Jeremy Clarkson on Lewis Hamilton in todays Sunday Times:
"After Lewis Hamilton crossed the finishing line in Turkey and clinched a record-equalling seventh Formula One world championship, he spent the next hour vomiting dreary right-on platitudes into every microphone he could find.
Kids were told that if they stuck at it, they too could realise their dreams, which isn’t necessarily the case because not everyone can sleep with Alicia Vikander.
After a brief pause while Lewis got in touch with his feminine side by pretending to have a little weep, he was really into his stride, urging the sport to be more woke on racial issues and more sustainable too. And then off he went to play with his vegan dog.
The only slight deviation from the Twitter playbook was an admission that as well as his usual post-race tipple, meat-free minestrone soup, he would allow himself some wine. This puts him a long way from Keith Moon and caused a friend’s son to send me a text: “What an arse this man is.”
He is not the only one to think like that. When Fernando Alonso won his world championship, thousands of delighted locals ringed the house where he’d been brought up, shouting jubilantly. But when Lewis won, his home town of Stevenage didn’t react at all. It’s as if he is not loved here.
That’s a shame because when I first met Lewis, 13 years ago, he was a very engaging, very likeable and very polite young man. He was also, very obviously, an extraordinarily good driver. The best in history? The statistics say yes, and many people in and around the sport would agree. And if you argued they’d point to the race on that Turkish skating rink as further proof that superlatives are needed when discussing his abilities. “He lapped his teammate,” they’d say, forgetting perhaps that his teammate had damaged his car on the first corner, making it pretty much undriveable.
I’m not going to get involved in a debate about who’s the best F1 driver, though, so let’s move on to the fact that in Turkey the podium was occupied by Lewis, 35, Sergio Pérez, 30, and Sebastian Vettel, 33. All the twentysomething young guns were slithering hither and thither, attempting moves that were impossible and paying the price. The old boys, with their wise heads, just went about their business calmly and sensibly, and were the last men standing.
Is that what we want, though? Old men bumbling along and staying out of trouble? Or do we want Max Verstappen pirouetting down the main straight and Carlos Sainz driving like he’s in a Lancia Stratos and Charles Leclerc costing himself a podium finish on the last corner by attempting a smoky pipe-dream pass on Pérez?
Weirdly, while I enjoyed the antics of the embryos and the foetuses, and recognise that their oversteery antics and lurid lock-ups are pages they must turn until they too become rounded and complete, I did find myself rooting for Vettel.
Partly this is because I like him. He’s very funny. And it is partly because, since Ferrari told him earlier in the season that he wouldn’t be required next year, he has seemingly been on a mission to damage his car as often as possible. And he doesn’t just biff a wing that would be fairly simple and cheap to repair. Oh no, when he goes off, he makes sure that all four corners hit the barriers as hard as possible.
This makes me happy because I’m not really a fan of Ferrari any more. It seems to me to be mostly a licensing operation for hats and T-shirts. Yet the fact the F1 team is in disarray this year — as I write, it is behind not just Mercedes but Red Bull, McLaren, Racing Point and even Renault — suggests the company’s best engineers are working on the road cars."
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