Michael Moynihan

LEWIS Hamilton . . . what were you thinking?
News broke last week of the former world champion Formula One driver coming to the attention of Australian police for dangerous driving down under.
That must have been some conversation when he wound down his window.
“Who do you think you are, Lewis Hamilton?”
“Well . . .”
The Australian media have pointed out that what Hamilton was up to was “hoon driving”. Nothing to do with the former British Secretary for Defence, it’s the Down-Under euphemism for what we refer to as boy racer antics.
Stupidity, to use the clinical term.
Lewis was fishtailing and so forth – like the lingo? – in much the same way sixteen-year-old boys on provisional licences burn up supermarket car parks on the weekend to impress fifteen-year-old girls chewing gum as they perch on the shopping trolleys.
(A complicated mathematical equation can be used, in which the speed at which the gum is being chewed is cross-referenced with the decibel loudness of the squealing rear wheels, to estimate the time of the evening at which the gardai arrive).
You’d imagine someone would pull Lewis to one side and explain how things operate: when you’re a Formula One champion, you don’t have to get up those kinds of manoeuvres to impress girls. The usual methodology for that consists simply of pointing to oneself and saying: “Hey everybody! Look at me! I’m a racing car driver!”
For a while Lewis was shaping up well – he was going out with Nicole Scherzinger, dead-eyed commandant of those wonderful ambassadors for female empowerment, the Pussycat Dolls. If they’ve broken up – our apologies to all readers but we haven’t been tracking our way through E! News too often recently – then we can only hope fervently that they get back together: it’d have to be better than seeing him squander his aura as an Australian copper asks to see if he’s on a provisional licence or what.
In that sense one wonders if the huge glamour of the Formula One driver will ever recover, frankly. We go back to the seventies, and the days of James Hunt, who led the kind of energetic social life that would make Colin Farrell whimper like a kitten.
Go back a little bit further and you had people like Al Pacino and Paul Newman – and forward in time, you had Tom Cruise - trying to prove just how cool they are by PRETENDING to be racing car drivers.
And what do we have now? A former world champion showing off his handbrake turns?
It’s the thin end of the wedge. Believe us, it’s only a matter of time until Bernie Ecclestone and company decide to uncork sparkling cider instead of champagne at Monaco and Monza. You heard it here first.