It's the ultimate dream for motor racing fans and for a driver paying his dues in a tail-end-charlie team, even more so: the call comes from the boss of the most dominant team the sport has ever seen which is seemingly getting better and better. How do you fancy a drive this weekend? a voice at the other end of whatever is the modern equivalent of the line. Of course you say "yes." Sure, their car is designed to be the fastest in practice and to win from the front; sure their pitstops aren't as fast as you are used do; sure it's the same engine as has been helping you trudge around trying not to get lapped but the package it's in and the team around it are, somehow, in a different league and no one in your present team knows why - for sure, it's not dedication and sacrifice.

So, of course you say yes. Welcome to the week when George Russel's dreams came true - then were dashed in a series of critical errors by the Mercedes team and a couple of bits of bad luck.

We have often made jokes at the expense of Roman Crashjean, as we dubbed him. Grosjean's career in F1 has been long for someone with so little success and so much carnage behind him. Having been told he was being replaced at HAAS F1 at the end of the season and there being no seat available for him in another team for 2021, it seemed as if he would go off into the sunset, another driver who was just kind of there.

But today he is written into the annals of F1 history, recollections embedded into the memories of everyone who was in front of their televisions, settled down for an afternoon's racing around the Sakhir circuit. For this was the day that no one wants to happen - and for which everyone in the sport has been preparing. Not just Grosjean, the Gross Un, the big one. And he walked away, battered, bruised, burned but fundamentally OK.

The world breathed out.

Media release: Australian Consumer and Competition Commission 26 Nov 2020.

The ACCC has today instituted Federal Court proceedings against Telstra (ASX:TLS) for admitted unconscionable conduct in the sale of post-paid mobile products to Indigenous consumers.

When customers spend months working with a salesman who works hard to understand their business and to tailor products and services to their specific needs, companies often cancel that relationship in favour of transferring the customer to someone with none of that understanding of the company, the product fit and, of course, the individuals involved. The question is this: does this hangover from the 1980s have a place in the modern sales environment?

When we wrote, in early 2010, a satire suggesting that Bernie Ecclestone might improve F1's racing by adding sprinklers to tracks (here ) we didn't expect that a few weeks later he would actually say he thought it was a good idea (but he didn't mention that we'd already put it forward). But the idea gained new impetus with the 2020 Turkish Grand Prix which turned out to be almost a proof of concept - and in doing so produced a race that, visually, looked more like the crazy days of 1970s and 1980s racing before sticky tyres and near-unbreakable downforce turned the sport into an engineering arms race that is at least as important as the driver's skill.