Skip to main content

Formula Fun

Image
By

OK, so the football was a shambles.

And the tennis is probably heading the same way, and Andy Murray will stop being British and become Scottish again. Good job there is a sport we ARE good at – Formula 1.

This weekend sees the British Grand Prix take place at Silverstone, and there’s a very good chance that the winner will be British too. Sort of.

There are 3 Brits in F1 at the moment – Lewis Hamilton (former World Champion, complains a lot, has earrings and a silly beard, hangs out with Nicole Shirtzingler), Jenson Button (former World Champion, affable, scruffy beard, currently wondering why he’s driving so badly, nice model girlfriend) and Paul di Resta (newish, young, sounds like he’s been programmed by his team, quick, girlfriend not obviously hanging around in back of garage).

Hamilton or Button have a pretty good chance of winning, di Resta less so. They’re up against the classiest field for years, with 4 other World Champions , Alonso (Spanish, only one, big, eyebrow, damn quick), Raikkonen (Finnish, sends viewers to sleep when he speaks, damn quick), Schumacher (German, has his own bus pass, damn quick) and Vettel, the reigning Champion (German, annoyingly likeable, waggly forefinger, damn quick), and a bunch of other chaps who would like to give them a good pasting on home soil too.

With Silverstone having been impressively upgraded over the last few years, and a pretty much guaranteed spot of rain, it’s likely to be a cracking race, adding to the 8 great ones we’ve already had, featuring 7 different winners.

And even if one of the British drivers doesn’t make it to the man waving the black and white chequered tea towel first, then at least the car the winner is pedalling will be in some way of this green and pleasantly damp land. Whilst many of the teams list their nationality as non-UK, most are based here, and even those that aren’t (Ferrari, notably) feature many key staff who enable them to go racing, and burn ridiculously big piles of cash chasing an extra two tenths of a second of lap time.

All we have to do now is sit back, relax, and try to cope with Eddie Jordan on the BBC forgetting to actually ask a question of an interviewee, whilst they smile politely and look bemused and frightened at the same time, both by his interview technique, and shirts that even blind viewers can hear. In the company of David Coulthard (the ex-driver who looks like he’s still wearing a crash helmet painted skin-colour) and Jake Humphrey (so corporate, he probably has ‘property of the BBC’ tattooed on his bum), it should be an entertaining few hours.

Sky? Nah – You have to pay for that, and I bank with Nat West.

Good news, then! The winner of the British GP is guaranteed to be at least very slightly British-ish! By our current sporting standards, that really is quite a result...

Have a very fast weekend.

If you can.

This post first appeared in my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column in the North West Evening Mail on Friday 6th July 2012. This is the unedited version - you can view the printed/online version here: After my moment of triumph last week, where they actually used my title, this week the paper went for "Ready for weekend of British triumph", which cunningly encompasses the fact that, startlingly, that grumpier-than-me bloke has made it to the tennis final at Wimblydon. It'd be grand to see some comments, so please go there and leave one. A nice one, if you like. Or a bad one. It's a democracy, after all.)

(New CD day! David Gilmour's  "Live In Gdansk" CD popped itself through the letterbox this week. Top guitarage!)

Labels

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