Earlier this year, when the Mosley scandal first broke, we used the blog search and comparison tool Icerocket to try and get a sense of what people online felt was important. It showed unequivocally that bloggers would far rather write about Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Raikkonen than Max Mosley.
We thought that, following the FIA’s vote of confidence in Mosley, it would be instructive to take another look and see how things are playing now.
First we entered three terms connected with the Mosley saga into Icerocket’s comparison engine. Here’s the results we got:
Then we tried removing the least popular of the terms, which turned out to be ‘Nazi Orgy’, and replaced it with F1. Just to add a bit of context, the Turkish Grand Prix, with Massa’s thrilling first and Hamilton’s fightback for second, was on May 11. Hamilton’s Monaco win was on May 25:
Now clearly this is potentially a bit misleading because F1 is a term that might well be used in writing about the Mosley scandal. And FIA might crop up in contexts other than its president’s sexual misjudgements.
But the scale of the difference between the green line and the other two does rather put the whole Mosley business into proportion in terms of the interest it holds for racing fans.
Only at the point when the verdict was announced, and interest at its most intense, could Mosley challenge F1 for online interest generated. And then not by all that much.
Here, just to finish up and add a bit more context, are some driver comparisons. Again, when you look at the figures in the table and see how much interest each of them is generating online, it does rather put old Max and his BDSM proclivities into perspective:
So once again it’s a clear ‘sod the politics, bring on the racing’. The only problem is that we fear the politics might once again be in a position to seriously interfere with it…