Jeremy Clarkson has taken aim at the relentless media duties forced upon Formula 1 drivers and claims he would fall down the order if he was a driver to he could avoid interviews
Jeremy Clarkson has claimed if he were an F1 driver he would deliberately come fourth so that he could dodge media duties. The former Top Gear presenter has bemoaned the amount of interviews forced upon a driver and believes it gives too much of an insight.
The sport has seen its popularity continue to grow in recent years, which has coincided with the huge boom that came from the Netflix Drive To Survive series, which has just released its seventh season.
From practice on Friday all the way through to the post-race debrief on a Sunday, every driver on the grid is subjected to huge media duties which they are required to undertake.
Those who finish on the podium come Sunday are then needed to face even more questioning with cameras rolling after the race before they then go into another interview room and Clarkson joked that he would actively give away positions to avoid the relentless media work.
He wrote in The Sun: “When you are a Formula 1 racing driver, you spend three hours a week driving your car and three hundred hours being interviewed by every damn herbert with an iPhone. You don’t get this in any other sport. Footballers arrive at the stadium and scuttle off a bus into a dressing room.
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“After the match, maybe one player has to answer one question and then that’s that. They’re all back on the bus. But in Formula 1, everyone is interviewed all the time. On the way to the track. On the track. Before the race. After the race. It’s constant.
“And if you finish in the top three, it’s worse because then you are interviewed after the race before being put in a room with the other podium-finishers so we can hear what you are saying to one another. And then there are more interviews. If I were an F1 driver and on course for a victory, I’d cruise round the last lap and deliberately come fourth.”
Clarkson believes that fans are given too much of an insight into a driver and there should be “some mystique” around their lifestyles with observers having to guess what individuals are like away from the track.
The presenter joked that he liked to believe all 20 drivers were similar to James Hunt – the British world champions who raced in the 1970s and was known for his fun-loving celebrity lifestyle away from the track.
He said: “A Formula 1 driver should have some mystique. I actually don’t want to know what they’re doing after the race or where they go on holiday or whether they prefer biscuits to cheese. I like to use my imagination because, in my head, they’re all James Hunt.”
