It was a sporty weekend for the second weekend in a row for Tom Cruise. Last week he was at Wimbledon and the Euro final, this weekend he was at Silverstone for the British Grand Prix, the home for Formula 1. Which of course those of us who are now obsessed with Netflix’s Drive to Survive are now familiar with, LOL. What kills me about the whole Drive to Survive thing is that suddenly, now that we’ve mainlined three seasons of it, we’re all experts on DRS and tires and pit times and namechecking the team principals etc etc. 

 

Anyway, there are always celebrities at F1 races, but Tom Cruise is another class of celebrity, as we know. And also… the “need for speed” and Days of Thunder, right? Of course he’d be there, on standby. Like if anyone is short a driver, Tom is ready to get in there!

Tom, evidently, was a guest of Mercedes. He was seen with the Mercedes crew, hanging out with Toto Wolff, and of course fist-bumping Lewis Hamilton at the start of the race and then putting a lot of man-aggro into hugging him after Lewis won: 

 

Look at the veins popping in Tom’s neck! He does everything with the same level of intensity! I’m actually surprised at this point that he’s not a team owner. 

In other F1 news though, it was a dramatic race yesterday with a controversial crash. Which happens in this sport. They’re going so fast, there’s so little space, split-second decisions are made, I’m not saying that what happened between Lewis and Max Verstappen wasn’t dangerous, but it’s part of the allure of the sport. And, frankly, when you watch enough of these races, they are always bitching at each other about who didn’t move over or who could have moved over sooner and who turned into who – that’s why Drive to Survive is SO good, and believe me, I had no f-cks to give about motor sports before, but the reason why this series changed me is because they show you all the sh-t that goes on OFF the track, out of the car, the petty personalities, the bitter rivalries and also the teamwork, all of everything that goes into these races. 

But to go back to yesterday’s result, and Lewis’s win, just one week after racists targeted Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukayo Saka after England’s Euro loss, they’re coming for the man many consider to be the greatest driver of all time. The online abuse happened across multiple social media platforms and Formula 1 has issued a statement condemning the behaviour: 

 

Lewis for years now has been Formula 1’s biggest star, arguably the sports biggest star ever, and the only Black driver on the F1 circuit. Lewis called out his sport, pretty much an all-white sport, last year, using his considerable platform to call out the fact that he too often has stood alone in the face of injustice. Fame and success, though, as we’ve seen, don’t protect you from racism. In fact, it always comes back to race when people are mad. So what’s even sadder is that for Lewis, this obviously isn’t new; he may have actually been expecting it – since, well, as a Black man raised in England, why would he possibly be surprised that white people would racistly? It’s likely the same for Black football players, not that it hurts any less, but it’s also not outside their reality. When people are actively booing the players kneeling in support of Black Lives Matter at football matches, in public on a huge scale, it tells you how entrenched it is, and how f-cking BOLD it is. Despite, of course, the protestation from white structures and establishments that there is no racism in England.