The boy wonder

Fasten your ear-muffs for a deafening weekend — din and dissonance, vrooms and fumes. Around Silverstone, lock up your dogs and daughters while the leaning, leather-clad boy racers sort out the British leg of the world motorcycling championship. Down on the Riviera, the straw-bales and (what we used to call) the starlets are in place for Monaco’s round-the-houses Grand Prix on Sunday, while across the pond in Indiana the world’s largest annual sporting throng has gathered for the always hairy-scary Indianapolis 500. Brits ignore most all-American sports; at home, as well, motor-cycling coverage is pretty well blanked by the mainstream backpages, though it strikes me as a more genuine sport than fat-cat supremo Bernie Ecclestone’s narrow-eyed four-wheeled Formula One unmerry-go-round which the multinational sponsors continue to swamp in greenbacks by the zillion.

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Assuredly no petrol-head, I did, as a kid, follow the racing drivers enthusiastically. Then they were not only heroic, but recognisably human — the likes of Parnell and Walker, Moss and Brooks, Hawthorn and Hill, carefree dandies who, between wizard prangs and tyre-squealing shunts, would dice together down the straight in short-sleeved cricket shirts, flimsy leather Rockfist Rogan helmets, goggles from Timothy White’s and a wink, as they passed, for an adoring dolly-bird on the kerb. If not at all one of those dashing death-wish innocents, suddenly at least the Brits seem to have found a cool, calm heir to that primeval line (followed by such as Surtees and Stewart, Clark and Courage, Pryce and Hunt). With the retirement of the unmatchable, uncatchable German, Schumaker, an unlicked, hitherto unheard-of young cub, Lewis Hamilton — inspired, they say, by his paternal grandfather who owns the fastest taxi in Grenada — is leading the 2007 drivers’ championship after four races, the only four he has ever entered: unprecedented.