And then there were four...

In F1 terms, Brazil is usually good value for money.

For starters, it has held the championship showdown for the last 5 years. Would it manage in again in 2010 with 5 drivers still in the hunt?

Qualifying was that entertaining thing of a wet, but slowly drying, track. Things went roughly as you would expect, which regrettably included Button struggling for grip and seeing him fail to make Q3. The biggest surprise came in the last 4 minutes, when everyone decided it was time to switch to slicks and see if they could hang on. Whilst most drivers (including the championship rivals) all slithered here and there, one man kept it all together - a surprising (and probably surprised) Incredible Hulkenberg. But not only did he manage to be ahead of everyone, he then put in another lap a whole second faster. Awesome. Somehow you knew that was likely to be the highlight of his weekend...

Button's crap day got worse when some armed neer-do-wells attempted to get at his armoured motor on the way out of the track. Still, whilst scary, he fared better than some Sauber mechanics who were held up and had their gear stolen. You don't get that at Silverstone. Mind you, you get robbed when buying a burger instead.

Race day saw Red Bull with another opportunity to become constructor's champs (if they could manage not to balls it up this time) and they got off to a fine start, with both drivers past Hulky on the first lap. Alonso couldn't manage the same until L7 and Button once again seemed to be struggling with tyres.

Hamilton seemed to spend most of the race grumbling about his tyres, the F duct (asking if it was working seemed a bit odd - it's a bloody hole. Did he think it had healed up or something?), tyres again and probably the price of fish too.

Jenson opted to pit early for tyres (what had he got to lose?) on L12 to try and get himself out of the Hulkenqueue which had formed, and Massa did the same. A dodgy wheel nut meant he was back in next lap, knackering him home GP big time, and any chance of him helping his team-"mate".

Up front, Vettel led from Webber by roughly 2 seconds for ages, the gap ebbing and flowing as they lapped endless cars, a low-attrition race (unless you were Tonio Liuzzi) meaning nearly everyone was still running at the end. Alonso, comfortable in the knowledge that he just needs podiums to bag another title, kept a comfortable distance back in 3rd.

Liuzzi failed to spot a corner (how come he's still got a drive?) on lap 51 and the Safety Car was deployed. As everyone had already taken their mandatory tyre stop, it was surprise to see Hamiton and Button pit, but as it turned out, they remained in the same positions, albeit with a bunch of lapped cars in front of them.

Button needed a miracle for his title chances to stay alive but, unlike armed gunmen*, it didn't arrive. Whilst Koyayashi did his usual late-race banzai business and Rubens had his usual crap luck at home with a puncture, Vettel won with Webber 2nd, Alonso 3rd, Hamilton 4th and Button 5th. Credit to Hulky - 8th was pretty respectable in the end, with only the title protagonists and 2 Mercs in front of him.

It was enough for Red Bull to take their first Constructor's title too. And so we head off to to the final race of the season, with the top 3 closed-up further, but Hamilton out of it, unless he wins and the rest don't score in Abu Shabi. Sorry, Dhabi.

Damn, this season is exciting...

(* Why do we say "armed gunmen"? If they weren't armed, they wouldn't be gunmen, just men. It's like saying wet water. I really shouldn't let this sort of thing annoy me so much, should I? *long pause* But it does. Grrrrr.)

(Playing tonight, Marillion's 88 album "Radiation")

"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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