KIWI RIDER 03 2020 VOL1 | Page 89

embracing set of four words. You work, you buy stuff, you get on with it. You make a living. As long as you have enough of it all is well and good, and coming from a family of five kids from the 50s we all did ok. We earned our way. Then there’s the “look at me” brigade. Those of relatively youthful years who have already made more in the last year than I ever made in my 48 working years. I was astonished, but not surprised, to spot the other day that Lewis Hamilton is set to earn (if that’s an appropriate term) $60 million for this year’s “work”. If you can make $60,000 a year toiling and fretting and whatever, then you’ll need to do that for many centuries to match that. But he’ll do it in year. How come? Lewis the ‘dollar lush’ drives for Mercedes, so will you go out and buy one because he just won another boringly insipid procession? No. Oh, and if the Ferrari chaps were to grab the F1 title would you nip out and sell a few more bags of home-grown spuds and buy one? Again, no. Mind you, if you were making the sort of money the drivers are making for going round and round a race track every fortnight then maybe you would. Of course the MotoGP brigade are also financially well endowed, because again, like F1, it is a petrol-driven glamorous business. In the ‘good old daze’ race day fans would wander the pits and talk to their heroes and get a photo on the old box brownie with them, and they’d get out on the track and do the business, because it was their passionate love. I don’t think it was about the dosh. It was about the challenge. The grinning rivalry. And I gleefully saw it at Mallory Park and Silverstone back in the 70s where I shared the same latrine as Barry Sheene because, hey, we were all in the same paddock. Both watchers and riders. “All’s going well Bazza?” ‘Yeah no real concerns.” The simplicity of motorsport, and pretty well sportingly everything else for that matter, has kind of dissolved… taken over by Pink bloody Floyd... ”Money!”