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Archive: 2006 October

Why I’m glad to see the back of the tyre war

31 October 2006 21:35

Categories: Formula 1

One of the most common criticisms about Formula 1 is the fact that often it is just the driver of the best car who wins. They’re only half right. The reality is far worse than that.

Not only did last week see the exit of Michael Schumacher from Formula 1, but it also saw the exit of the Michelin tyre company. With a control tyre due to be brought in by the FIA for 2008, it has brought to an end the tyre war for the foreseeable future.

With more and more restrictions being placed on chassis and engine development, most time can be gained through improvements in tyre technology. It is said that 2006′s tyres were 2 seconds per lap faster than 2005′s. The rivalry between Bridgestone and Michelin had become increasingly competitive over the past few years.

Here is an extract from an article by Paul Kimmage in The Sunday Times from a couple of months ago.

At a press conference the next afternoon at the [Istanbul] circuit, [Jenson Button] is joined on stage by fellow drivers David Coulthard, Kimi Raikkonen and Tiago Monteiro. A French journalist raises his hand and asks, â€œQuestion to you all: who will win the world championship? Schumacher or Alonso?â€ The four give the same reply: the championship will basically be decided by the team with the best tyres. The journalist is annoyed. What? No names? No opinions? â€œWeâ€™ve given our opinions,â€ Button insists. â€œWe canâ€™t see into the future. We donâ€™t know whatâ€™s going to happen.â€

We meet an hour later and I pull him up on it again. â€œWhat was all that corporate crap? Why couldnâ€™t you give the guy a straight answer: Alonso or Schumacher? As a journalist and a fan, I find that absolutely infuriating.â€

â€œBecause itâ€™s the truth,â€ he says. â€œIt will all come down to the tyres.â€

â€œThe tyres,â€ I repeat, incredulous.

â€œThe tyres, 100%,â€ he insists.

Kimmage might not have believed him, but it is true. Over the past few years if a driver won the World Championship the tyre manufacturer got the credit. If Schumacher qualified on pole it was because Bridgestone produced a good qualifying tyre. If Alonso won the race it was because Michelin had produced a good race tyre.

In reality, we no longer had a Drivers’ Championship or a Constructors’ Championship. All we had left was a glorified Tyre Championship in all but name. It’s not as heroic as a driver standing up on his seat to win a race. It’s not as sexy as a constructor pushing the boundaries of technology to make their car better. Formula 1 had come down to four — literally — black boxes. Elements that are peripheral to the cars became central to the championship.

Competition is good. It drives improvement. But the thing about tyres is that because they’re black boxes you simply don’t see that improvement. Today’s Formula 1 tyres look almost exactly the same as they did in 1998, even if what goes inside them has developed radically.

The only way we can actually see a tyre making a difference is by looking at a list of lap times. It’s not like watching a driver making an audacious overtaking manoeuvre, a team making improvements to their car design or even the crew executing a slick pit stop. Put simply, tyres are boring. End of.

At first the tyre war added another variable into the mix; a new angle to look at the Championship at. But by the end it had overwhelmed the entire Championship. It drowned out all of the other elements that make motor racing what it is.

Alonso ran away with the first half of the season. When Michael Schumacher made his comeback it was accompanied by a Toyota resurgence at certain races. That wasn’t because of anything Schumacher or Toyota did. It wasn’t not a coincidence that Ferrari and Toyota both used Bridgestone tyres.

Here is what F1Fanatic had to say on the morning of qualifying at the Chinese Grand Prix.

The Toyota drivers Ralf Schumacher and Jarno Trulli, whose average starting positions this year prior to Japan were 10.38 and 11.19, are third and fourth. The swing in tyre performance is so great that its making a mockery of the endeavours of teams and drivers – just as it did to Michael Schumacher and Ferrari last year.

The tyre war has provoked some cripplingly dull races this year when either Michelin or Bridgestone have been miles ahead, handing Alonso and Schumacher some very uncomplicated wins.

I couldn’t agree more. This season might have had a topsy-turvy championship because of the competition between the tyre manufacturers. But a lot of the races themselves — particularly at the start of the season — were shockingly dull, simply because one tyre company would have such a huge and obvious advantage over the other.

F1Fanatic also makes reference to a piece by Mark Hughes in favour of the tyre war. Some F1 fans have relished the tyre war because it has often made things exciting. But that just shows up the big problem with Formula 1 at the moment. How many people can honestly say that they started watching motor racing because they were interested in tyres? Any takers? Surely not. Motor racing is about great drivers and great cars — not bits of rubber.

When Kimi Räikkönen lost the 2003 World Championship, it was blamed on 23 laps of the rain-hit United States Grand Prix when the Bridgestones had a 1.4 second per lap advantage on a drying track. Those crucial 23 laps were, so Michelin said in the December 2003 edition of F1 Racing magazine, the only laps where Bridgestones were faster than the Michelins. And it won Schumacher the championship.

It might have made that particular aspect of the championship interesting. But I don’t want to see a driver win the Drivers’ Championship because he has superior rubber. Nor do I want to see a constructor win the Constructors’ Championship because it happens to use the best tyres. It makes a mockery of the whole idea of racing. You might as well just take one Bridgestone and one Michelin and roll them down a hill to decide who wins the championship.

So good riddance to the tyre war. If it means that next year’s season has fewer twists and turns, then so be it. At least I will be able to see what makes a winning team — because it will no longer be concealed in those anonymous black boxes.

