There has been a lot of caterwauling from some of my journalistic buddies 6,000 miles adrift from the Japanese Grand Prix.
This controversy relates to a reporter who covers Formula One for the Guardian being asked by Max Verstappen to leave his press briefing last Thursday before the race in Suzuka.
The name of the scribbler in question is Giles Richards – affectionately known to his pals as ‘Snake’, a moniker he delights in, the origins of which I do not remotely know. But when he turned up in the paddock a few years ago, he asked his new colleagues to address him thus.
Leaving that aside, a few armchair critics in my trade have waded in on social media and in print over the last few days, telling some of us who were in Japan that the assembled media crowd ought to have walked out of the Red Bull hospitality area in solidarity with ‘Snake’.
How do they know those there didn’t?
One journalist did leave the room, but you had to be there to know that.
Putting aside the rights and wrongs of the basis of the dispute – namely Richards, as Verstappen claims, grinning minutes after he (Verstappen) lost the world title in Abu Dhabi last year, asking if he regretted his road rage at the Spanish Grand Prix which arguably cost him in the final analysis, forfeiting nine points – I think internecine journalistic disputes are better dealt with over coffee or dinner or at the bar than in grandstanding flexing on X/Twitter and the like.
Max Verstappen asked a British journalist to leave his press briefing before the Japanese Grand Prix
He took issue with a question asked last season by Guardian journalist Giles Richards about his red mist in the Spanish Grand Prix, which cost him enough points to win the title
Particularly so as some of the reporters and their publications who now stand in the pulpit supped from Sir Alex Ferguson’s chalice all the while he banned the BBC from interviewing him for seven years. And he drummed out other journalists, the bully. Yet most of my comrades, me too on odd occasions, filled their and our pages with his pronouncements.
On the three occasions I have been ‘banned’ by Mercedes and, further, threatened with exclusion from Formula One – as well as ‘expelled’ by UK Athletics – no Guardian journalist so much as lifted his typing finger in support of me.
Matthew Syed, a Commonwealth Games table-tennis champion, preached in The Times the other day at great length, opining that: ‘They should have walked out. All of them.’
I’ll tell you what, old mucker, the Times could have walked out if they had been in Japan, a privilege that costs thousands of pounds of travel expenditure. At least the blessed Guardian man was in town to be excommunicated.
Also in attendance were the Mail and the Press Association and Reuters. Other national daily British publications? AWOL. As well as no Times, there was no Telegraph, no Mirror, no Sun, no Express. I could go on.
I have always got on tremendously well with Syed. So warmly, in fact, do I like Matthew that when in Greece we covered the lighting of the Olympic torch ahead of London 2012, with 11 women portraying Vestal Virgins and a parabolic mirror deployed to spark a flame at the Temple of Hera, I told him that, excruciatingly, the light had gone out amid the nonsense choreography.
With his head in a guidebook, and only me to hold his hand, he had not remotely seen this malfunction. He was grateful I had shared with him what might otherwise have been my flimsy ‘exclusive’.
His graphic report in The Times the next day spared no detail: ‘The lighting ceremony at Ancient Olympia yesterday morning went off without a hitch — unless you count the flame being extinguished at the very moment the “Priestess” came solemnly walking over the brow of the hill and into the ancient stadium.
On the three occasions I have been ‘banned’ by Mercedes and, further, threatened with exclusion from Formula One – as well as ‘expelled’ by UK Athletics – no Guardian journalist so much as lifted his typing finger in support of me
‘Everyone seemed to freeze. Some wondered if it was part of the act.
‘Others looked to see if there was a substitute flame nearby. Almost everyone seemed struck by a sense that this unfortunate and somewhat embarrassing mishap was a metaphor for the travails of modern Greece.’
Who is anyone to judge other hacks in public?
It is always poignant to walk out of the press room at the end of the Suzuka paddock. A helicopter is poised for action some 20 yards away.
This was the exact spot from which Jules Bianchi was flown to a nearby hospital 12 years ago after hitting a recovery vehicle in the wet, incurring injuries from which he died nine months later, aged 25.
The Frenchman, who was driving from Marussia, became the first and, thankfully, only Formula One driver to die since Ayrton Senna at Imola in 1994.
It is a remarkable statement on the improvement in safety standards that such tragedy is rare in the modern genre of grand prix racing, but that damned but helpful helicopter is a reminder of the inherent dangers of the sport.
A Netflix generation may blanch at the view, or pretend to blanch at the view, but James Hunt, the great British boulevardier who won the world championship in Fuji 50 years ago, summed up what he considered to be an essential element of motor racing’s appeal to the wider public. He said: ‘People will deny it all day long, but they watch it to see if someone will get killed.’
As they used to say in sixth-form essay assignments: Discuss.
Is Lewis Hamilton undergoing a revival, or is it a mirage? Jury out on this one, though this member of the dozen is sceptical.
Lewis took his first Ferrari podium in Shanghai a fortnight ago after a year of trying, but then fell away at Suzuka despite a safety car seriously helping him to latch on to third place before he finished sixth.
Lewis Hamilton finished sixth at Suzuka, a disappointing follow-up to his first Ferrari podium in Shanghai a fortnight ago
Hamilton described his race as ‘pretty terrible’ – at 41, will he ever be able to summon the magic of old again?
The following is not my judgment but his: ‘Pretty terrible ultimately because I was P3 and I ended up going backwards. I just need to understand where I was losing all the power.’
Oh dear, this regression while his Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc finished third.
I sincerely hope Lewis can rekindle some of the magic of old. But he is 41 and history records nobody of that age is as good a driver/sportsman as he was at 31. Certainly not since the likes of Fangio, though those guys were, to put it simply, older because of the War.
I don’t wish to go all Alan Whicker on you, even though he is a hero of mine because he was the greatest broadcaster of all. (For students of such things, go to 20mins 9sec into Journey of a Lifetime on YouTube, as he walks along a murderous street in Houston; it is unsurpassed as a ‘piece to camera’.)
But if you are a vicarious F1 traveller, I should report that on returning to Japan after an absence of a few years, I sense the people here remain the most hospitable, gentlest, and politest.
There is still no litter on the streets, not a stain of chewing gum expectorant, and barely a cigarette stub discarded. Order and civility are ingrained. The guards on the train bow as they leave each carriage. Ours dress down. The age of the Station Master, with a capital S and M, died years ago.
Here in Japan, the train staff are accoutred in dark blue hats and suits, and the elegance contributes to a respectful aura. The bus driver who took us in from Shiroko station to the track put on his peaked cap the moment he switched on the engine to drive away.
If someone is sitting in your seat on the train, you go to the guard to ask him to deal with the situation rather than challenge the interlopers yourself. How civilised and orderly.
Does it remind you of the London Underground?
