Skip to main content

Looky-likey #1 - Sauber


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 recession bubbled up and their most recent car was slow even by Luca Badoer's standards. So Peter's got the team back. Could be a tricky season though... An old driver with lots of testing experience (De la Rosa), but not much racing, and a fiery kid with only a couple of races to his name (Kobayashi). Last year's Beemer wasn't great, so how much can they improve on a much smaller budget?

Pedro has been a test driver for McLaren since 02, but has raced a couple of times as stand-in. He was OK, but never set the track on fire in his racing days. Very much a safe pair of hands, he'll probably be OK, but I suspect he's a bit rusty and will take a while to get back into the rhythm of it all.

Kobayashi was brilliant in his couple of outings for Toyota last year - no-one seemed to phase him, and he wasn't afraid of being a bit rough either to maintain his place. He should be entertaining to watch this year, if only to see how long it is before someone punches him for crashing in to them.

(Alarmingly, tonight's cassette seems to have some Whitney Houston on it. Stop shouting woman!)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Schaf Shuffle

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...

Making an exhibition of yourself

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 ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

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...