Formula One drivers and support staff—from pit crews to crew chiefs to team bosses to PR people—have become deeply immersed in “tweeting,” sending short messages on Twitter, the microblogging social network service.
Michael Gascoyne, chief technical officer at Lotus Racing, told Formula1.com, “I think it is very important to let the fans be part of the team. To create a bond with the younger generation, it is crucial to communicate with them using their tools. The fans seem to enjoy it very much.”
This presents problems in communist China, where Formula One teams are preparing for the Shanghai Grand Prix, this Saturday April 17. In China, the Internet is heavily censored and most social networking sites and services, including Twitter, are banned.
The Chinese communist regime employs at least 30,000 police officers, plus a corps of volunteers, to monitor Internet traffic and chat room conversation. The Chinese regime, in its effort to control the thoughts of the people, inadvertently limited the social and commercial outreach of the Formula One teams they had invited (and spent hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to accommodate.)
Apparently, the Chinese people are wise to the ways of the regime. HRT driver Karun Chandhok in particular complained about the ban. Shortly after he disembarked in Shanghai, he was greeted by three fans that told him how to bypass the Twitter ban.
Other drivers soon had the same information, and before long several drivers and other F1 folk were tweeting away. This presents a problem for the Chinese regime: having spent so much to bring Formula One to China, should they now arrest most of the drivers and the teams?
In all likelihood, the Formula One contingent won’t send any “revolutionary” messages about the regime’s violent suppression of reform in Tibet or Xinjiang, its suppression of spiritual freedom, or its abhorrent human rights record. So in all likelihood, the F1 contingent will be allowed to tweet in peace. And maybe by the time F1 returns to China next season, the Chinese people will be allowed to do so as well.