Dear Harry,
First off, apologies for the delay in sending this latest missive from the high-speed world of Formula One but, well, it’s a high-speed world and things move pretty fast. As my hero Ferris Bueller said: “If you don’t pay attention you could miss it”.
Now, even though our PR Camilla says that not paying attention and missing things are the twin mantras by which I live my life (I took the comparison with Ferris to be quite the compliment), I will admit that I have been pretty busy over the past month or so, so it’s no surprise I haven’t had time to write.
Most recently, we had the Hungarian Grand Prix, which was something of a triumph for Vürsedan Rockbottom Racing, as we had a number of significant improvements, the first of which was that we got a new title sponsor, which in turn was followed by a load of new bits for the car.
It’s a bit complicated but it all started when our young American driver Bratt Lentucho got a bit upset by our performance, particularly in Canada, or lack thereof. In fact, we were so slow that early in the race he collided with one of the island’s famous groundhogs and the poor animal was so enraged by the altercation that it got up and bit the car before stalking off.
The bite resulted in some front wing damage, which according to our chief engineer’s quote on the post-race release “badly compromised our race pace”. I think it was probably due to the fact that the mountain of sticky tape used to fix it back on wasn’t exactly a triumph of aerodynamic efficiency.
Anyway, Bratt was none too happy about being lapped 11 times by Lewis Hamilton or Lewis’ post-race comment that he was deeply concerned about the sense of F1 regulations that allow a milk float to be homologated.
The upshot was that a few weeks later, after the pit wall noticed that during the safety car period following the accident involving Fernando and Kimi that Bratt’s was driving flat out and was still being caught by someone called Bernd Maylander, Bratt’s father, Larry appeared at the factory demanding an audience with Vlad.
The boss was nowhere to be found, however. Indeed, for the past few weeks Vlad has been behaving a bit strangely, muttering that he had never meant to tell Vladimir Putin that all the shirtless hunting pictures made the Russian president look as if “he played for the wrong satellite republic”.
“Was just the vodka talking,” Vlad said with a sad sigh as he tapped away at his laptop, Googling something called Polonium. “Remember, Tristan, never drink own product – unless of course you are in deserts of Kazakhstan, being chased by local warlords and water bottle is empty.”
