Lewis Hamilton is - by any measure - a driving legend, blessed with incredible skill and on the cusp of F1 immortality in the manner of a Senna or Fangio. #Respect.

As a driver - Lewis Hamilton is awesome. I would love to hear him talk us all through a lap of Brands Hatch, or the Nurburgring. But - to be perfectly frank - I don’t actually give a shit what he thinks about anything else.

I understand, therefore, why an angry mob would vandalise the statue of a dude who’s (at best) an historical footnote, in Bristol, in the UK. They ripped it down after 125 years and threw it in the harbour, ignominiously. Just the other day.

Take that, Edward Colston, you bastard. You croaked at the age of 84, roughly 300 years ago, in 1721. And your effigy has been hurled to the bottom of the Avon river. (Although the council did soon thereafter resurrect you, not unlike Jesus…)

Mr Colston was a Tory MP, a merchant, and a philanthropist who built local schools, hospitals, and established charitable foundations in and around Bristol and London - many of which survive to this day. Institutions and buildings bear his name.

You can even chow down a nice, fruity Colston bun in Bristol - so I suppose that’s nice. All this is true and a matter of historical fact. So, why was the crowd so self-evidently pissed?

Colston was a senior executive in a company established by King Charles II - the Royal African Company - which traded gold, silver, ivory and - at this point you best remove the rose coloured tint of retrospectivity - because it also traded slaves, disgracefully. Legally, under the seal of the crown, but disgracefully nonetheless.

84,000 slaves - men, women and children, whose lives mattered to them just as much as yours does to you, and mine certainly does to me. Stolen and sent to the Americas, to work mainly on tobacco and cotton fields. 19,000 of them didn’t even make it. They died in transit. Seafaring was a much more high-risk endeavour back then, clearly. Except of course on the Ruby Princess...

And then, of course, Lewis Hamilton chimed in - when, in my view he should have shut his trap and concentrated on being a champion driver.

"That man's statue should stay in the river just like the 20 thousand African souls who died on the journey here and thrown into the sea, with no burial or memorial. He stole them from their families, country and he must not be celebrated! It should be replaced with a memorial for all those he sold, all those that lost their lives!"

Clearly, slavery and racism are an indelible scar on the human spirit and we need to eradicate them from the future. I’m talking about eliminating future crimes against humanity.

To me, that’s what’s important. And dudes like Lewis Hamilton simply are ill-equipped intellectually to help on this - in my view:

"I challenge government officials worldwide to make these changes and implement the peaceful removal of these racist symbols."

These racist symbols indeed. These close ties with slavery. Hear hear. Mr Hamilton is challenging lawmakers peacefully to remove racist symbols indelibly linked to slavery. It seems unequivocal.

And yet, also a poor idea to lob such a stone, no matter how well-intended, when your arse resides in such a seemingly glass house.

A couple of far more recent slavery-linked contenders come instantly to mind: Mercedes-Benz and Hugo Boss, coincidentally enough - because they are sponsors of Mr Hamilton, and their histories are indelibly linked to slavery. Play the episode to see just how deeply.