F1 Fanatic

In the past 24 hours I’ve seen comments, here and on other sites, variously suggesting that:

McLaren are sabotaging Lewis Hamilton
McLaren are sabotaging Jenson Button
Mercedes are sabotaging Michael Schumacher
Red Bull are sabotaging Mark Webber

It seems some people have a knee-jerk response to any driver being beaten by his team mate – over however brief a period of time – that there must be some sinister conspiracy within the team to undermine him.

Here’s the thing: Drivers have good weekend and bad weekends. Sometimes a bad weekend can be down to nothing more than being a tenth of a second slower than their team mate over a single lap on a Saturday afternoon.

And sometimes F1’s cutting-edge, powerful, experimental cars break down. And sometimes pit crews, under phenomenal pressure to get four wheels on and off in less time than it takes to read this sentence, fumble a change or cross-thread a wheel not.

It does not mean there are devious intrigues going on in every team.

Constantly jumping to these silly conclusions that teams are spending nine-figure sums going racing and then deliberately hobbling one (or, apparently, both) of their entries is complete nonsense.