F1's unwelcome move to the front pages

Time was when politicians and other public figures touched by the merest whiff of scandal would make a principled resignation and shimmy out of the public eye for a while. That was then; this, indubitably, is now. Over the past couple of decades compromised politicos from Peter Mandelson to Boris Johnson have shamelessly clung on to the trappings of office – and even when they’ve been flushed down the pan, vexatiously and disobligingly they bob back to the surface.

I was moved to think along these lines when Formula 1 appeared as item three in the BBC’s 10 O’Clock News at the beginning of the Saudi Arabian GP weekend. Not in its customary position after the stick-and-ball sports, nor even P3 in the sporting round-up, but sitting with DRS activated in the slipstream of US election ferment and the latest shenanigans in the open sewer that is UK domestic politics. The subject was not who had gone fastest in either of the practice sessions, but the latest developments in the ongoing Red Bull affair.

This whole tawdry and unedifying scene, in which a significant HR complaint has been opaquely investigated and dismissed, then weaponised in a maelstrom of power-grabbing and petty score-settling, does F1 no favours at all. A number of factors here are highly problematic, including the challenge for a monthly magazine of covering a constantly developing story which will no doubt take further twists between GP Racing going to press and arriving on the shelves.

There are important questions of perception to be addressed here. In any HR process surrounding an accusation of the kind which began this saga, there must be a presumption of innocence until th