“This is a vastly different world accommodating a vastly different sport”
DOUG NYE
A late, lugubrious – but wise – friend of mine had a rather splendidly deflating line which he used on special occasions. He would consider the evidence of any argument, and then remark flatly “I think there’s rather less to this than meets the eye.”
It seems to me that this should perhaps be applied to the manufactured hyper-enthusiasm generated this season by Red Bull’s certainly admirable run of success with Max Verstappen and its RB19: “So much success has been entirely unprecedented in the entire history of human kind, we are living through a phenomenal period of sporting history”, our jaws should all be dropped clear to the carpet...
Of course one expects this kind of stuff from marketeers as proficient as those who built the Red Bull fizz legend in the first place, but much of it hasn’t come from them at all. Instead the motor sporting media – especially broadcast media – seems largely to have been doing the job for them, statistics brandished grown from the kind of often purblind study pursued for decades past by ball sports devotees.