Martin Brundle

Mallya forced to relinquish Control, Ecclestone U-turn, Tooned Cancelled, Sky F1 reporting gets even worse

by

London GP: Ecclestone says the race is off that was never on. London – city or Olympic Park http://www.cityam.com/sport/central-london-grand-prix-says-ecclestone. I love how he then goes to great lengths to explain why it would be cost efficient and a great idea though. Maybe this undying enthusiasm for pointless ideas and lost causes is how Mokpo not Seoul ended up with the Korean GP (South Korea, Ecclestone and The Emporer’s New Clothes)

Tooned: is cancelled due to Lewis leaving the team – so for the rest of this year at least. Would love to see it return with Jenson and Perez next year. Perez character could be based on being a relative of my childhood favourite cartoon, Speedy Gonzales, a very very fast mexican mouse. For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure…(YouTube). If you enjoyed that and want a free box set worth of them…(YouTube). More importantly Tooned is a way of attracting kids interest in F1 and was a good idea. I think they should just do a best mates breakup story about Lewis and Jenson anyway. My best mate aged 22 didn’t speak to me for a year – its life.

Read more

Lewis keeps Mercedes in F1

by

Now the dust is settling following the Hamilton announcement, there are a number of threads to tidy up, but we’ll start with some housekeeping.

Firstly, forgive me for some of the Tabloid headlines which are presently being used and are designed to attract attention, but we are a new blog and it is a good way of grabbing readers who have not heard of us. I will get to the headline of this article shortly.

Also, there has been a certain amount of cynicism over whether we do in fact have access to ‘inside’ information at times, but this is not actually that important except from the fact it is helpful when trying to work out what will be the next talking point.

More fundamental to the articles being written is that we’re trying to address the issues and the questions the headline writers and mainstream F1 travelling media circus miss by chasing the breaking news.

This will hopefully mean that we will call things before the headline writers do. Feathers in the cap so far, Jake Humphrey leaving the BBC a week before it was announced. Further, today a number of high profile media commentators who travel with the F1 circus have now begun looking at why Lewis has actually left McLaren.

One example is Martin Brundle who said on the F1 show on Sky TV that if McLaren had really wanted to keep Lewis they could have done quite a lot more. Without using the word “pushed” he acknowledged McLaren had been feeling the need to move on from Lewis as much as Lewis did from McLaren. Others you will have seen have been saying similar things in reflection a day after the big announcement.

So that’s 2 strong predictions in the first 2 weeks of the blog – not too bad – but a weekly statistic that will be impossible to live up to I suspect.

Read more

Lewis had no choice. He was pushed.

by

The inevitable has happened! Nope, not Eddie Jordan being right again as he was 3 years ago when he called Schumacher’s return  – the inevitable is the angle of the stories which abound about Lewis Hamilton in the mainstream media.

“Hamilton is taking a big risk” (David Croft, Sky website).

Joe Saward, much respected long standing F1 writer says in his blog, “it will be a leap of great faith [Lewis has] in the German-owned operation, but may be a decision that the British youngster will one day regret”.

Martin Brundle tweets, “Statistics +gut feeling say Lewis has taken a big gamble”.

I could go on. These stories are the natural evolution from the stories written following the leak that Hamilton was in negotiations with Mercedes. The general themes of those articles back then were …that it was illogical to leave McLaren for Mercedes…surely Lewis would stay with a proven race winning team rather than take a risk…it’s all just negotiating rumours…it’s not about money.

Again, I could go on. Yet as I wrote last week (again getting lots of stick) I heard that Lewis was being pushed by McLaren. Of course no one was saying telling Lewis to “do one”, but the writing was on the wall in giant red letters 10m high.

Let’s also forget the “I heard” something (as I suggested in the last article) and look only into the scattered tea leaves.

Read more