The thin silver line

I called Lewis the best overtaker in April - he still is. (pic ph-stop)

It’s only been a couple of months since I last dabbled with the blog, in motorsport that can be an age. It took a split second for JR Hildebrand to lose the Indy 500, well over four hours went by before Jenson Button finally made Sebastian Vettel crack under pressure in Montreal and the Earth turned on its axis as the thrills, spills, tears and triumph at a truly epic Le Mans unfolded. It took a few more days for the Bahrain Grand Prix to go from off, to on, to off again – leaving the FIA and Formula One looking foolish.

Meanwhile it took only a couple of weeks for Lewis Hamilton to go from hero to villain, his reputation proving more fragile than carbon fibre. There are few drivers in the world who are so electrifying to watch. The moving DRS rear wings may be an artificial way to enhance the show but Hamilton’s real-deal racecraft is anything but false. In the fullness of time these indiscretions will shrink from mountains to the tiny mole hills that they really are.

As for Lewis switching teams, that seems like a load of Red Bull to me. But you can never say never. It is natural for a driver to shop around, Red Bull likewise, although with a world champion already at the wheel of the RB7 it seems that this speculation is just something to keep Fleet Street occupied, as if they haven’t got enough going on right now…

Down the other end of the timesheets Daniel Ricciardo will be making his debut for Hispania. The young Australian looks like a hot prospect (although I’m more excited about the next Red Bull Junior driver in line, Jean-Eric Vergne) so why stick him in such a struggling team? It seems that his presence on the grid is a ploy to apply pressure on the track and off it to Webber, Alguersari and Buemi. The message is clear – Ricciardo is coming so you guys had better get your skates on. You would think that if Lewis Hamilton was truly looking at making a switch there wouldn’t be any need for Red Bull to be feeding backmarker teams cash to train up drivers.  Tis the season to be silly, so who knows where this game of musical race seats will take us?

Meanwhile I’ll be hoping for more fireworks from Lewis Hamilton this weekend at Silverstone. As another Mclaren driver in a yellow helmet once said, if you no longer go for a gap, you are no longer a racing driver. Mclaren don’t need to fill up the other teams with their test drivers to get Messrs Hamilton and Button to drive any better, that’s for sure.

In the hot seat

 

Fancy a go at this? Hirvonen won in his Fiesta, but the star turn of Sweden came from a complete novice. (pic by Ford Europe)

On to happier matters. The new for 2011 World Rally Championship started its hopefully bright future on the gleaming white snow of Sweden last week. The big story was an incredibly tight final day that saw five drivers duking it out for the first victory of the new era, with Ford’s Mikko Hirvonen taking top spot, although the story that caught my eye was about a surprise interloper in this lead scrap – a chap called Chris Patterson.

 

The British interloper was thrust into the limelight at the end of the rally after Petter Solberg was caught speeding by the cops. A rally driver speeding, who’d have thunk it?

 

If you break the limit in Sweden you serve a driving ban that starts 48 hours after the offence, which seems like a pretty strong deterrent for the speedy. This fascinating forfeit for the fast left the former World Rally Champ and all-round nice guy with no choice but to hand the keys of his brand new Citroen over to his co-driver Chris Patterson. More used to looking into his lap than out of the windscreen, the raw rookie found himself needing to hold onto fifth over the final stage with non other than 7 million time champion Sebastian Loeb chasing them down. You can see Chris’ first experience of the driving seat here. It looks like a sterling job with only a little interference from his somewhat over-qualified driving instructor, just look how chuffed he is at the end of the stage!

 

This magic moment brings to mind Bernie Ecclestone in his Brabham days when he reputedly sent a message out on the PA system in Montreal back in 1980 asking if there was anybody in the stands who fancied being an F1 driver after Niki Lauda declared he was “tired of driving in circles”. Argentine driver Ricardo Zunino popped up and gladly took the seat, although it seems unlikely the reality of his appointment was quite so Hollywood. Zunino, a competent hand in F2, was already on Ecclestone’s radar and the ringmaster has always enjoyed a good story, but who are we to ruin such a charming tale?

 

A little more successful as an impromptu stand-in was John Boland. An Irish politician, he went to spectate at the Olympics revival in Athens in 1896 and came home with two gold medals. Unbeknownst to Boland his friend had entered him into the tennis competition where he excelled

by winning the gold in both the singles and doubles at the first modern Olympic Games. He never played competitive tennis again, it wasn’t going to get any better than that. Boland went back to politics, his Olympic golds becoming the world’s best ever holiday souvenirs.

 

The professionalism of sport today makes this about as likely to be repeated as the pilot on your Easyjet flight inviting you to land the plane yourself so he can take some time off and join the mile high club. The Solberg-Patterson car pool is about as close as we’ll see in motorsport to ‘one of us’ being thrust into the spotlight; Renault won’t even let its band of merry reserve drivers loose in its Grand Prix car, so we won’t be seeing Bernie asking the spectators to have a crack at driving any time soon.