Oops, upside your head

Valencia. It's so dull, isn't it? Nothing ever happens. *sigh* oh well. Might as well watch then, you never know, this year it might be different...

Qualifying made a bit of a mockery of 2 weeks of press speculation about how fab some team's new blown rear diffuser was or how much extra time had been found with an F-duct etc. In the end, the only surprises were that Michael and Nico (the floppy haired one) both went out in Q2 in the clearly-less-than-brilliant Merc, whilst Williams drivers Rubens & Nico (the Hulk-y one) made it into the top ten. Vettel grabbed pole, Webber was 2nd, Hamilton 3rd and Alonso 4th. Button managed just 7th after a scruffy lap. His Sunday was set to improve, whilst Nando and Webbo's were about to get worse. In Mark's case, much worse...

Webber made a scruffy start to the race and wound up somewhere down the arse-end of the top ten, so a decision was taken to cut his losses and change tyres early. This put him back out right near the back of the field. Behind Crikey Heikki's Lotus in fact. Opinions here differ somewhat: Should the slow teams just get the hell out of the way of the faster drivers? Shouldn't they be allowed to race for position? Was Mark stupid to get so close knowing the Lotus would brake earlier for the corner? Did Kovaleinen deliberately block him? Whatever your opinion (to my mind, Heikki wasn't at fault) Mark ploughed into the back of the Lotus and was launched into the air. Hello sky! Hello DHL sign! Hello track... head first...

For the first time in a while I suddenly discovered myself stood up, having just said something quite rude. As the car landed the wrong way up, I wondered if it was going to roll. Luckily it didn't. Then Mark's car hit the tyre wall HARD. Amazingly, he was OK.

Righty-ho, this isn't a boring race anymore! The Safety Car came out and, unseen by us mortals, Lewis backed off, then sped up again, thus managing to just overtake the SC before it crossed the line painted on the track. The line that basically means "don't overtake the SC now". Woops. More entertainingly, this meant that Lewis could zip round at near full tilt and pop into the pits for a leisurely tyre change. Fernando (and I'm guessing his face was the colour of his car) was stuck behind a dawdling safety car, thus losing him a heap of time. Ever the gentleman, Nando immediately got on the radio to complain, and proceeded to do so for the rest of the race, after the race, today and quite probably for some considerable time to come. To further irritate the easily-irked Spaniard, the stewards took ages to apply a drive-through penalty, by which time Lewis had built up enough of a margin to pit and rejoin ahead of Kobayashi, who hadn't bothered to stop for a tyre change. Crazy guy!

As the race wore on though, Kamui's plan seemed to be working just fine. After 54 laps he was still on the same tyres and quick - and 3rd. Finally he pitted, rejoining in 9th whilst Hamilton tried to catch Vettel. He never made it, but Kamui on new tyres was flying. Last lap and he caught and passed Alonso (which I'm sure improved the grumpy one's mood no end) and then, at the final corner, nipped past Buemi for 7th. I remember why I picked him for my Fantasy Formula 1 team now.

Hulkenberg has entertainingly picked a fight with a tyre wall after his car conked out, and even though he gave it a damn good kicking, it was still there afterwards.

So in the end Vettel won easily, followed by Hamilton, Button, an excellent Barrichello, Kubica, Sutil and Kobayashi. After that it got a bit confusing. 9 drivers had been a bit too nippy after the safety car came out and were subsequently handed a 5 second penalty, which gently mixed the remaining results, handing Alonso 8th.

Germany 1, England 2 (and 3).

Finally worked out how to record the red button Forum on the BBC post race. It was great for 20 minutes, before the power went out at the circuit leaving us with blank screens. And it never came back...

(Playing tonight, Bowling For Soup's most recent CD, which dropped through my letter box this week, "Sorry for Partyin'" and the track "America (Wake Up Amy)". Woop Woop!)

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 ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog