grumpyf1

Crikey! The Jordan team are back! Black and yellow car, with B&H-style stripey bits - yep, definitely EJ's squad. It's who? Renault?! At the risk of sounding like a broken record (sorry, that should probably be a clipping MP3 file or something, shouldn't it?), where's the sponsorship? Not that I mind, mind (THAT looked weird!) - the cars always look better without logos all over them. Here we go then.... Renault were pretty cool I reckon, as they saved announcing their 2nd driver until the day of the launch. Mind you, they had only signed him round about then as well. So a big "hello, comrade!" to Vitaly Petrov, 25, all the way from Russialand, who has apparently never driven a F1 car before. Eh?! I guess the fact that he's bringing an alleged £9 Million in sponsorship to the team will counterbalance that minor issue, though... Lest we forget, Renault aren't really Renault, as the team are 75% owned by some organisation that sounds like the front f...

Crikey! I thought the Brawn team had packed it in! Oh, hang on... it's the new Sauber car, rising from the ashes of BMW in a not-very-phoenix-like blaze of.. er.. black and white. And their drivers are dressed in white too. Still, it worked for Button & Co last year... One small (financial) point... there doesn't seem to be any sponsorship. Hang on... (gets magnifying glass out) yes, I can definitely see something on the wing mirror. That's got to be worth at least £50, and they've got 2 mirrors! pre-season preview? Why not... Much like Williams being run by the chap whose name is on the car, I always had a soft spot for the Sauber team. They never quite seemed to be a "big" team (big as in run by a car company) but sometimes managed to punch above their weight. Peter Sauber seems like a top bloke too - wide smile and a cigar. Brilliant. Then he decided he'd had enough and BMW waved some cash at him. Being a car company, they got cold feet when the rec...

Williams sort-of launched their new car the same day as Ferrari, but suffered from a very British attack of not wanting to make a big show of it, so no journalists were in attendance, except for a scamp from Autosport who snapped this picture. I'm always excited by a new Williams car, and that's a tidy motor - notably different to the Ferrari and McLaren too. I love the Williams team, although I've never been quite sure why. Maybe it was because they were successful when I was first getting into F1. Maybe it's their very British nature - so much more down to earth that Mclaren. Maybe it's Frank & Patrick's no-nonsense approach and refusal to pander to their driver's egos. Maybe it's because they're from Oxfordshire, the county I grew up in. Maybe it's because they ran Damon Hill, who's still my favourite all time driver. Grumpy F1 pre-season preview? Oh, go on then.... Williams haven't won a thing for quite a few years now after much ...

The new McLaren is out... and boy does that look a bit..er..radical. What's with the shark-fin bit? Does that really join up with the rear wing? is that even legal?! Still, it's a striking-looking piece of kit, and handily has pretty much the same colour scheme as last year, so I should at least be able to recognise 2 teams, if not their drivers. Hey - that must mean it's time for another Grumpy F1 entirely-free-from-bias-or-curmudgeonly-opinion pre-season preview! McLaren had a startlingly crap start to last season. With Hamilton as World Champ, they managed to kick off 2009 with a startlingly rubbish car and a big fat scandal when Lewis "forgot" that he'd overtaken a Toyota during a safety car period. I can still visualise Ron Dennis sitting at home, slapping himself repeatedly on the forehead. Impressively, the team did manage an amazing improvement during the season, allowing Lewis to win a couple of races. Let's face it - they're a bloody good tea...

It hath begun . New Formula 1 cars will be rolled out almost every day over the next couple of weeks, whilst some slightly embarrassed and awkward looking peddlars smile politely for the cameras in their new race suits. First up - Ferrari. And wow - is that a nice looking car. And now (fanfare!) the inaugural Grumpy F1 pre-season team preview!! With that grumpier-even-than-me Finnish bloke having gone off in a huff having been dropped by the team (and probably trying to grumpily figure out what to do with his huge pay-off), Ferrari are looking to regain their more-usual crown of bestest team in Formula 1. Strange, then, that the last person to prove this point was none other than Kimi Raikkonen. Poor old Fisi (who has bags of experience and can usually get a half-decent performance out of most cars) proved in 09 that the red car was a bitch to drive, so hopefully they've fixed that. New boy Alonso has two titles to his name (3, if you count the title of "Mr like to have the te...

