And so to the Hungarian Grand Prix, where the first thing that happened was that I had to face a barrage of questions about the new upgrades in my first appearance in the official FIA Press Conference.
I’ll be honest and say I’d been looking forward to being in one of these for ages. I’d watched loads of them on telly and had been hugely impressed by the ability of my fellow team principals to say absolutely nothing of any consequence when asked a direct question by the journalists, especially the one who always asks about the terrible decisions they make.
Anyway, I eventually got a call from the FIA to attend in Silverstone.
“Do I have to? I’m terribly busy doncha know,” I said wearily, even though inside I was as excited as a schoolboy who’s just traded his weekly tuck allowance for a rather tatty and oddly brittle porn mag two hours before lights out.
“Yes, it’s in the rules,” the chap replied. “You’ll be fined otherwise.”
“Right-ho,” I answered. “Is it because of all the new bits on the car.”
“No, it’s just your turn.”
Anyway, Camilla did a bang-up job beforehand briefing me on all the things I should say if questions came up about our engine partner using their wind-tunnel to test bits for our car which would go on theirs by default and teraflops and on-time and so forth.
And sure enough it was the first question I was asked and I think I dealt with it brilliantly.
“The upgrades we have on the car this weekend are the result of some extremely hard work back at our factory where the various departments have been flat out for some time developing this car. There should be no suggestion that the work undertaken for us by our technical partners’ contravenes the regulations and no one has exceeded the prescribed number of Terrahawks during this process. In fact, we have plenty of Terrahawks in hand and we’ll be deploying these Terrahawks in due course.”
I was surprised at the giggles that followed my brilliant remarks and even more nonplussed by the next question.
“Just a follow up to that for Tristan Gelding-Jones: Following the summer break, will you be deploying your Terrahawks against the evil alien Zelda?”
For some reason the whole place collapsed into laughter, which I didn’t understand at all. Never mind, come Sunday we absolutely aced the race. Despite all the accidents and incidents we managed to get both cars home and Bratt was only lapped eight times. I went to congratulate him after the race but he’d pinned a sign on his door saying ‘Private! Grown-Ups Stay Out!’ and when I asked if I could come in he screamed that it was all “So unfair!”
I tell you, I’ll never understand the youth of today.
