Just a few weeks ago Jeremy Clarkson was giddy with excitement at the start of a new Formula 1 season – but it seems that enthusiasm has already dissipated.
He declared on the grid prior to the Bahrain Grand Prix : "I adore Formula 1. It was infuriating for years and years and now it's back because they can follow one another and the aerodynamics are so much better."
Clarkson also predicted that Max Verstappen would win the race and was duly proven right. Not only did Red Bull finish first and second in the season-opener, but they repeated the trick two weeks later in Saudi Arabia with Sergio Perez taking the chequered flag.
In both races, Red Bull gave their drivers target lap times to hit rather than encouraging their drivers to race each other. And the same was true for Mercedes in Jeddah, who tried to manage the pace of George Russell and Lewis Hamilton.
Writing in his Sun column, Clarkson was clearly left bemused by those actions. "We like to think that when the red lights go out at the beginning of a Formula 1 race, every single one of the drivers goes round every corner and down every straight as fast as is humanly and mechanically possible," he wrote.
"That’s what racing is all about, surely? It seems not. When Lewis Hamilton came up behind his team-mate, George Russell, in last weekend's Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, George solved the problem by driving more quickly. Why didn't he do that in the first place?
"And then you had the Red Bulls. To stop them from doing any racing, each of the drivers was told to do the same speed as one another.
"I know there are boring reasons for this, tyre wear and saving the engine and so on, but I wonder how many people would watch athletics if they thought half the competitors were not going as fast as they could. To prolong the life of their shoes."
