Round and round and round and round and round....

It's winter. You'd probably noticed that though.

So apart from snow causing everything to grind to a halt at the first sign of a flake or two, and Slade being on the radio all the time, it also means there's no F1. You'd probably noticed that too. You're really quite observant, aren't you?

Anyway, immediately after the last race of the season in Abu Dhabi, the teams stayed on for a first spot of testing, and largely to try out the new Pirelli tyres they'll all be racing on next season (assuming they make it to the first race - I'm looking at you, Hispania). I say teams, because there were a few exceptions on the driver front, notably Button and Hamilton, who scarpered pretty sharpish and left Paffett to the McLaren. Ominously, the fastest driver was Alonso...

Lotus had the honour of being the last team to run a fresh set of Bridgestones, before it all went quiet and everyone nipped off to the pub.

So now we have a big old wait until the 4 testing sessions of 2011 spring into life, with the car launches before that. Spain gets the lion's share, with the first session at the Ricardo Tormo circuit in Valencia 1-3 Feb, before Jerez gets a go 10-13 Feb. The Circuit de Catalunya is next up 18-21 Feb, with the final session being in the days before the first race in Bahrain, 3-6 March.

Less than 2 months to go then, before we all start trying to read things into the fact that one car or driver seems strangely fast. Remember Sauber last winter? Precisely...

Even though it usually means diddly-squat, I still can't wait.

(This-afternoon's tunes courtesy of Irish scamps The Undertones' "True Confessions")

Comments

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 ...

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...

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