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 the full facts are assessed. Equally, while personal matters should remain confidential, the complaint must be treated with due gravity and investigated seriously and impartially.

There have been many calls for transparency. That’s difficult, given the indistinct borders between transparency and prurient nosiness, but justice must be both done and seen to be done.

At the moment, when a female employee’s grievances have been dismissed, the employee herself suspended from her job, and the subject of the complaint is telling everyone to shut up about it and move on – this being the gist of the segment in the 10 O’clock News – the optics are spectacularly poor for a sporting category which is trying to attract more female fans, workers and participants. My wife, who has no interest in F1 beyond the fact that it keeps me gainfully employed, rolled her eyes and muttered, “Well, typical.”

The reliably acerbic Guardian columnist Marina Hyde described this saga as ‘Keeping Up With The Carkrashians’. She’s not wrong.