SofaF1

This might be a bit overdue and probably irrelevant now after Radio Five’s commenatry from the Nurburgring brought Murray Walker back to the airwaves, but a few weeks ago (it actually could have been months) I heard Murray chatting away on Radio 4. He had been invited to talk about the championship and Hamilton mania, and it was great to hear him of course, but it got me to thinking…

He just has the kind of voice that makes you want to listen to what he is saying, ok sometimes in the race he gets a bit jumbled up, but his excitement in describing what is happening out on the track seems to overide all of that and you get carried along and feel like you are involved with what is happening too. On this radio segment he even ended up talking about hearing aids and was still interesting to listen to!

You may have read about Kimi taking part in a powerboat race in the last few weeks. He didn’t win the race but he did win the prize for best dressed crew:

Yes that’s Kimi with the beer.

And they say Formula 1 doesn’t have any characters?

Hungary is often described as “Monaco without the houses”, but as well as being twisty it is also very dusty which means if you think it’s hard to overtake at Monaco you ain’t seen nothing yet. Unless it rains.

But it might rain.

McLaren seemed to have a massive advantage over Ferrari at Monaco for which the blame was placed squarely on the long wheel base, something Ferrari won’t have been able to change, but certainly other Ferrari improvements should have brought them much closer.

To win the race you really want to be in 1, 2 or 3. The pole sitter wins a lot, but starting off-line in the dust of 2nd brings you very close to danger from the 3rd place man. Probably expect the 1st place man to scamper off as 2nd and 3rd place swap.

If it rains watch Jenson as everyone is saying he was pretty quick last race (0.2 seconds a lap faster than Alonso) and he also won this race last year in the wet.

Apparnently it’s really hot in Hungary and suffering from occasional showers. If that happens in the race then it will be mega, if not then we’ll probably be faced with a bit of a procession. All the more reason to be paying attention in qualifying – that’s where a lot of the action will be!

I would like to introduce to the famous portal of sofaF1 the idea of ‘sledging’.

For those of you not in the know, this is the deliberate use of humorous and/or offensive banter by cricketers (and baseball too, although it was described as ‘trash-talk’ by our Canuck guest in the Rack & Tenter) to put off an opposition batsman/batter.

So what can this have to do with the exciting world of Formula 1, I hear you shout above the sound of Bernie counting his yachts?

How about this – all teams are permitted not only to listen in to other team radio conversations but to interject with witticisms and fruity comment designed to distract the driver/team form their intended course of action and hopefully gain an advantage for yourself.

Now that might sound stupid (might? – Ed.) but it would be no good just shouting insults across the airwaves “la la la you’re crap you are Alonso”, it would just be ignored; he clearly isn’t crap. But how about “Mmmm, lovely bit of chorizo” or “What colour is that on the pit wall? Is it taupe? Or camel? Do you think they have it at B&Q?” or “Isn’t that Maggie Gyllenhaal wearing Manolos and a smile?”…..

And if that fails, you could always lob jelly beans onto the track 🙂

Any suggestions for (un)suitable banter? Comment below!

* famous Freddie Flintoff sledge, in case you were wondering

Near my office today there is a F1 Simulator being run to celebrate the launch of New Look’s mens clothing department which opens today 3rd August 2007.

So yes you get to sit inside a 2005 replica Ferrari and play a Formula 1 simulator game, there is a screen at the front that you are looking at, and a screen at the back so when you look in your mirrors you see what should be there.

It might be the closest you get to the real thing so head on down:

It’s on the corner of Moorefields and London Wall which as you can see from the Map don’t look like they join. It’s actually a large pedestrianised area.

This weekend Martin Brundle is having his usual Hungarian break and this
time his replacement is going to be Damon Hill.

We already know about the strong feelings on here about the lead
commentator and my guess is that most people rate Martin but who is your
favourite Number 2 other than Martin?

Amongst the contenders are: Jonathan Palmer, James Hunt, Peter Windsor
(in the states on Speed TV), Mark Blundel, Jenson Button and Anthony
Davidson. I’m sure there are loads more but I just wanted to get you
started.

Sakon Yamamoto will be replacing Marcus ‘the leader’ Winkelhock for the rest of the season at Spyker and…

Scott Speed is out to be replaced by Sebastian ‘super-sub’ Vettel at Torro Rosso.

Now we’ll really find out if it’s the cars or the drivers who are to blame.

My guess? Liuzzi needs to be pushed to succeed, rather like “Quick Nick” he might need this kick to get going. The car might still be rubbish though.

When Alonso and Massa were having a rant at each other after the European GP, James Allen calmly told us they were speaking in Italian (i think i recall), now my Italian is pretty non existant so i wouldn’t really know but wouldn’t it make more sense to assume they were speaking in Spanish?

Maybe someone who has a better grip of Spanish or Italian could let me know.

I’ve never particularly noticed le Tour de France before. Obviously this year, starting as it did in London, there’s been a lot more publicity than usual. It also happened that as F1 was engaged in a spy scandal, so cycling was in controversy over doping. The two stories were compared, and run adjacent to each other, in many news programmes.

So, I became interested in how it worked. There are 20 stages, much like there are roughly 20 races. The winner is the person who, on average, does the best. He doesn’t have to win every stage, or even the most amount of stages. It rewards consistency. However, the main difference is that there are no points – the winner wins on the amount of time it takes him to complete the whole Tour. For example, this year’s champion, Alberto Contador, took 91 hours and 26 seconds. Could we apply this to F1? Could the winner be the driver who took the least time over the season? This way drivers would no longer ‘settle for second’ and drop back off the leader. They’d push to get as close as possible and minimise the time loss. Conserving engines, and team orders after the second pit-stop, would all go out the window. The only drawback, I can see, is what do you do when a driver fails to finish a race? What time is he given?

Martin Brundle has often said in the past is that all Bernie would have to do to make the races more interesting would be to install sprinklers at the circuits. It certainly was an exciting race.

Although I’m sure Martin was half joking it certainly fits in with one of the most common suggestions for improving Formula 1: lowering the grip level in the car by significantly reducing the downforce generated. This would make the cars harder to drive which is clearly exciting and also make overtaking easier.

In the pub fourstar asked me if this was the best race of the season or was their a purity problem due to the weather?

I throw the question open to all. Also adding a related second question: is the best race always the most exciting?