F1 drivers seem to no know limits when it comes to demeaning themselves for a bit of publicity for themselves. So from Lewis Hamilton's high wire act to Michael Schumacher's choice of shampoo, we salute six of the cringiest publicity stunts from F1's past.
1) Lewis Hamilton's Trojan moment
He may have lost the 2007 drivers championship at the very last, but there's no doubt that Lewis Hamilton won all the prizes when it came to the far more important "make yourself attractive to sponsors with cash" championship. After his spectacular (by every possible definition) debut season, the boyish good looks and slightly smug smile of Hamilton was very much the face that every sponsor in the pit lane wanted somewhere near their product and/or event. But, as Spiderman probably never contemplated, with great sponsor money comes great responsibility. In return for wads of cash bonuses on top of his normal salary that saw him become Britain's best paid sportsman by some distance, Hamilton was then tied into any number of dire sponsor events, show openings and various other wastes of time.
Undoubtably the nadir of Hamilton's sponsor whoring came ahead of the Turkish GP in 2008, where thanks to commitments to Vodafone, he was pitched into the role of the Greek God Apollo in a flabbergastingly misguided on-stage production of the battle of Troy, a performance that culminated in the McLaren driver being lowered on wires, down from the heavens, in his race suit. Words really cannot adequately convey quite how ridiculous he looked, so instead here is a brief video highlighting the whole shoddy affair. Be warned, according to some internet reports, thirteen people in the last three months have sprained their necks after cringing too hard watching that.
Hamilton was, of course, insistent that his Trojan stunt had not in any way made him look like a ludicrous plonker. "I had to wear some strange Borat crazy suit, I wouldn’t be doing that," Hamilton insisted after the wire act, "There are limits to what you do, but it’s the job I have and I don’t feel I have to do anything stupid." Really, Lewis? REALLY?
2) Michael Schumacher's hair treatment
As "What the hell were they thinking??" moments go, it's pretty difficult to top this seminal moment in F1's brightest of careers. For all the championship titles, all the race wins, all the controversy, all the glory, the mesmeric wet weather victories and sublime pole laps, Michael Schumacher will always have this particular skeleton in his closet to add balance to the scales whenever you think that maybe life has just been a little bit too bloody perfect for him. Yes, it's the moment that the thrilling secret behind Schumie's perfectly coiffured barnet was finally revealed to the expectant world. Because he's worth it.
It has to be said that Schumacher worked just as hard for his staggering Ferrari salary away from the race track as he did on it, somehow finding the time to advertise everything from crap-looking Fiat vans all the way through to breath mints (in this ad here, which is one of the most mind-bogglingly surreal things ever committed to film). But quite how and why his PR work reached a point where his L'Oreal advert was allowed to happen is really impossible to fathom. The one positive thing about the metaphorical car crash that is the 30-second long, badly-dubbed, hair-touching ad is that it may well be possible to trace the birth of metrosexuality back to the precise point in the clip when Schumie finally turns to the camera, flashes that winning smile and delivers those infamous four words with an improbably American-sounding accent.
3) Honda's Earth dream
In terms of where our futures lie, the sad fact is that we're all going to die in a hellish, global warming-led catastrophe, that much is now clear. Alas, we never really stood a chance of stopping the tragedy, largely because the only real champions for good in the carbon battle were hippy-types, and speaking from painful experience, whenever hippy types get their hands on anything, they tend to find a way of messing it all up in a painfully embarrassing way. Maybe it's not their fault, maybe the gene that makes you a carbon-emitting hellfiend has the side effect of making you really really organised, but whatever the reason, environmentally-friendly initiatives always end up being a bit of a shambles.
And so it was when, in 2007, the Honda F1 team suddenly tied flowers in their hair, wove themselves some hemp-based clothing and decided to forego the usual dizzying F1-spec combination of sponsorship by oil companies and cigarette pedallers, and instead run a sponsorless car designed to highlight their new green credentials. The "My Earth Dream" initiative may have amounted to little more than a website, a list of partners committed to saving the planet and a godawful colour scheme, but at least someone was taking a stand in a sport that was increasingly struggling to remain comfortable in the new-age, environmentally-conscious 21st century society.
Alas, the whole project rather fell on it's arse when the RA107 proved to be a hapless shambles of a machine, somewhat ruining the team's plan to brag about being able to be green and still be fast by completely failing to fulfil the latter part of that idea. In 2008, they switched to a marginally less awful colour scheme, but the car was still a complete heap, tarnishing the reputation of environmentally-friendly types in the sport for years to come. Eventually, the Honda team pulled the plug on it's F1 plans at the end of the year. The My Earth Dream website now displays nothing more than an error page, and the whole planet is left hurtling towards disaster. Which is a shame.
