Important Messages

The producer of ITV Sport made the career-threatening decision (hopefully) yesterday to run a commercial break during the last three laps of the San Marino GP.

Schumacher had sliced through the field from thirteenth on the grid employing the "quítese cabrón" driving technique much favoured by the late great Ayrton Senna, and ended up tail-gating Alonso's Renault with twelve laps to go. What followed was probably the most exciting Formula One racing seen this Millennium, so cutting to commercials at such a palm-sweating stage really has to be seen as the F1 equivalent of doing it during an England penalty shoot-out.

Surely none of the advertisers whose products were thus immersed in a bubbling acid pool of negative emotion will thank ITV for this sort of exposure.

Rosenthal and co. tried to make ammends by re-showing the last three laps, but this only compounded our sense of annoyance and injustice with its sheer pointlessness. They were lucky Alonso was still showing Schumie the afterburner when they returned to Imola for the last lap.