The other Red Bull team have announced that they will launch their car at the first test session in Valencia on the 1st of February. Toro Rosso will be one of a whole bunch of teams giving their new cars a showing off and a shake down in the next week or two. Which means its very nearly time to fruitlessly read all sorts of things in to lap times and start trying to guess who's built a beaut and who fumbled together a dog. Exciting, isn't it....?

Gutted. Just watched the finale of Defying Gravity, the Sci-Fi thingy that ran on BBC2 until Christmas, only to discover after a quick graze of the interweb that it's been cancelled. In America they didn't even bother showing the whole series. A space exploration/relationship/weird stuff romp that even girls might have liked, it seems to have suffered from a lack of publicity in the States and unfavourable descriptions like "Grey's Anatomy In Space". Genius that one - Grey's fans will think "urgh, Sci-Fi" and Sci-Fi fans "girlie romantic stuff". Anyway, a bunch of flawed astro's get hurled into space only to discover that their mission to various planets is actually to pick up a bunch of weird fractal objects that give them nasty, guilt-laden hallucinations and start messing with their genes as well as their heads. The writer had Series 2 & 3 all planned out, and it was a 6 series idea. I knew it was on the ropes when BBC2 shunted i...

Another seat for F1 2010 has finally been filled. US F1 have announced that Argentinian Jose Maria Lopez will drive for them next year. JML (Why have I heard that before magic cleaning cloth?) was Renault's test driver for 3 years, which just goes to show how pointless an exercise that has been with the major testing restrictions, as I'd never even heard of him. Fascinating Argentinians-In-F1 quiz time!! How many Argentinians have competed in F1 previously? More. No, more than that. Come on, you're not even trying. 24, amazingly. Who was the last one - come on, it's easy... Gaston Mazzacane (Prost team 1991). You should have know that....

Ah, so now I get it. Apparently, the Sporting Working Group (who seem to be made up of people from the teams themselves) are keen to have a points system that gives greater encouragement to drivers by rewarding them more for 1st and 2nd places, hence the proposal to readjust the new points system. A bigger gap would exist between first and second, second and third, and all the other points would be reduced a bit. This needs to be ratified by the FIA at their meeting next month, but looks likely to happen. Which begs the question... WHY DIDN'T THE FIA ASK THE TEAMS IN THE FIRST PLACE?! (Oooh - get the culture vulture! Tonight's musical offering is Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Opus 67. conducted by Herbert Vov Karajan. Really!)

Bit odd this - I switched over to BBC News24 earlier and caught the end of the Merc launch in time to hear the reporter saying something about a 7 point difference between first and second place. Hang on a cotton-pickin'-goddam-minute-there-boy! Isn't first place now 25 points and second 20? I know there was a rumour that a Working Group wanted the gap to be bigger, but I didn't think it had been ratified? Nothing online anywhere about it....? Wah! My rules, my lovingly crafted rules! *sob* (Moved on to Brian May's "Nothin' But You (Guitar version)" during this online panic attack.)

