yesterday's Time For Tea
continues to raise controversy but hopefully today's brew accompaniment will be slightly less contentious. In fact, it doesn't even feature a video so we should be safe.
It is instead a selection of still images recreating key moments in the dramatic history of Mercedes' Silver Arrows racing cars as they duelled with Auto Union and Alfa Romeo in the 1930s. This contest had all the makings of a classic adventure - an epic rivalry between two powerful foes, an arms race of technology and horsepower, heroic drivers living and dying attempting to tame these monstrous cars and ... Nazis. Oh, what was that about avoiding controversy?
Mercedes vs Auto Union on the 'Donington hop'
Obviously the funding and inspiration for expressing German technological might on the world stage isn't front and centre of these images but, frankly, it doesn't need to be. What Mercedes has done is recreate - using a complicated combination of photography, CGI, live action and good old fashioned story telling - a selection of the most dramatic moments from a most dramatic era of motor racing.
So we have busy pre-race preparation in the Nurburgring paddock, the stripping of white paint off the W25 to get it under the weight limit and create the myth of the Silver Arrows, Hermann Lang powering on to victory in the 1939 Belgian Grand Prix past the burning wreckage of his dead teammate's car and much more besides. Fabulous stuff, the detail of how the images were recreated almost as compelling as the pictures themselves.