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

The Schaf Shuffle

By
The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...
Post a Comment
Read more

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

By
We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...
Post a Comment
Read more