CAR-pointing experts Ferrari have caused uproar by replacing their driving team with two excessively polite gentlemen from the 1820s.
The drivers were spotted before the race complimenting fellow competitors on the exquisite lining of their jumpsuits and sampling a range of delicate amontillados. Stewards also had to repeatedly warn the pair against smoking their briar pipes in the pit lane during refuelling.
F1 supremette Bernie Ecclestone said: “We had to fine the team £100,000 after they held up the race by stopping to pick violets by the trackside and compose a sonnet about them.”
Regular drivers Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso were dropped by Ferrari after a blood test revealed that neither were related to the Duke of Devonshire or his charming wife Charlotte.
They were replaced by Sir Hector De Montford and his friend Algernon Twisset, who had been summering in Geneva as part of Sir Hector’s rest cure after coming over all unnecessary during a performance of the Magic Flute at Covent Garden.
De Montford said: “Algie and I were most delighted to be chosen for this venture into expediated perambulation.
“We have been working like the very devil to choose just the right hat.”
He added: “When I saw Algie whizzing up behind me, I did the decent thing by giving him a wide berth. He’s a gutty lad but his whip arm can be all over the place when he’s at full gallop.”
A recording of the Ferrari team radio transmissions has revealed that as Twisset passed De Montford he said ‘lovely day’ to which De Montford replied, ‘sir, it is indeed the loveliest of days’.
Meanwhile De Montford is now expected to mortally wound McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton in St James’s Park shortly after dawn tomorrow morning.
