Ever since its £6.4 billion takeover of Formula One, Liberty Media has emphasised the need to promote the personalities of the 20 drivers, in all their vividness and complexity. This begs the question, then, of why Ferrari, in the week of the season’s first grand prix, have neglected in Australia to put Kimi Raikkonen up for any media work. If one ignores the fact that the Finn is about as quotable as a telephone directory, the explanation given by Maurizio Arrivabene, the Scuderia’s team principal, is intriguing.

“Define media,” he said. “What do you mean by media? Liberty have said that our digital platforms are used at only one per cent of our potential. So we were using social media to post something about Kimi. We have to make sure we keep Generation Z happy.”

One can just imagine Bernie Ecclestone talking up the need to satisfy ‘Generation Z’, a label loosely applied to those post-millennials who conduct their existence through Facebook. The 86-year-old would have thought Arrivabene was talking in Swahili. Far better, as he once put it, to entice the older race-goers with plenty of cash than to masquerade as having any affinity with youth culture.

Liberty thinks very differently. Chase Carey, the twirly-moustached former president of 21st Century Fox who has replaced Ecclestone, would rather promote the contents of Lewis Hamilton’s iPhone music collection than hear him wax lyrical about the performance of the rear tyres. Although Carey has kept Ecclestone as F1’s chairman emeritus, the gesture is essentially just a salve to his predecessor’s bruised ego. There will be a radically modernised approach with this new sheriff in town.