Get real: it's about racing

Fans are bored witless by much of the F1 chat and backchat

It really is going too far isn't it?

We have, allegedly, the best drivers in the world, bitching and moaning about the sport that manages to pay the fuel bill for the private jet, the power bill for the second or third home as well as the garage full of toys at both, or all, of those homes.

Quotes from the drivers in the days leading up to and at the Hungarian Grand Prix were all somehow in the negative with nothing I heard in the positive.

Complaints about the track limits and the way they are being policed, the new radio regulations that prevent driver coaching and pretty well everything else: the Pirelli tyres, over-complicated engines and management systems, and well, just about everything else you can think of.

Obviously many of those grumbles are justified and pretty well all of them are picked up and magnified by the eager troupe of media men and women who follow the circus around the world.

Many media people with self-proclaimed "authoritative" Formula 1 websites, sit at home on their chuff watching on TV, just like me, pick up the smallest tidbit from those "real" media people actually at the track and "expand" those reports.

They need, they feed on, almost any small utterance from a driver.

That fact, however, does not totally excuse some of the recent driver quips.

We have quotes like "Complete bullshit! All the radio issues we have are a joke," from Sebastian Vettel talking about the new radio restrictions.

Two-time World Drivers Champion Fernando Alonso also chips in. "If you painted all the cars black, you would not know which team built which car � we can never drive the cars to their real limit. We can never attack as much as we would like because the tyres don't allow you to. If you push too hard they overheat and lose grip immediately. If you use the engine too much, you step over consumption parameters. To be quick in today's F1, you must not attack too much, that's the secret, but that's something against a driver's instincts."

Even the normally diplomatic Jenson Button says: "It's a stupid regulation". Talking about the radio team-to-driver restrictions.

Vettel again: "People on the outside are laughing at us."

Sebastian, your language on the team radio may be more colourful than most of the drivers, and your driving heart may well be worn plainly on your sleeve with an occasional arrogance that emulates your predecessor Michael Schumacher, but I have to say you are dead right.

I talk to people who have a passing interest in Formula 1 and they are amused by what appear to be petulant millionaires squabbling over inconsequentials while the crowds slowly lose interest in the core business of the sport, the racing.

Even new boy Max Verstappen chipped in during last week's Grand Prix at the Hungaroring saying "I am driving like a grandma," while he was having to preserve both tyres and fuel, while other drivers were reportedly "coasting" for the same reasons.

It is an old drum that I beat -- but a drum that needs continual beating by fans of the sport -- when I say that I think those fans are now bored witless by the talk of track limits, radio chat and the peripheries that seem to fill endless hours of TV time, terabytes and column inches.

Perhaps it is all in the cause of "nothing to see here [the racing] but just look over there at the HUGE problem of what the teams and drivers can and cannot discuss on the radio. Fascinating isn't it?"

No, it isn't. Enough already!