Bar at the dog and duck: Jenson Button’s recent demonstration of an ability to drive his Mclaren faster than his team mate Lewis Hamilton could be connected to a similar aptitude that saw the driver from Frome win the 2009 world championship, writes our performance analyst correspondent, Remington Stilts.
Having surprised the entire paddock by not only out-qualifying his apparently faster team mate but going on to dominate and win the race in Australia, pundits everywhere have been struggling to conceive reasons for the allegedly impossible event to have occurred.
Number crunching geeks struggle with Button-Lewis enigma
“People have been running around like headless chickens since Melbourne”, top paddock pundit Apricot Twist told us; “nobody could explain how this slower guy had beaten the quicker one other than to go on vaguely about tyre degradation or the weather or something: everyone has been really struggling with it.”
Lacking an explanation beyond mystic runes, acts of God and Malaysian betting syndicates, the performance puzzle risked becoming a perpetual riddle in the same way as the Loch Ness Monster, Marie Celeste and belief that Dr Who is any good has.
But now it seems, the Melbourne mystery may just have been solved thanks to the left field efforts of one particular analyst, Alton Towers.
“I must say this was a particularly tough challenge”, Alton told us from his secret bunker of number crunching computers, jazz mags and Role Playing figurines. “At first glance it seemed that there was no explanation – like Piers Morgan – but on Tuesday I suddenly had a revelation and having done some more analysis am convinced I’ve found the answer”.
Alton went on to describe how, upon reading some old race reports from October 2009 he stumbled upon the fact that Jenson Button actually won that year’s World Driver’s Championship a fact which until now had been forgotten about by every single living F1 fan. And 7 dead ones.
Months of meticulous research unearthed evidence for Button speed, claims bloke
“I must say it was quite a shock”, he continued. “For Jenson to have won the title – like Lewis did the year before – he must be at least, fairly competent. It was then that I realised there could be a link between that and him being able to beat Lewis at least once when the circuit isn’t typical, the weather couldn’t make up its mind and he lucked out massively with certain decisions”.
It is unclear where this revelation leaves the current state of F1 journalism punditry. Some believe the whole industry of guessing what’s going to happen in future by making lazy generalisations about the past will have to rethink whether slightly more than 8 seconds cogitation will be required before estimating what is going to happen going forwards. Others meanwhile think that some things will change but not as much as the others think while still others think nothing will change and the remainder didn’t know.
