answers and when he runs out of drivers, who are uniformly grey, he grabs a celebrity. Or Gordon Ramsay.
Quite why the broadcaster feels we need to learn the motor racing opinions of someone who cooks things for a living I shall never know. I am no more interested in Ramsay’s ‘expert’ opinions on how brilliant Lewis Hamilton is than those of the ladies who prepare my occasional dinners in our local fish and chip shop. Moreover, they don’t swear as much either.
Brundle then managed to collar the less talented Williams sister Venus who, wonderfully, sidestepped and ignored him, thus depriving us of her insightful observations of the intricacies of motor racing. Phew: that was a lucky escape. Sky’s cameras still lingered on her from time to time before the excitement of the race overwhelmed us all. Except that, for me at least, it didn’t.
With F1, you know exactly what is going to happen as soon as the lights go out at the start of the race. The fastest cars are all at the front of the grid and the one who gets to the bend first will still be first some two hours later, which is exactly what happened with Hamilton yesterday. I tuned in again near the end of the race and heard Sky’s over-excited commentators in a state of F1 orgasm, gurgling over what a great race it had been. From memory, when I watched the races in their entirety, except for the bits when I fell asleep, the ‘excitement’ involved the odd overtaking manoeuvre or positions changing due to the fitting of new tyres, in the fight for third place at best, and more likely someone moving up from 13th to 12th. As these cars had already been lapped by Hamilton, how on earth could anyone derive pleasure from this?
Plainly, millions do derive pleasure from F1, although not as many as there used to be. Soon the ‘sport’ will disappear completely to Sky’s pay TV and viewing figures will slump from millions to hundreds of thousands, as happened with cricket and interest across the land will fall too. I am sad about the respective decline of cricket and indeed golf, accelerated as they have been by being removed from terrestrial TV, but I can’t say I feel the same about F1.
Perhaps Lewis Hamilton, who is so proud to be British he lives in Switzerland to avoid paying his fair share of tax, really is a fine motor racing driver and up there with the greats? Maybe he would win even if he was driving one of the cars from the back of the grid. But one thing is for sure: he is the most boring racing driver ever.
It is not Hamilton’s fault that he is entirely without charisma. That’s just the way some people turn out. I am not sure his wooden personality would be any different even without his faux mid-Atlantic accent. No. Lewis Hamilton drives the fastest car faster than the other drivers drive their slower cars. And that, in essence, is F1.
That Sky felt the need to interview a foul-mouthed man who cooks things for a living to spice up their F1 coverage says it all for me.
