Skip to main content

Meow! Prancing Horse gets catty


They're only happy when they're whingeing. Ferrari have had a right old grumble on their website about the new teams joining F1 this season (or not, depending on which rumour you listen to).

Try this: "Two teams will limp to the start of the championship, a third is being pushed by an invisible hand and, as for the fourth, you would do well to call Missing Persons to find it. In the meantime, we have lost two constructors along the way, in the shape of BMW and Toyota, while at Renault, there is not much left other than the name. Was it all worth it?”

I think they might be unhappy about something or someone. Can't quite put my finger on who, but they sure are taking it to the Max.

They aren't too keen on Stefan either... “Serbian vultures, who picked the bones of Toyota on its deathbed”.

Ooooooo - back in the knife drawer, Mrs Sharp!

So they're blaming the decision to introduce spending restraints, allowing new teams to enter F1 so that they actually have a vague chance of competing, for the departure of "big" teams? Let's look at the evidence, shall we?

BMW - did pretty well until last year, when they were only slightly better than me in my Punto 1.2 (Probably. I'd have given the Toro Rosso's a run for their money though.)

Toyota: Many years, no wins. Occasionally good, mostly mediocre. More likely to get one of their road cars going really fast when the pedals got stuck.

Ferrari have been in F1 forever. That makes them the F1 equivalent of a great-granny; Sat in the corner grumbling about how things aren't what they used to be, why does everyone look so scruffy these days, who are you anyway? and I was right all along, see?

Maybe it's not time for the retirement home just yet, but perhaps they need to make sure there actually is an F1 for them to win in, rather than trying to scare off everyone by being grumpy.

That's my job.

(Late career oddity - Squeeze's "Babylon And On" from 87. Trust me to open my mouth)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"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 ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...