Oksana and the Malaysian pot-holes

Lewis Hamilton was weaving more vigorously than a 19th century Lancashire power loom. To the immense detriment of the viewing audience, Oksana's reaction was not captured on camera, but it seems reasonable to conclude that she was far from impressed.

Had Lewis possibly spotted some pot-holes in the track surface, caused by a recent, unexpectedly harsh Malaysian winter? Or was he, perhaps, trying to free his left leg from the prodigious sucking power of the cockpit orifice to McLaren's Dyson-inspired F-duct? Could Lewis even have been momentarily mesmerised down the back straight by the serrated, foliar-tipped grandstand canopy, scrolling limitlessly in his peripheral vision?

In fact, the immediate cause of these strong-armed driving tactics was a moment's inattention from Lewis going into turn one, just moments after he had apparently put Vitaly Petrov to the sword. The root cause, however, was the convective rainfall on Saturday, which had relegated Hamilton's McLaren to the back of the grid for the Malaysian Grand Prix. Or, more accurately, the root cause was McLaren's misplaced assumption that meteorological predictions of convective rainfall are of equal reliability to those of frontal rainfall.

If Michael Schumacher had not been re-hydrating with a refreshing cup of Ovaltine, he would have been infused with a dewy-eyed nostalgia for the halcyon days when he was the pre-eminent driver of his generation, diagonalising the straights to deter potential assailants from contemplating passing manoeuvres.

Perhaps there is method in Lewis's madness, and he seeks to intimidate the current driver cohort in the manner patented by his hero, Ayrton Senna. On the negative side, however, the next driving infraction may well result in a stop-go penalty, like an agricultural Blackburn midfielder exhausting the referee's patience with a final minor transgression.

Only one thing is certain: Oksana will prevail.