F1 Fanatic

McLaren not going to tar and feather Hamilton:

Martin Whitmarsh will not take any internal action against Lewis Hamilton for tweetpic of sensitive data today.

— Ian Parkes (@ianparkesf1) September 2, 2012

Whitmarsh has described Hamilton’s actions “an error of judgment and corrected fairly quickly and apologised for”.

— Ian Parkes (@ianparkesf1) September 2, 2012

The last time a driver did something that resulted in an apology to the team, Vitaly Petrov lost his seat.

Though whether that was the straw that broke the camel’s back is open to debate.

I think it’s more a case of McLaren not wanting to upset Hamilton while they negotiate a new contract. Going after him for this might prompt him to join another team, or inspire him to become surly and disinterested so that McLaren have to bow to one or two of his demands to keep him happy.

Hamilton does have a tendency to get distracted by his personal life. I think that posting this telemetry is symptomatic of his lack of thinking when his mind is somewhere else.

The question is what set him off. Is this an isolated incident, where he was simply in a bad place because of his aunt’s death? Or is it perpetual because he is stressing over his contract? Or both? Or even something else that we don’t know about?

@prisoner-monkeys Whatever it is, we don’t know & we probably won’t know because no one knows what happens behind closed doors & I’ve always been concerned about Lewis himself ever since he’s been tweeting a lot.

There’s a really fine line in modern sport (not just in F1) between professionalism & pure honesty, ignoring the deleted & thoughtless tweets like the data telemetry, Lewis is being himself & expressing what’s instantly on his mind, of course in terms of emotions we sometimes find it difficult to read into words (they can be meaningless) whilst you also want to be weary of what you say or write but isn’t this what the majority of fans want from drivers? To speak their minds & not be the ‘robots’ they claim drivers to be, now everyone is discussing about how it offends the team, affects the contract discussion & to some extent, people are still complaining.

Social media (namely Twitter) has been a powerful tool used by famous people to get them closer to their fans & supporters, even then they’re still scrupulous about what they mention & Lewis at the moment is slightly distancing himself from that mindset, you can tell via his use of informal language like ‘mofo’ & ‘homies’, I’m sure there’s plenty of more, maybe it’s kind of a side-effect with his auntie recently passing away, I don’t know & maybe for some reasons unknown as well but honestly – they may be mindless & offensive but it’s honesty & a great insight. Referring back to the fine line, just next time, let’s hope Lewis can hit that line nicely.

So Hamilton was effectively 0.4s quicker than Button

And while Peter Sauber is swapping Perez for Senna, he can swap Kobayashi for Massa. Why settle for one under-performing Brazilian when you can have two?

why would Peter Sauber want to change either of his two drivers at the moment?

The only conceivable answer that is also realistic is that he has no choice in the matter. Driver movements are a two-way street. Where Sauber can drop his drivers as he sees fit, so too can his drivers leave the team if they see fit. Perez has indicated that he wants to stay, but that doesn’t meant that Kobayashi is a sure thing.