Skip to main content

The Lotus position

Image
By
If they were children, you'd get them in a room, give them a good ticking off and tell them not be so bloody stupid, as all they're doing is making themselves look silly, and spoiling it for everyone else.

So how come two Formula 1 teams haven't managed to "grow up and act their age" and both want to be Lotus? Even more confusingly, they'll both be running Renault engines, and neither will actually be owned by Renault.

And worse still, until just recently they were both planning near identical colour schemes. Luckily, the Lotus squad that were in F1 last year seem to have relented, and are going with a variation on the green and yellow scheme they had this year.

But what's with the former Renault team? Have they just run out of ideas? Last year's car looked like a Jordan, and the new one (which will use the colour scheme above) mimics the JPS Lotuses of yesteryear.

Renault sold their shares in the team bearing their name recently, and next year they will be Lotus Renault GP, after backing arrived from the Lotus Car co. Meanwhile, the existing Lotus squad are battling to hang on to their name, which they purchased from James Hunt's brother, who gained the rights to it after the original Lotus F1 team headed by Colin Chapman folded. The squabble is over who actually has the rights to the Lotus name. Clear now? No, me neither.

And that's the point. There are millions of pounds sloshing around in F1, and if things stay as they are, having two Lotus/Renault combo's on the grid is surely going to dilute any promotional/advertising tie-ins either team try to establish. And confuse the hell out of the viewers.

Might I suggest both of them have to go to bed early and think very hard about how much they look like complete and utter dickheads.

(I'm lounging at home today with a numb face. I should probably explain that I've been to the dentists. It a minute I will attempt to drink coffee, but probably dribble it down my shirt. Ah well. Right now, I'm listening to Ken Bruce on Radio 2)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making an exhibition of yourself

By
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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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

By
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Suffering from natural obsolescence

By
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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more