The Mercedes team launched their new car today. Only they didn't. For some inexplicable reason, they chose to show-off their new drivers, Rosberg (nice hair) and Schumacher (nice stare), and a car in the new livery, which is going to have me thinking it's the McLaren for the first part of the season. Only it wasn't a new car. It was last year's Brawn,a couple of cans of RAL 9006 and some stickers. Quite why they did this is anybody's guess - they are due to launch the actual car later this week. Mind you, isn't it all just a bit of a gimmick anyway? All the teams will avoid putting any particularly clever bit on display for as long as possible, and they will all revise the cars after they start testing. Crikey - did I just talk myself out of a grumble? What's wrong with me?! (Filling the cans tonight - Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells II" Live)

You probably thought of him as the hirsute German chappy with bad taste in sunglasses, but I always though Nick Heidfeld was a darn good driver. He never managed to be in the right car at the right time though, and was always just "the other German driver" during Schumi's reign. Who knows? Had he been at Brawn last year, he may well have given Jenson a run for him money. It seems he will shortly be announced at Mercedes Test Driver, usually shorthand for "my career is over, no good teams want me as driver, I might as well rake up a few quid and hope I get a another pop sometime". Ironically, it was Schumacher's return that probably prevented him from getting the drive beside Rosberg. Pity that - I think it would have been quite revealing... (Tune tonight - Genesis, "The Brazillian (Live)".)

No, not the Europe song. With Alguersuari having been signed up, there are now only 4 seats left in F1 for the new season. Surprisingly, Renault still have a vacancy, The Campos team need someone to partner Senna (Brrrrr. Still freaks me out typing that) whilst USF1 are too busy scoffing burgers, using up the world's energy resources and invading other countries to decide on any drivers yet. Or something. That's me given an intimate body search should I ever try to visit America, then.

Jaime Alguersuari (pronounced "Hi me" you see? See what I did there? Huh? Huh?!) has been re-signed by Toro Rosso, alongside the already signed Sebastien Buemi. Surprisingly for someone who has already completed half a season in F1, he's still only 19. Lordy. Don't policemen all look young nowdays too? (NP: We've moved on to more of that orchestral fella doing his hoovering with the lights out - the Organisation album, Side 1, "Motion And Heart")

Finally got around to seeing Avatar today, in 3D. Wow. That's a good film, and stunning in three dimensions. But don't take my word for it - a young lad I overheard afterwards mustered up all his linguistic skills and knowledge of the wonderfully rich vocabulary available to him and said: "When it was, like, snowing, it was like it was snowing and I forgot I had the 3D glasses on". Couldn't have said it better myself, kid. Anyway, it's soon fairly easy to forget that 10ft skinny blue aliens with a distinct lack of clothing (but seemingly no embarrassment) are actually not normal until the point that one picks up a human (I won't spoil the plot) and you realise that the small, pink pudgy things are us. OK, the plot is a bit obvious, and you can spot most of what's coming (except one bit), but it is clever, poignant and a walloping great big environmental message. If this all sounds a bit enthusiastic, stand by - here's the grumpy bit. The 3D glasses...

The cloud. Apparently, that's where we are all heading. In the not too distant future, we won't have to worry about actually owning or storing any physical or digital copies of music, films, photos etc. They'll all be in The Cloud. We won't even need to have software on our computers - it'll all be in The Cloud and you'll just access it from your teensy touch-screen wotsit via a mega broadband connection that would make the channel tunnel look like a drinking straw. Yes, the future is very exciting. Could someone please explain why I have an entire drawer filled with bloody chargers, cables and connectors then? It just took me five minutes to find the right one for my mobile. Go on future - sort that one out... I swear they're multiplying. (NP: Laydeesandgennelmen - Mr Johnny Cash sings "I Walk The Line")

That didn't take long then - Schumi is playing the mental power games already. Under the somewhat weird car numbering system in Formula 1, Button gets 1 because he's World Champ. Hamilton gets number 2, not because he was the previous Champ or anything remotely clever like that. Oh No. He gets it because he's Jenson's team mate. Anyway, because they were the Championship winning constructor, Brawn (now Mercedes) get 3 and 4. Because Nico Rosberg was first driver announced, he got 3. Schumi gets 4. But not any more. Apparently, he doesn't like racing in even numbered cars. So he's pulled rank, and bagged the 3 instead. This would of course have absolutely NOTHING to do with it being a higher number than 4, psychologically. Definitely not. No way. Nuh-uh. He's back everyone! And he's already being arsey! (I can't tell you what's playing tonight. You'd laugh.)

