Formula Premiership?
Posted by Robert Bright at 1:30PM on Friday 20 April, 2007 6 Comments
What could be a better way of spicing up the personalities involved in Formula One than introducing a little bit of the Premiership?
Ditch some of those establishment androids and replace them with football's finest examples of the unreconstructed working-class.
You'll have found the next James Hunt quicker than you can invent rhyming slang for his name, albeit with an accent that's more broken-bottle than cut-glass.
For a start, the players are already getting nicked for speeding on a regular basis, so they've clearly got enthusiasm for the fundamentals of the sport.
Then think about the wonderfully predictable ways they'd go about making a complete hash of their good fortune, falling drunkenly off yachts in Saint Tropez, throwing up over roulette tables in Monaco, suffering weekly tabloid humiliation thanks to another call girl kiss-and-tell.
Then there's the casual violence. Imagine someone like Graham Souness being shunted by Michael Schumacher. As soon as Schumacher had begun to smugly justify himself in the post-race interview, he'd be visited by a Souness head-butt.
And much as the redtops seek to condemn the likes of Bellamy, Dyer and Pennant, do you really think they'd give up all the entertaining column inches they provide outside the sport to write about Mark Webber's enthusiasm for kayaking?
Marvel at some of the priceless moronisms that pre- and post-race interviews would be littered with: "You can't do better than second on the podium", "When the tyres fell off, I knew we'd have some problems finishing the race" etc.
But best of all, in an attempt to emulate the footballer who strips off his shirt after scoring, we'd have the winning driver leaping from his car and spending the next 10 minutes excitedly trying to remove his Nomex suit and fireproof gear in order to swing it all victoriously around his head, running up and down the tarmac in nothing but soiled underwear.
Now who wouldn't give up a couple of hours on a Sunday to watch all that?
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6 Comments for "Formula Premiership?"
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How good would it be to replace that t***** Martin Brundle and his sidekick James Allen, with Andy Gray or Richard Keys from Sky Sports?
Andy Gray: 'Wow, those tyres are really round and going super fast'. It would be classic and make it more interesting for people who aren't interested in F1.
Hilarious stuff! Now how about Stella instead of champagne on the podium?
So you want a racing series that has drivers with personality, casual violence and showboating after wins? We got all that (and cars actually passing each other) in the States... it's called NASCAR.
Only certain personalities would work for this idea, though.
Hard-guy players like Souness, Vinnie Jones, Roy Keane, players who want to win at all costs and where the battles would be potentially death-defying and brilliant to watch.
Plus they would actually make the post-race interviews interesting to listen to, which is a stark contrast to the legion of PR trained ego's we have now.
But all the players I mentioned there are either retired or too old to do F1 these days.
And that brings me to the biggest setback, about who is an 'interesting' footballer or 'tough-guy' footballer these days?. Most of them are over-priced and over-paid divers and whingers who fall to pieces at the first sight of a challenge. Can you really see the likes of Francis Jeffers in an F1 car?
Unless you want to hear David Beckham trying to talk about suspension settings, tyre degradation and gearbox ratios... which would be rather amusing.
Well, it would certainly be nice to get some personalities on the grid, and Frank, genius with the Stella, maybe for the GB F1 this year?
And Rayzor, sorry dude, but comparing F1 and Nascar is like comparing a pedalo to an ocean-going yacht.
Any thug can drive a wheely bin with a V8 that revs slower than a Honda Civic, hence why there are so many 'exciting moments'.
Getting back to the point people, I'd love it if footballers with the kind of personality and charisma that Michael Owen has shown throughout his career were allowed into racing. Or maybe Mikel John Obi's incisive post-race rundowns? Or even John Barnes letting rip with his tactical know-how of Hamiltons' sweeps past Raikkonnen?
Maybe the those racing boys aren't as stupid as they seem now, huh? Word.