First they came for the hostesses, and darts fans did not speak out, because they were not members of the Presidents Club. Then they came for the walk-on girls, and the Formula One fans did not speak out, because they find darts a bit on the slow side. Then they came for the grid girls – and Bernie Ecclestone could not stay silent. “I can’t see,” the F1 billionaire said, “how a good-looking girl standing with a driver and a number in front of a Formula One car can be offensive to anybody.”
And perhaps there might even be a rethink, now he’s made clear – at least, to anyone unversed in the sport – how critical they were to its operation. “They were necessary really,” Ecclestone said, “because when the team driver wants to get on to the grid, it’s much better and easier for them to know their place where they need to stop.” It’s just a guess, but for some F1 historians, this is presumably a bit of a Rosalind Franklin moment. In fact, it’s hard, as a woman, to know whether to burst with pride over this hitherto unsung contribution or to ask why the grid – whatever that is – should be so excessively small, or hard to spot, that drivers are unable to get on and off it without the orientation offered by young women in tight clothing. Pending a redesign, maybe traditionally dressed lollipop ladies could offer crucial human signage that also resonated with F1’s new brand values?
Anyway, with so many car enthusiasts already exercised by the attack on F1, this may not have been the best week for Anthony Bangham, chief constable of West Mercia, to call for an end for the “soft” treatment of amateur racers. Currently, although it contributes to 26% of fatal collisions, speeding is one of those unusual offences widely agreed – with the connivance of some law enforcers – to be not so much a rule, as a hint. In more indulgent regions, an unwritten code allows drivers a margin, before prosecution, of 10%, plus 2mph, over the speed limit. And even then, magistrates may show mercy towards a particularly piteous, that is, respectable, offender.
The chief executive of Lotus Cars, for instance, was spared penalty points after doing 102mph on the All (where he was previously caught doing 96mph). Jean-Marc Gales, his lawyer said, already had eight points and losing his licence would be unhelpful for a CEO of Lotus, even more so, you gather, than a history of speeding offences. Given the frequency with which the car industry has its speed-glamorising ads banned by the Advertising Standards Authority – “good to be bad”, “luxury just lost its manners” – a points-accumulating CEO could well be a more reliable way, than hiring Tom Hiddleston, for a company to perpetuate associations between alpha-maleness, magistrate-dazzling speed and, it follows, erotic irresistibility.
That particular delusion has rarely, of course, been better expressed than by Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, when, as a car writer, he borrowed a Ferrari. “It was as though the whole county of Hampshire was lying back and opening her well-bred legs, to be ravished by the Italian stallion.”
By extension, speed restrictions are for people untroubled by Johnsonian rape fantasies; the world’s Lynda Snells, feebly waving teeny gadgets at men such as Jeremy Clarkson, Gordon Ramsay and new speeding hero, Jason Higgins. The latter, recently caught exceeding a village limit in his Bentley, has won acclaim in the Daily Mail for reporting the volunteers who clocked him to the police. “Is there anything more annoying,” writes a sympathiser, “than sanctimonious do-gooders like these old biddies?”
Given that news media are not immune to such inverted priorities, also thoroughly embroiled in car marketing, maybe it’s unsurprising that reporting about the chief constable’s firmness on speed limits should have featured striking levels of rage. Submit to the legal speed limit? Purely because this would kill and maim fewer people? This insane proposal made law-abiding drivers, we learned, “angry”, “furious”, “incensed”. It would never work. It was crazy. It was the work of snowflakes. It would actually lead to more deaths!
It’s some measure of how well the car industry has done its job, in identifying aggressive driving with personal liberty, that the US gun lobby can sometimes sound marginally less delusional than our car one, having an amendment, sort of, on its side. But the two lobbies share an obvious indifference to casualties and a proud sense of manly cussedness. The ubiquitous man who calls himself “the man they call Mr Loophole”, famous for getting celebrities off speeding charges, should take particular credit for his part in shifting blame for driving restrictions from offenders to enforcers. “Mr Bangham,” Loophole said, “is trying to criminalise hardworking people struggling to get from A to B on the country’s congested roads network.”
If there are, as indicated by support for Brake, IamRoadSmart, Community Roadwatch and countless local campaigns, many equally hardworking people who do not believe in the sacred right to drive at 35mph in a 30mph zone, their voices were drowned, last week, by driving’s leading freedom fighters – FairFuelUK, the Alliance of British Drivers and the RAC. Prominent, as always, was the AA president, Edmund King, deploying the popular, if ludicrous, argument that lower enforced limits would create “paranoid drivers forever checking the speedometer”.
If King can intuit speed without checking, once he reaches, say, 10% plus 2mph above the limit, it’s a skill he really ought to share. Because if he can’t, it’s dismaying, having fallen for his breakdown cover, to think of him spinning much the same line in entitled, turbo-charged fantasy as Bernie Ecclestone’s vital grid girls.