It seems that Mercedes AMG have got all in a huff about no one seeing them, well, Lewis Hamilton, dominate the Japanese Grand Prix.
Talking to reporters in the Suzuka paddock after the team’s eleventh win of the year, non-executive chairman Niki Lauda told reporters: "I was watching TV all day long, and funny enough I saw Saubers and a lot of Honda cars, but I don't know why. Somebody must do the filming here; I have to ask what's wrong with him. I want to see Bernie next week and ask him what the reason is. At the moment I can't say much but it was funny today that even the pit stop of Lewis - the leader - you only saw him driving out. You didn't even see if he changed his wheels. So it was interesting."
The three-time World Champion was backed-up by Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff, and he does have a point. The leading Merc did indeed receive only a morsel of TV coverage, but there is a very good reason for that: it would have been a waste of TV air time.
Why would the producer tell his camera crew to follow a lone car – despite its position – when there was actual racing action going on behind? Yes we’d like to occasionally check in with Lewis to make sure he’s ok, but we’d rather watch some wheel-to-wheel action, even if it’s Jenson Button being humiliated by a Torro Rosso.
It was put to Wolff and Lauda that the lack of coverage could have been the doing of Bernie Ecclestone as a form of revenge for Mercedes’ refusal to supply engines to Red Bull from 2016. Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz is threatening to pull out of F1 because his team isn’t winning anymore, and Ecclestone is not keen to lose him. Both men refuted this statement, and rightly so.
But this sounds more like people looking for conspiracy theories when none exist.
The cameras will follow the action, and when a car is out front by itself minding its own business, it’s not really the sort of “entertainment” everyone wants to see. It’s fun for the team and the sponsors to see their man command the field, but we want to see Max Verstappen nearly lose it on the exit on 130R.
During the early 2000s when Michael Schumacher was winning everything we had the same thing, and likewise when F1 was nothing more than a Sebastian Vettel benefit race a few years ago. People want to see action.
You can’t have it both ways; if you’re going to dominate, after a time you become boring and people will turn off. So forgive the cameras for giving the people what they want: Will Stevens doing a 360 degrees spin on one of the fastest corners in motorsport.
After all, if the cameras had followed Lewis the whole time, we would have missed the other Mercedes’ brilliant move on Valterri Bottas.
