Formula 1 and other stuff

Are we in the middle of a news vacuum, or something? I ask because that paragon of journalistic virtue, the Daily Mail, has taken a brief detour from its usual obsessions – you know, burning all immigrants, dole scroungers and single mums at the stake and whatnot – to commit to print what is possibly the stupidest story of the year.

Under the headline The Italian’s job: Abu Dhabi steward’s link to Ferrari… and Fernando Alonso it engages in a thoroughly muddleheaded attempt at a syllogism. I’ll save you reading the Daily Mail’s guff by summing up the proposition here:

- Emmanuele Pirro, the third steward at this weekend’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, is Italian

- Italians all love Ferraris and are therefore, as well as being institutionally corrupt, all instinctively biased towards the cause of the Ferrari F1 team

- The FIA appointed Pirro even though they’re not supposed to have driver stewards who are linked by nationality to the cause of a championship contender

- Pirro is therefore biased in favour of Fernando Alonso and the FIA smell of elderberries

- Is he a dole scrounger and a single mum as well? Probably – pass the matches, Tristan…

You don’t even have to know much about F1, or motorsport in general, to see this for the codswallop it is. Emmanuele Pirro was a test driver for McLaren and a multiple Le Mans winner (and touring car winner) for Audi. I know him well from my days in sportscar racing and can testify that not only is he a true gent, he doesn’t take orders from anybody.

During his time at Benetton in Formula 1 he was royally shafted by Flavio Briatore. About nine years ago, when Benetton became Renault, I was helping to write an ensemble feature for a magazine in which we contacted all the team’s ex-drivers and invited them to sum up their memories of their time there. When I rang Emmanuele he simply wasn’t interested in doing an on-the-record denouncement of someone who had harmed his career. “It’s a long time ago now,” he said. “In many ways it was a good opportunity for me. I have only good memories.”

Unfortunately the next person I phoned was Roberto Moreno, who spent the next 75 minutes heating my ear up with a full and frank expression of his feelings on the subject. Shame I only had space for 50 words…

Anyway, needless to say, the Daily Mail’s story has been taken up and promulgated by another F1 ‘news’ source with little connection to the real world: GMM. What a surprise!

You know it’s a funny old world when the winner of GP2, Formula 1’s premier feeder series, is beaten to an actual F1 seat by, er, the bloke he beat to the GP2 title. Welcome, then, to the funny old world of Pastor Maldonado.

In spite of a management contract with Nicolas Todt (if that’s not a VIP ticket to a plum F1 seat, nothing is) and backing from Venezuela’s state oil company, not to mention a high-profile pat on the back from President Chavez himself, Maldonado has failed to secure a seat alongside Kamui Kobayashi at Sauber in 2011. Instead that place will be occupied by 2010 GP2 runner-up Sergio Perez in a move that has been eased by a considerable injection of funds from Telmex, the Mexican telecoms concern.

But exactly how big an injection are we talking about?

It’s perhaps a reflection on the sort of traveller who regularly commutes between London and Shanghai that the British Airways 777 employed for this purpose has a mammoth First/Club section, while Economy occupies about 10 rows down the back. Nevertheless it was in this cupboard-sized vestibule that I found myself sitting next to Perez on the way back from the Chinese Grand Prix a couple of years ago.

Back then, Perez had just kicked off his GP2 Asia campaign with a DNF and a seventh place, hot on the heels of flunking the lead of the British Formula 3 Championship. Still, everyone was talking about his potential, and plenty of people were excited about (and keen to get their hands on) the reputed pot of gold that Telmex brought. This was just as the financial crash was just crashing, but Honda were yet to withdraw from F1 – in fact, Nick Fry and Ross Brawn were sitting several rows ahead, beyond the gilded curtain, in altogether comfier seats.

He wasn’t the most talkative chap, but he owed me a favour. I’d woken him up as they came round with the boxes from the laughably misnamed ‘All Day Deli’. I made the slight tactical error of asking him what had happened in the closing rounds of British F3 (cue a screed of excuses, thankfully lightened by the arrival of some liquid refreshment – diss BA cabin crew if you like, but they’re generous with the vin rouge). I then asked him what on earth he was doing ‘down the back’ of a 12-hour flight when he had a fair bit of sponsor’s wedge behind him – especially when various unimportant persons and hangers-on, such as TV pundits and marketing types, had ‘turned left’.

He replied that it was more important to spend the money that was being disbursed on his behalf wisely, ie on the business of racing, than to swan around like a VIP when he hadn’t earned that status yet.

I was impressed by his attitude. Impressed by his raw pace during races, too, although his results have been patchy. For the latter reason you may read some hemming and hawing from the kind of pundits who do their research on Wikipedia. Ignore them. This fellow has talent.

And after all, Kamui Kobayashi didn’t set the world aflame in GP2, did he?