Goodness me - I've been in the same job for a whole year, as of today. To think, it was just 365 days ago that I sat in front of my computer screen, looking blankly ahead and wondering just what the hell it was I was meant to be doing. Well, I'm delighted to say that 1 year later, my screen is bigger. I still don't know what the hell I'm meant to be doing though. The good thing is... nobody has noticed. Hope you all enjoyed the celebratory cake. Except for Chris. Sorry about that. Still, if I'm here this time next year, I might bring another one in. (NP: Still the same Freddie album!)

Cable arrived in the post. Phone now has The Sweeney theme as the ringtone, and the end bit from John Craven's Newsround as the text message noise. Memory on phone now full (?!! WTF?) so will have to buy some teensy memory thingy if I want to do anything else. Cheeky sods.

Pedro de la Rosa has landed the vacant seat at Sauber for next year and will be teamed up with that feisty Japanese chap who drove the last couple of races for Honda last year, Kamoo... Kamyouee, er.. Kobayamish.... Anyway, Pedro has been kicking around at McLaren getting in the way of the likes of Coulthard, Raikkonen, Hakkinen, Montoya and Hamilton for the past 7 years as test driver and last raced in 2006 (a bit). He's contested 71 GP's and hasn't particularly set the world on fire to date. He is nice and old though. He'll be 39 by the first race of the year, which is positively ANCIENT in F1 terms, although he is beaten by Schuey and Rubens. And maybe Fisi. I should possibly have checked up on that before writing this. Research? Yeah, right... (NP: Still Fred....)

You know your week is off to a bad start when you get hassle from youir breakfast. Having purchased a whopping 1kg box of Mr Kelloggs finest corn flakes (and accepted the fact that the box is just too sodding big to fit in a cupboard) there's just the small matter of getting into the box. "Slide finger under flap" normally induces fits of laughter from 12 year old boys, but in this instance is more likely to give you a nasty cut. Sharp, cardboardy edges? Dried shards of gluey stuff? No thanks. I use the flat side of a knife. Haveing (moderately) successfully cleared the first hurdle, I calmly gripped the plastic inner bag and pulled at the opposing sides as usual, expecting the seam at the top to open up at one end, thus providing a handy flakey chutey thing to gently guide my nourishing brekkie towards it's milky resting place. Sadly, it just tore straight down both sides instead. Bearing in mind that 1kg is a LOT of corn flakes, I will be aiming for the bowl and spr...

After carrying around my big ol' Nokia for the past... er... bit embarrassing this... er.. well, probably 5 years plus (screams of horror from technotypes) Mrs Hamilbutton decided I was just too pathetic to be seen with and purchased me a new moby. . After reading the manual and realising that you need to own a flash phone before you could understand what any of it means, I did the usual thing and played with it a lot. It's got a camera (I took a picture of a hairy cow today. What are you looking at?) and an MP3 player/radio, video camera and is about half the weight of my old one which... was a phone. Now, once I've purchased the obligatory Sony Ericmorecambe cable to allow me to connect to the laptop, I can (I think) shove anything I like on to it and have it as a ring tone. The shortlist so far is: The bit out of The Chain used by the BBC for F1 * The Cadbury's ad tune with the kids with the wiggly eyebrows ** The theme from Captain Pugwash The theme from Dr Who The ...

