And to be fair to him, it's an international sport with many different nationalities present, in a country where you can't expect everyone to speak your language. It's not someone well known on the track, not a driver or a team boss etc.
To me it seems like a perfectly polite way to check that you can communicate in the language of the people watching on the other side of the world, before launching into a full blown series of questions that they might not understand a word of.
This feels like the result if a slow news day...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
