What a difference a week makes. Lewis brings his Mum to Abu Dhabi, orders a birthday cake and suddenly the perfect “Happy Bubble” - copyright Jenson Button - is created.
Of course it might have been a lot different if a sniper hadn’t taken out Sebastian Vettel’s right rear tyre at turn two (I jest, but such a thing was suggested years ago as an explanation for a sudden departure at turn one in Monza. In fairness, even the most eager of conspiracy theorists wouldn’t pick urn two at Abu Dhabi for the job...)
Anyway, that trashed Pirelli did the race a favour because Vettel had made a clean getaway from a pole position that he had pinched from Hamilton after practice and qualifying, until Q3, had been dominated by the Englishman.
That Vettel’s pole time was slower than Hamilton’s Q2 fastest lap indicates that Lewis dropped the ball on Saturday. Vettel’s long run pace had been strong in practice suggesting that Hamilton really needed to be out front from the get-go on Sunday to put one over Red Bull.
Well, we’ll never know now whether Hamilton could have responded to Vettel’s perfect start but gift horses aren’t inspected too diligently down Stevenage way so, while the number one Red Bull speared off track, Lewis scorched off into the distance to thunderous applause and all chat about his troubled state of mind was shelved for another fortnight at least.
It could well kick off again in a fortnight when Lewis gets to Brazil for the final push. The level of hostility from the home fans in Sao Paolo will tell us much about the respect for Hamilton and also, I would suggest, about what they think of Felipe Massa.
Brazilians are an affable nation by inclination but if Hamilton is visited by a cacophony of booing throughout the weekend then you’ll know they still love Felipe. Anything less and it might indicate how far he has fallen since the frenzy of that heroic failure at Interlagos in ’08.
Off track, the political gunslingers are preparing for the latest shootout as negotiations heat up about the future of the series.
Luca di Montezemolo evoked misty eyed memories of Giancarlo Baghetti’s extraordinary world championship debut win at Reims in 1961 to support his case for three-car teams in the series. The fact is that Baghetti was no more than a talented journeyman whose cause was greatly aided once his team mates Phil Hill and Wolfgang Von Trips dropped out of contention.
He had the most powerful car in the race on a track that demanded a big motor and just about held off a couple of breathless Porsches. Anyway, I digress. Di Montezemolo might just as easily have pointed to 1976 when Ferrari gave one of their gorgeous 312Ts to Giancarlo Minardi to run for promising Italian F2 driver Giancarlo Martini in the non-championship races at Brands Hatch and Silverstone.
The experiment was apparently all about preparing young Italians for F1 proper but was not repeated. More recently Red Bull have done the same thing with their Toro Rosso team until the other teams cried ‘no fair’ and made them design their own cars.
Either way, it’s all folly. One statistic that emerged yesterday was that only five drivers have stood on the podium in the last 48 races.
That’s not because they are such wonderful drivers and so much better than everyone else. Four of them are the best drivers but they’re being greatly aided by their cars. If the likes of Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull were allowed to run third cars then there’s every chance they’d lock out the top nine positions, thereby making it even tougher for the likes of HRT, Marussia and Caterham to keep swimming in the shark pool.
Of course Montezemolo’s proposal is just a bargaining tool, really. A distraction; an instrument to confuse and wear down opposition as they posture over the Resource Restriction Agreement and, ultimately, a new Concorde Agreement.
Instead of scrapping over three car teams they should tear up the current Concorde and carve up the revenues so that HRT get the same funding from central funding as Ferrari. That way the minnows would get some financial stability and a chance to establish themselves and maybe one day contemplate a podium.
The rich teams would still garner the biggest slice of the sponsorship pie so it wouldn’t suddenly be some sort of socialist revolution of the sort that would cause di Montezemolo and his buddies to spill their gin and tonics.
This sort of revenue split is what sustains US sport and makes their NFL and Baseball leagues in general so much less predictable than F1. The lack of such equality is what makes English Premier league soccer such a dull two-tier system with the same four or five teams in contention every year.
Just like F1.
It won’t change, of course. The rich will just get richer. But it should...