Watch out Lewis, Punxsutawney Phil could be F1’s next big thing

Fascinating creature, the groundhog.

Prevalent in the wooded lowland areas of North America, this mostly herbivorous rodent is not averse to feeding on grubs and snails if it turns them up while digging with its curved claws in the soft soil of its habitat.

And people say Formula One is of ­limited educational value, but I wouldn’t have known any of this stuff about groundhogs if Lewis Hamilton hadn’t run over one during last ­weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix.

Nor would I have known that groundhogs are considered the most solitary of the marmot ­species (quite like Formula One drivers, you could say) and that their mating ­season is restricted to March and April (not like Formula One drivers). Nor that they are considered highly ­intelligent (insert your own smart-­arsed remark here).

Most of all, though, I would have continued to labour under unhelpful assumptions about the likely size of a groundhog in the wild and/or at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.

And in this I don’t think I would have been alone. Indeed, I’d suggest the improbable headline “Lewis Hamilton devastated after ­hitting groundhog” carried additional alarm for anyone whose familiarity with groundhogs, before Hamilton ­accidentally squashed one on lap 13 in Montreal, mostly revolved around Punxsutawney Phil in the Bill Murray movie.

Because Phil, in that movie, is quite the unit: a small dog, frankly. The idea of colliding with him at 180mph in a racing car with minimal ground clearance… well, it doesn’t bear ­thinking about.

And these terrible mental images were only compounded by the Canadian journalist who informed a ­genuinely mortified Lewis in the mixed zone that he had struck “a ­beaver” – though, of course, as I can now tell you, “beaver” is another term for “groundhog”, along with ­“woodchuck”, “whistle-pig” and ­“thickwood badger”.

However, I now understand that, seen from the dashcam of an ­accelerating F1 car, a stationary groundhog can present a tiny dark spot on the track ahead and produces only a quiet thud in the cockpit when run over. Think more on the scale of a squirrel, then, or, indeed, that ­notoriously vulnerable road-crosser, the hedgehog.

Phew, I suppose.

Nevertheless, the consequence of that strangely ­undramatic impact was an ­immediate loss of downforce, impeding ­acceleration and gravely reducing performance.

And it wasn’t great for the Ferrari, either. Hamilton ­eventually limped home with a hole in his floor in sixth place.

Cue the inevitable barrage of jokes: that that groundhog was the only thing Lewis has been able to leave in the dust all season; that every day for Hamilton at Ferrari right now is Groundhog Day; and that even after it’s been run over, the groundhog remains more likely than Ferrari to clinch a podium place at next weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix.

But such easy gags are beneath this column. We believe the sport should be asking itself some ­serious questions. Around signage, for ­starters. So far as I’m aware there wasn’t so much as one sign on the ­circuit saying, “Slow: groundhogs”. And why wasn’t the safety car brought out, at least until the groundhog had finished crossing, or foraging, or thinking, or whatever it came on to the track to do?

You can talk about being caught on the hop, but groundhogs are by no means strangers to the Canadian Grand Prix. Last week, a handful were openly cavorting beforehand, solitarily and intelligently, in the ­surrounding grass.

But I suppose the assumption was that they would stay away from the track, either because of the noise or because, like a lot of us, they feel the fun went out of Formula One when the Michael Schumacher/Damon Hill era ended, and they’ve now got better things to do with their Sundays.

In that sense, even though it didn’t end well, the appearance of the groundhog in Canada could be thought a good thing – the sign of an indifferent demographic ­coming back to the sport, lured, like so many others currently, by the Netflix ­documentaries and the revitalising energy of the Piastri/Norris/Verstappen/Russell rivalry.

Yet Formula One can’t just smugly shrug and walk away from this ­unsettling episode, surely. Next time it might be one of the big ones.

Photograph: Columbia Pictures