Skip to main content

Try to stay awake now - it's RRA time! (and it's not as good as Hammer Time)

Its a tough one to make interesting... so I will instead apply equal measures of sarcasm, vitriol and, possibly, pointless meandering.

Fresh on the heels of yesterday's blog post about HRT (snik!) leaving FOTA, it seems that the teams are now upset about someone (*coughREDBULL*) flaunting the noble agreement that is the Resource Restriction Agreement (RRA).

This worthy concept was introduced voluntarily by the teams themselves a few years ago, and therefore is policed only by their good selves also, which sounds very much like putting me in charge of security at the main Cadbury Creme Egg depot. Wherever that is now. I know nothing. I wouldn't tell you anyway if I did.

Anyway, this agreement limits the amount of time and cash each team can spend on developing various bits of the car, wind-tunnel testing and just about anything to do with making the car whatsoever, the idea being to stop the big teams spending money equivalent to Ireland's overdraft on making a wheel nut just a teensy bit more aerodynamic.

Just for a change, Red Bull are under the microscope, with the insinuation being something along the lines of "You don't go THAT fast unless you cheated". Interesting thought, but one that didn't add up when anyone challenged the RB Boys over their front wing flexing, diffuser, or anything else come to that, last season.

The self-imposed penalties are basically that you lose the amount of time you overspent last season against your development for this season. But cunningly, on an incremental scale. Where have you heard that before? Yup. my FF1 competition.  Gits! I'll do you for copyright!

Anyway, investigations are being made, there will doubtless be some bitching, posturing and snidey comments, and the whole thing will go boobies-up in no time.

Still, Red Bull won last year, and no RRA can take that away from them.

Gentleman's agreement? This is F1 we're talking about.....

(Tonight's very thin bit of brown tape doing the analogue hissy thing through my stereo is still the whopping Best Of The Eighties compilation. Arcadia's "Election Day". Crikey.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Faking it for real

As Donald “I’m really great, everybody says so” Trump is so fond of pointing out, there is a lot of fake news around nowadays. Honest. Your friends at Facebook think so too, and have recently been publishing their top tips for spotting false news – by placing them as ads in newspapers. Considering they came in for considerable criticism themselves, that’s like shouting “Squirrel!” and pointing at a tree whilst you hastily kick away the prize begonias you just trampled. To help you make sense of this (and because I’m a caring person), I thought I’d run you through their suggestions and help to explain them for you. I know. I’m lovely. 1. Be sceptical of headlines READING THIS ARTICLE WILL IMPROVE YOUR SEX LIFE!!! And explain that catchy headlines, or stuff all in capitals might be a bit iffy. 2. Look closely at the URL You can find out more about this at www.wowyouregullible.com if you want to understand how phony web addresses are a sure sign of dodgyness. 3. Investigate...

Going Underground

The US presidential election and Brexit must have made me more nervous than I’d realised. It seems I’ve created an underground bunker without realising I was doing it. Still – we’ve all done that at some point, right? No? Ah... In that case, the fact that I have inadvertently turned my cellar into a rudimentary survival shelter, just in case it all kicks off, demonstrates a severe case of bunker mentality. Fretting about Donald and his wall, and Hillary and her emails, clearly made me more paranoid that I thought about the possibility of WW3 kicking off. Whilst attempting to find a specific size of imperial washer the other day (turns out I’d mis-filed it in the nut cabinet – Tsk!) I was struck by what a lot of jam and chutney we have in the cellar. And I do mean a LOT. There are boxes of boiled-up sugar and fruit and more boxes of boiled up vinegar and fruit. We’re still only part way through 2015’s output too. Then there’s the plastic containers holding pasta in various for...

"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...