As an aside, for irony lovers everywhere, at the height of their misery during this misguided campaign, Honda struck gold with many people with their hugely impressive "Impossible Dream" advert. Whether this was an exercise in hidden meanings is yet to be fully discovered.
4) Fernando Alonso's glimpse into the future
Ah, the bitter tinge of irony, the delicious feeling of precognition, the warming hubris of quirks of fate. Nostradamus himself would have struggled to match the future-telling of this knockabout Mercedes commercial from 2007, dreamed up to help the new superteam of two-time champion Fernando Alonso and young, marketable upstart Lewis Hamilton help to flog dour-looking German saloon cars.
And ahaha, how very amusing the whole thing is! Laugh how Alonso and Hamilton compete with each other! Chortle as they trip each other up, desperately try and spoil each other's chances and basically wind each other up a treat as they battle to win each and every one of life's little challenges! Guffaw at the lovely twist in the tale as their monomaniacal obsession with each other allows the surprising form of a quietly spoken Finnish character (played here by a worryingly naked Mika Hakkinen) to sneak ahead of the pair of them to cement top spot! All of this could never happen in real life, of course. This is just an advert.
What? Oh. Oh, I see.
5) Jackie Stewart's company car
Let's not pretend that lining your wallet with advertising tie-ins is a new phenomenon, any more than the odd F1 race without much overtaking is. Back in the early 1970s, Jackie Stewart had the world at his feet after wrapping up three world titles in five years for Ken Tyrrell's team. And what did he receive for his efforts when he decided to retire at the end of the 1973 season to concentrate on moaning passionately about safety opr moaning even more passionately about RBS's excellent share packages? Well if this hilariously awful advert is to be believed, he and the disturbingly monosyllabic Mrs Stewart got the keys to a lovely beige Ford Capri.
Marvel at the Capri's new "rear door", making Jackie's loading time for his bags so much shorter. Meanwhile, take note of the somewhat laughable contribution of Mrs Stewart, reduced to a rather non-emancipated role of standing about looking pretty and gushing "It's beautiful!" while she stands next to the car stroking it's roof for some unfathomable reason. So taken aback by the looks of the beige beastie, she repeats "Beautiful!" later on again for good measure. And again, during the final hilarious twist. All things considered, it's a brilliantly awful reminder that advertising wasn't invented recently.
Not that Jackie's commitments to flogging rubbish Fords ended there. Here he is again, this time flogging a Ford Tempo to impressionable Americans, and delivering to camera one of the most unconvincingly positive reviews of anything in the history of forever. Oh Jackie.
6) Eddie Jordan's lowest common denominator
Us blokes, eh? Simple creatures, aren't we? We dawdle about our lives, happy, carefree and oblivious, occasionally indulging in our favourite things, which for all us blokes, of course, means a heady combination of "cars 'n' tits". Yes, in terms of appealing to that "special" paragon of menfolk who constantly need to be looking at a fast car and a set of perky nipples to reaffirm their heterosexuality, Eddie Jordan didn't miss a trick back when his team was vaguely successful, employing a variety of pneumatically-chested tabloid fodder to drape themselves awkwardly over his cars, his drivers or, occasionally, himself, all in the name of attracting hoards of simple, onanistically-minded male photographers to pop along and give a crap about his team for about half an hour or so. He couldn't have reduced the credibility of the modern F1 pit lane more if he'd have installed a dartboard and a Stella Artois pump in the corner of the garage, and occasionally shouted "OI OI!" for no apparent reason. Waheeey, cos we're bloody blokes, yeah?
Of course he was just trying to make F1 'cool' for the kids, appealing to the late 90's crowd of born-again laddish fantasists, and at the same time add a bit of colour and entertainment to a staid pit lane full of fat engineers showing off their buttock cracks and Patrick Head standing around looking solemn. But surely there should have been a way of tarting F1 up a bit without, erm, tarting it up a bit. Is F1 really that pathetic that it thinks it can distract us from the lack of action with the strategic use of pretty people in revealing clothing? Erm, sorry, I completely lost my train of thought for a moment there.
As an aside, I'm aware how easy it would have been to shoehorn in a "Giancarlo Fisichella and Ralf Schumacher/massive pair of tits" gag into this particular entry, but I'll leave you to do that for yourselves.
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