Not so the affable Red Bull marketing reps, dashing around making this dazzling enterprise happen while enthusiastically quaffing can after can of their speedy brew and hoping that somehow this show will add to the three billion cans they already sell each year.
The Rookies races are usually hugely entertaining, if only for the wild displays of reckless teenage braggadocio and out-of-their minds optimism that characterise so many of the overtaking manoeuvres. And the sense of fraternity among the 23 riders is refreshingly warm, none of the dead eyes and dead legs I remember from my days in schoolboy sport.
But I can’t help but feel a nagging sense of moral unease about the whole thing – allowing a bunch of school children to tear-arse around a racetrack at 120mph, flogging energy drink and entertaining a hundred thousand trackside fans and a few hundred million TV viewers.
Isn’t 13 a bit young to be sucked deep into the drive train of the corporate motorsport machine? Shouldn’t the youngest of these stars of the future be back home swapping ringtones, bullying teacher, doing some heavy petting, some studying, maybe even a bit of schoolboy motocross or minimoto? Or maybe it’s time to allow 13-year olds to do all the other supposedly adult things we currently don’t allow them to do – like driving on the road, drinking in pubs, working in factories, going down the mines, owning guns, voting, smoking and joining the army. Just a thought.