The media game is a strange business. Formula One coverage is perhaps the wackiest of them all. The output during race weekends is often full of endless speculation and nonsense from writers who are tasked by editors with filling column space.

This endless speculation and nonsensical publishing of unverifiable “facts” is known as the F1 crazy season. In the old days, before the web, F1 crazy season ran from September until the end of the season.

Now it’s all year round. Every second, every day. F1 crazy season is monetisation. The speculation is often loosely grounded in facts, but the source of those facts can be tenuous. Often, they don’t exist at all.

It’s All About Group Think

The F1 media gets darker and stranger still. The media gather like ducks at each race and engage in groupthink.

Groupthink is having the same opinion as everyone else as a way of forming a mutual bond, because journalists, on the whole, are vacuous individuals who have few friends.

And then they later report from each race. They quack away and, like ducks, leave shit all over the place — verbal shit, to be precise.

And that verbal shit ends up in the headlines. Although, by now, it isn’t shit. The shit has been skilfully translated into legible words, edited and published.

But at the end of the day, it is still shit.

They Turned on Carlos Sainz

Carlos Sainz has now come under the spotlight, all of a sudden. I’m not sure why.

Sainz made a decision to go to Williams. Williams is a team that requires a lot of rebuilding; its glory days are long gone. Sainz knew that when he joined.

Sainz made that decision. No one pushed him into it.

Now the F1 media, with seemingly nothing better to cover during a quiet week or so, have turned their knives on the Spaniard.

His career is over, apparently. He’s made a few unforced errors. What F1 driver hasn’t?

He should have joined Audi, they all say. But two seasons into his Williams adventure, apparently he is a faded driver on his last legs.

Sainz is 32 years old, they point out, nearing the end of his career.

Perhaps. Maybe he has three or four years left at the top. Who knows?

In the end, Sainz will make that decision.

In professional sport, retirement is guaranteed. Otherwise, Martin Brundle would still be driving in F1.

But F1 journalists seemingly never retire. There is no performance review for them.