Glitz and glamour but Bernie Ecclestone’s winning formula still hard to love

All sport is, inherently, ludicrous.

Let’s start right there. Whether it’s thumping leather balls with your head and feet, sticking your noggin between the bums of two other men or women in a rugby scrum or running ad nauseum around a track, the whole thing doesn’t really make any sense in any practical or biological way.

It’s why all these online forums where people laud their chosen sport at the expense of others are so tiresome. Hurling is the greatest field sport on earth, apparently, football is the beautiful game and rugby is, well, rugby. Unfortunately, this is the time of year when those pointless arguments migrate like locusts from our small screens to the slightly bigger ones we call TVs. And into newspapers and magazines, too.

Sports person of the year. Sports personality of the year. Sports team of the year. The list goes on. And on. The BBC had their usual stab at it last weekend and it created a right old kerfuffle with Lewis Hamilton, the world’s best Formula 1 driver, beating Rory McIlroy, the world’s best golfer, to the honour of Britain’s favourite.

The very title of Personality of the Year is, in itself, outdated and misleading although, in fairness to Hamilton, he inhabits the most ludicrously bling sport on the planet, has Nicole Scherzinger as a girlfriend, and the only people who drive cool cars as well as him work in Hollywood as stuntmen for a fraction of his pay. Look, this stuff matters not a jot, but it is the elevated importance lent to F1 in general that grates here.

Like, should F1 even qualify as a sport anymore?

Hamilton is unquestionably a driver of considerable talent, but he is just one, admittedly central, link in a chain that stretches to something close to the 1,000 employees the Mercedes AmMG Petronas Formula 1 team employ from its base in Brackley, Northamptonshire. What would Hamilton have achieved without them, or without his team’s €300m budget in the season just gone, the third biggest pot on the entire grid behind Red Bull and Ferrari? How would he have managed without their Mercedes-Benz PU106A Hybrid engine or the F1 W05 Hybrid chassis and state-of-the-art Pirelli tyres?

David Coulthard, the former F1 driver and now commentator, has estimated that responsibility for performance breaks down into a percentage ratio of 80:20 in favour of the car over the man behind the wheel. Nico Rosberg, Hamilton’s fellow driver at Mercedes last season and again in the campaign to come, has made a more or less identical estimation in the recent past.

The Olympic Games is by no means an idyllic sporting body, but even it did away with events that depended on engine power way back in the mists of time. Jacques Rogge, who was president of the International Olympics committee when he visited Silverstone as the guest of F1’s supreme leader, Bernie Ecclestone, in 2012, updated this stance when he remarked that the Games “are about the competition for the athletes, not the equipment”.

Whatever your views on McIlroy — and heaven knows there are any amount of conflicting opinions out there — or the fact that he enjoys the best of equipment and preparation, the fact is that when he stands on the first tee at Augusta or St Andrews, it is a case of him against the rest of the field. Everyone else is free to use the same clubs, hit the same little white ball and wear the same polo shirts.

I’m only getting started here with F1. There was a time when the circus around the sport played second fiddle to events on the track and in the pit, but gone are the days when the drivers’ championship could captivate your lukewarm punter. The documentary ‘Senna’ which was released to widespread acclaim two years ago only added to the lament for what the sport has become on both sides of the fence. Overtaking, for example, is less likely or advisable than on the narrowest of country boreens.

This column had the good fortune to travel to Germany and Hungary for the Hockenheim and Budapest Grand Prix back in the mid-noughties as a guest of Eddie Jordan and his team, but they were experiences that instilled memories of haute cuisine and the glamour and riches of the VIPs walking through the paddock like it was a catwalk although the thousands of Ferrari ‘tifosi’ lent a rare touch of reality and genuine sports culture to the whole affair.

Who won the races? Couldn’t tell you. Hard to care. Even then. Even there.

* Email: [e-mail]

Twitter: @Rackob