APRIL 1, 2018

Taki Inoue movie tops April Fools' jokes

You always have to be careful when you read any news story on April 1st and although this year's date being on a Sunday made it a quieter than usual event for the Formula One fraternity, there were still a couple of good pranks that could make you wonder.

You always have to be careful when you read any news story on April 1st and although this year's date being on a Sunday made it a quieter than usual event for the Formula One fraternity, there were still a couple of good pranks that could make you wonder.

The most elaborate story came from Japan's Tokyo Chunichi Sports, a daily sports newspaper that has been covering Formula One for nearly three decades and clearly put a lot of work into their April Fools prank. Using the whole back page of the newspaper – traditionally devoted to motor racing - the Japanese daily had as breaking news that a movie about Taki Inoue's short and troublesome Formula One career was being filmed in Hawai. Appropriately titled Hit by - Hanerare in the original - the movie would focus on Inoue's most famous incidents – being hit by an official course car while being towed back to the pits in Monaco, flipping and ending up in hospital, three months before being run over by a rescue vehicle in the Hungaroring while trying to put out a fire on his own Footwork A16 - but would also feature other less known incidents that marked the Japanese drivers' short but lively foray into Grand Prix racing.

To add a bit of spice to the story, our Japanese colleagues also wrote that Inoue was to played a Hong Kong actor, who decided against it because there were no stuntmen to replace him in the dangerous scenes. So Taki Inoue would have stepped up to play himself in this movie, only to be hit by a camera during shooting…

Other less elaborate stories came from Italy, where a blogger connected to Ferrari wrote Raikkonen had decided to quit the Scuderia and Formula One altogether feeling the team had worked against him to favour Vettel in Australia, while our colleague Pierre Van Vliet wrote on F1i.com a more likely story: the Brabham family was about to take over Force India to bring that famous Australian name back to Formula One.

Other stories involved Pastor Maldonado being a Steward in the forthcoming Bahrain Grand Prix - scene of one of his famous accident when he flipped Esteban Gutierrez's Sauber seconds after coming out of the pits – and from a local newspaper came the story Kenya was to host its first Grand Prix next year, with a race in the streets of Nairobi. Mind you, given the way Liberty is going about bringing Formula One to new countries, this may nor be an April Fools' joke for long...