Skip to main content

Team Willy!


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 success in the 80's and 90's. Occasional promising results have too often been scuppered by driver or tactical errors. They're still canny though, and capable of thinking up something no-one else has. I really hope they can for 2010. Rosberg & Nakajima did well last year, but they've replaced Nico with... Nico (Hulkenberg). And Kaz with the longest-toothed F1 driver of all time, Barrichello. Rubens is good, make no doubts, and Nico... well, we'll have to wait and see.

Barrichello doesn't seem to get lucky. In fact, if it wasn't for bad luck, he wouldn't have any luck at all. Last year with Brawn he finally had a shot for the title without team orders...and still got beaten. He can be great some days and a bit pants on others. I hope he gets the chance to mix it with the kind of company he got used to last year, and doesn't wind up battling Lotuses and, er, Virgins. Ooh, hang on - we'll have to think about what we call that team carefully, won't we...

Hulkenberg? If I'd done some research, I might be able to tell you how he'd got on pre-F1. Shockingly, I have - he was GP2 champ last year, so he'd good. How will he cope in F1 with the teensy bit of testing you're allowed nowadays though?

(NP The Excellent '86 album, titled and by They Might Be Giants)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...

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

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...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

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 ...