Skip to main content

Lookey-Likey #2 - Renault

Image
By

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 for a Bond villain (Genii, or something), having come very close to pulling out of F1 after a season that saw them convicted for cheating, the loss of sponsors and their top management wallahs. Oh, and their star driver who won them 2 titles has bloggered off. Again. Still, could be worse (but not much). In their favour, they have got Bob Kubica, who could well win a race again, given the right car. How is the car, then? Worryingly, bits of it were covered in bin bags at the launch. Either they've got some tricksy new bit they don't want the others to see, or they haven't quite finished it yet... It's probably going to be a tough year for Renault, I think.

Robert Kubica is a top-notch driver, and deserved a better hand at BMW Sauber. Just when it looked like he was in with a shout of the title in 08, the team decided to concentrate on the 09 car. Which was a dog. He'll drag a performance out of the waspmobile this season, and might manage a few star-turns too.

Vitaly Petrov... erm... is Russian... and... oh yeah, he was 2nd to Hulkenberg in GP2 last season, so he's a least a pretty good pay-driver. But never driving an F1 car before? Sheesh...

Footnote - Renault manage an interesting double: Petrov is F1's first-ever Russian, and their test driver Ho-Ping Tung (No, really) is the first Chinese driver. Golly.

(Still Whitney. I should turn it off really.)

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making an exhibition of yourself

By
Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...
Post a Comment
Read more

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

By
If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...
Post a Comment
Read more

Suffering from natural obsolescence

By
You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...
Post a Comment
Read more