And the winn(g)er is...

A picture paints a thousand words....

Still, won't stop me, will it? Well, what a cracking afternoon's entertainment. The BBC's coverage of the British Grand Prix was spot on (thanks guys) and I especially enjoyed the pub quiz. To quote Al Murray's pub landlord when offering darts to Button "You any good at Arrows? Nah, neither was Damon Hill".

An interesting story had bubbled up overnight about the Red Bull wing issue. In short, they had two new front wings, Vettel's broke, so they took the one off Webber's car and gave it to Seb. For a guy feeling the pressure about wether his team are favouring the other side of the garage, this must have brought down the red mist for Mark. Luckily, he's better at controlling his temper than Alonso, and he took it on that big Aussie chin of his and decided the best way to answer that was to go out there and win it.

Straight away at the start he made it abundantly clear that he wasn't going to take any crap from his team-mate and avoided a swerve by Seb before muscling him out of the way at the first corner. Vettel then brushed Hamilton's from wing and copped a puncture. Pole to the back on the first lap. They weren't the only team-mates scrapping though, as Alonso and Massa came together and Felipe joined Seb at the back after his own flat sent him limping to the pits. Hamilton and Webber traded fastest laps at the front with Mark ahead, and a hot-headed Alonso tried to get past Bob Kubica, only to find he was out of track when Mr K firmly closed the door on him. Rather than do the sensible thing and let Kubica back through, he ploughed on, risking a penalty. It came, but by this time Kubica was out of the race so the FIA went for a drive-through penalty instead. Unfortunately for the grumpy one in red, the Safety Car came out to allow for debris from De La Rosa's collapsing rear wing to be cleared, thus he had to take the penaly afterwards... by which time a Sunday drive down the pitlane involved the entire field passing him. I'm guessing he wasn't happy, as not long afterwards he curtly told the team "no more radio".

Towards the end some good scraps built up: Liuzzi & Alonso, who was attempting to get back through the field - didn't work out very well though, and Fernando wound up with a puncture. I wouldn't want to be on his flight back home. Rosberg and Button (in a brilliant recovery from 14th on the grid) slugged it out for 3rd, with Nico the winner in this fight, whilst Sutil and a fast-moving Vettel had a ding-dong for 7th, with Seb finally getting the place.

Webber's comments on the radio after taking the flag spoke volumes: "Not bad for a Number Two driver", whilst Christian Horner asked him "Can you manage a smile now?".

Barrichello showed Williams' improving form for 5th (and then became the fastest F1 driver in a reasonably priced car on Top Gear later), with another good drive from Kobayashi netting him 6th. What was he doing the first half of the season then?! Sutil, Schumacher & Hulkenberg rounded out the points finishers, meaning both Williams and Mercedes drivers finished in the points. Ferrari? 14th and 15th...

If Mark Webber needed to answer his critics and show that he can rise to the occasion in difficult circumstances, he did a fair dinkum job at Silverstone.

(NP tonight. Er... Bon Jovi. Sorry.)

"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...

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