Some of the teams have started announcing dates for the launch of their new cars. McLaren seem to be first up on the 29th of January (that's just 2 weeks away!), with Renault on the 31st and Sauber sometime around then too. Lotus will probably unveil theirs around the 12th of Feb. I would imagine there will be some interesting liveries on most of these, with major sponsorship changes etc. That squeaking noise is me bouncing up and down in my chair in excitement, by the way. (I'm not ashamed to admit that at the moment I'm listening to A-ha's "Take On Me")

...have a Grand Prix. Seems that the idea of a street race around Rome is on the cards. That'd be pretty exciting, wouldn't it? Any other suggestions? Basingstoke? Didcot? Reading? "And here's Alonso on Broad Street, just past Heelas and getting dangerously close to the Marks & Sparks cardigan display".... No? OK then. (More MP3 toons - Enigma "La Puerta Del Cieulu")

Bernie has stated that he would like circuits to have a shortcut that drivers could use a certain number of times per race, to liven up proceedings and allow drivers to get past each other. I'm pretty sure he's been watching ace 70's cartoon Wacky Races - didn't they always have some great shortcut than none of the other teams knew about? Actually, there's a thought.... Boulder Brothers - Ferrari Dastardly & Mutley - Mercedes Penelope Pitstop - Renault You get the idea... (Random MP3-age today gives me The Kooks - "Stormy weather")

Blimey. 2 followers in a day. I feel like a rock star. Henceforth, I shall be insisting that any smarties have all the green ones removed first before being presented to me, and I want a chino helicoptered in direct from Chesters whenever I fancy one. Which is quite regularly. Life would be much better if only I could get hold of a cuppuchino at any time of the day. Handily, after a bit of impressive maneuvering, I managed to exit the car park at work in just 4 attempts. Well, it's called a car park... it's more a muddy, puddle-filled wasteland where, if you aren't in early and bag the best spots, you need waders and a friendly dry-cleaners afterwards to get out of your car. And that was before the local river decided it wanted a look a couple of months ago. For the last 3 weeks, it shared many characteristics with the Alps. Hilly, nasty crevasses, snow covered, the sort of place where you could easily get lost and die of cold and only attempted by the extremely brave. Ther...

Hello to Olie, who has the dubious honour of become my first follower. I now feel a bit like some sort of religious cult. Yes, that was an "L" in the word at the end of the last sentence. Weather update from the wilds of Cumbria... Oh look - it snowed again. Alarmingly, when I got to work today I had to dig my way in to a parking space. I'm optimistically hoping for a nice thaw before chucking out time. (Playing on the lunch-break non-Apple MP3 player today, randomly plucked from the 732 tunes on there is Kim Wilde's "You Came", 12 inch version)

Apparently "the" bookies have announced who the great unwashed masses have currently predicted will be the top three in the 2010 F1 championship, assumingly by bunging their hard-earned spendo at said makers of books. According to them, the newly KittyCatDoll-free Hamilton will be World Champ, with Alonso second and Schumacher third. What... no-one thinks Button might win it again? Or Massa?! Vettel even? Blimey. (Today's audio-cassette tape tunes are courtesy of Peter Gabriel's 1992 album, "Us")

Jenwis had an MRI scan on his head today - results have not yet come back, so I can't say for definite if a brain was detected. The hospital sent me a nice letter explaining about not wearing clothing with metal bits in etc. I eventually found a pair of trousers with only plastic buttons for fastening, swapped regular grundies for my leather ones with the metal studs and arrived feeling slightly smug. That didn't last long. After paying a King's ransom for the car park (which was sheet ice... don't get me started) I wandered into the appropriate department where any smugness rapidly evaporated. I'd forgotten how depressing these places are. Everyone in the waiting rooms in the X-Ray department looked at you as you walked past with that kind of sad look that hopes forlornly that you might be about to tell them they're fine, and it's nothing to worry about. It was either that, or they couldn't believe my wooly hat and scarf combo. After signing in and fill...

Nico Rosberg has apparently said that he will get equal treatment from Mercedes. The "other" driver at Mercedes is Michael Schumacher. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Haaaaaaaa!!!!! Thanks Nico - nice one. (Currently grooving to the inexplicably long-titled track by the Cross, "Love Lies Bleeding (She Was A Wicked, Wily Waitress)".)

