Lewis Hamilton did not stand as a witness at Adrian Sutil's trial and Sutil has branded his former friend as a 'coward' and I think that is bloody unfair. Adrian attacked someone and was found guilty of GBH, but the court suspended the sentence and some would say that showed leniency.

On the day of Adrian's trial, Lewis was in Woking at the launch of the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes MP4-27 and I cannot see how he could be anywhere else. Sutil's attack was recorded on camera.

Vodafone McLaren Mercedes pay Lewis handsomely and every employee owes loyalty to his employer. When I was a teacher, I had to miss the funeral of friends. I could have had time off for the funerals of close relatives, even if I didn't much like them. That was the rule and I accepted it.

Lewis's first loyalty is to his team. McLaren employs 500 people just to put he and Jenson on a Formula One grid. There seems to me to be little doubt that McLaren played a part in insisting that he was at a launch and not at his friend's trial. It is McLaren who has said that Lewis has no comment. He even has a PR minder in the paddock and the excuse is that since Sutil has appealed against his conviction, Lewis has to keep quiet.

This, of course, is tosh. The case is no longer sub judice and it is insulting to the German legal system to suggest that the appeal judges would be influenced by anything that Lewis would say to a journalist, even if they read the comments. The excuse given by Lewis's PR minders is nonsense, but nobody forced Lewis to become a World Champion, he might have found employment in some menial job. He has no really serious educational qualifications.

One can argue that McLaren is being over-sensitive and that it is taking corporate image-building a stage too far, but McLaren has every right to do that. Every few weeks McLaren makes Lewis a Sterling millionaire. In the windows of my local branches of Santander and Vodafone, there are pictures of Lewis and Jenson. They enjoy an enviable lifestyle because they have also have obligations to McLaren's sponsoring partners.

We no longer live in an age when a driver simply raced and I, for one, regret the passing of such innocence. Short of a world-wide cataclysm, such days are gone forever.

If McLaren offered you the sort of deal that Lewis has, would you turn it down on the grounds that you could not speak to the press on certain issues? Do you suppose that if Adrian Sutil had landed a drive with McLaren that he would rebel? I think that we all know the answer.