Being a hardy Northerner (snic!) I am of course used to a bit of snow and cold weather. However, even I'm surprised by quite how snowy and chilly it has been of late. The nearest weather station to my place of work was registering -11C... at lunchtime today. Even down here by the balmy coastal waters of the North West it's already heading for -4C. Worst of all, at my place of blogging (the teensy room laughingly described as a third bedroom by the Estate Agent, and nestling next to the wafer-thin partition wall next door to the loo) it's currently a totally tropical 12C. Tip of the week. Don't buy a 100 year old house. They have a small heat-retention problem. * Coming soon - Jenwis answers your questions on the merits of removing plaster and lathe walls and the detrimental effect it can have on your wallet *

Unbelievable. How does he do it? Flavio Briatore, former Renault boss and the man at the centre of "Crashgate" had had his lifetime ban from F1 overturned by a French court. Pat Symonds has similarly had his 5 year ban removed and both have received damages (although I'm guessing Flav didn't really need an extra four and a bit thousand quid). The Mumbling One has also suggested (in his usual, somewhat incoherent and indirect way) that he's been cleared, and may even take Piquet to court for getting him in the poo like this. But let's just make one thing very clear - the French court said that his lifetime ban was not enforceable. NOT that he was innocent. Purely that the the FIA didn't have the authority to ban him. Big BIG BIG difference. Renault have already appointed a new team principal, and Flav has said something about wanting to spend time with his family and not being in a hurry to return to F1. At least, I think that's what he said. I never c...

Whilst travelling home post-Crimbo, I passed through at least 142 separate road-works on the M6. All were bereft of workmen, which is fair enough. Some even had the cones pushed back. All retained the 50mph speed limit (and don't get me started - I once got fined for doing 54mph in one such instance, and the letter was kind enough to say it was for "the safety of the workforce". I'm guessing that, as they were probably at home watching the Eastenders Christmas Special, me endangering them was fairly unlikely). But what really wound me up was where the hard shoulder was being strengthened, and to give the contractors room to work in safety the lanes had been squeezed together a bit. You know the sort of thing; little shiny reflective yellow squares in a row (except for the stray ones making a run for it), and some pillock in a BMW who keeps drifting worrying into your lane. Anyway, the overhead signs declared "NARROW LANES FOR YOUR SAFETY". Hang on a mo... MY...

Is there a wind-up going on? I've just read that some team called Stefan GP are trying to get into F1 next year. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think entries are well and truly closed, aren't they? Anyway, continuing the theme of it all sounding a little weird, Stefan GP are from Serbia. Remind me of the other big Serbian F1 teams? Drivers? Anything F1 related? No...? They apparently have Toyota's cars planned for 2010 before they pulled out. Not whole, I assume, just in plan form. Mind you, the way this story is going, maybe Toyota hid them in the back of an Aris somewhere that Stefan brought second hand. I dunno. The theory seems to be that, if they aren't allowed into F1 this year, they will rent the cars out to pay drivers or teams, assumingly for practice. There you go - it's not even the ends of the first day of the new decade and already it's all gone a bit strange. *sigh*

Nice to see Jenson Button and Ross Brawn handed an MBE and OBE respectively in the New Year's Honours List, wasn't it? Button certainly deserved some recognition for his continued battle against a seemingly endless flow of bad luck with teams over the last decade. Brawn too thoroughly deserves his award after masterminding Schuey's 7 World Titles and steering his eponymous team to the Title this year.

Farewell then, noughties. Welcome to another decade - let's hope it's a great one. My thanks to everyone who made Christmas great: My lovely wife for the top pressies and a great walk in the snow on Christmas day; Her family for entertaining us on our quick overnight over the border in Yorkshire; Paul & Kris for the lovely evening (and Johanna for being extremely cute); James & Charlottie for the fab Iranian food and free-flowing drinks and great company (see, the kitchen never did catch fire); John & Sally for lunch and always being excellent hosts and for the pressies, Colin for his pressies and Lucy for being the best 13 year old on the planet... sorry David Tennant's gone, spud. (NP: Xmas pressie CD number 3 - Thomas Dolby's "The Golden Age Of Wireless")