6 comments

Take that, facial hair fascists: A squirrel will be on my face

30 October 2006 18:37

Categories: General, Personal

Sorry I haven’t been writing so many posts recently. It really has been non stop over these past four or five weeks. And now that I’ve got a chance to relax I’m just relaxing.

I’m a little bit worried about what my colleagues at work might think about me. Since I started working I’ve noticed that people talk behind one another’s backs quite a lot. Of course, I wasn’t naive enough to expect that it never happened. But the amount that it happens was a bit of a surprise. It’s not an act that I could keep up. I’m not very good at lying. I just start sniggering uncontrollably.

One time recently at work I was even more tired than normal because I was ill with the cold. I was puffing and wheezing and generally grumbly. When we were getting ready to finish, one person stage-whispered, “Duncan ran out of razors last night.”

I didn’t understand the comment. The only explanation I could think of was that because I was downcast with my illness it was some kind of comment about depression or something. But the comment would only make sense if I already had a reputation as a self-harming manic depressive. Was this what my colleagues thought of me??

The comment suddenly made sense the next time I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I was beginning to sport a beard. It was an innocent comment about my untidy appearance. Phew.

Whenever I’m busy or tired — like I have been for the past few weeks — there is a certain five minute long routine which is always the first to be knocked off the schedule. I’ve mentioned before on this blog that I really can’t be bothered shaving. Imagine if all the time people spent shaving was instead used for doing something useful. I think you’ll agree; the world would be a much better place.

Yet society deems bearded people to be potential axe-murderers or rapists. Or maybe just lazy bastards who can’t be bothered to shave. The whole beard thing became even worse when I realised that it made people think that I was ginger, a crime which for some people is right up there with axe-murdering and raping.

So I decided last year to start shaving regularly for the first time in an attempt to clean up my appearance. But there’s only a certain amount of time that you can shave every day and feel as though it is time well spent. As far as I can make out, it hasn’t altered the way people treat me. And it’s no use having a tidy appearance in the facial hair department if you only get your haircut twice annually or whatever (I haven’t had time to do that either). All it means is that my stupid, poncey face is exposed.

What I’ve discovered about shaving is that if you don’t shave absolutely every day it becomes the thin end of a very slippery wedge. It starts off when I just miss a day because I’m expecting to be indoors all day. Fair enough. Then I decided not to shave whenever I didn’t have to work. Then I started not to shave even when I did have work.

I was shaving every two or three days. Then it was every three or four days. Now it’s about once a week, twice on the odd occasion. The thing about leaving such big gaps between shaving sessions is that because your hair is longer the razor gets clogged up really easily, so the process takes even longer.

Now it’s clear that I value those five minutes per day far more than having an unhairy face. So I’m thinking — despite society’s apparent unease with anybody hiding their face even with perfectly natural facial hair — that I should just grow back my beard. Why the hell not?

I’m not sure what work will think about it though. I’m determined to turn up on Friday looking like I have a squirrel living on my face to see what they say.

5 comments

The legacy of Michael Schumacher part 2

28 October 2006 21:28

Categories: Current affairs, Formula 1, Politics

F1 Fanatic points out another sign that Michael Schumacher’s long term legacy might not be what his fans are hoping for.

Keith Vaz congratulated Schumacher on his “outstanding career” in an Early Day Motion, to which Conservative MP Bob Spink replied:

I donâ€™t think he should be a role model at all. People diving in football is one thing, but what he did is worse because when he was on the racetrack he would often put other drivers at risk.

2 comments

Pulp — The Peel Sessions

28 October 2006 01:56

Categories: Entertainment, Music, Radio, Reviews

For a band that’s been on ‘hiatus’ for the past five years, there has been a remarkable amount of activity on the Pulp front. Jarvis Cocker’s solo album is due to be released very soon. Pulp’s three most popular albums — His â€™n’ Hers, Different Class and This is Hardcore — have recently been re-released, each with an extra disc of bonus b-sides, rarities and suchlike.

It’s a bit odd, because when Pulp’s greatest hits album was released a few years ago it didn’t even enter the top 70. But they must have decided that enough time has passed for people to get nostalgic about Pulp.

The Â£15+ per go I’m being asked to pay for the re-releases of albums I already own from a period when I was such a big Pulp fan that I own all of the b-sides anyway is a bit much. I’ll wait for the prices to come down. But when I was browsing in Virgin the other day I spotted this CD in the corner of my eye and I jumped on the chance to buy it.

It is the ‘complete’ set of Pulp Peel Sessions. It certainly feels complete with two CDs and twenty-nine tracks spanning twenty years. Most people are probably unaware, but Pulp were actually formed in the late 1970s. Their first Peel Session was in 1981, about fifteen years before anybody else had heard of them! Pulp also hold the dubious honour of having the longest gap between their first and second Peel Sessions — a fist-gnawingly long twelve years. Ouch!

Jarvis Cocker has always let it be known that he thinks that Pulp’s material from the 1980s is poor. I quite like most of it. The only genuinely dodgy album of theirs is Separations, their misfiring experiment into acid house territory.

In the liner notes to The Peel Sessions, written by Jarvis himself, he says that he has always resisted the release of Pulp’s first Peel Session because it sounds naive. Perhaps inevitably, it’s the most interesting aspect of the CD. I am actually quite impressed with these songs, performed by a band whose members were still in their teens (the drummer was 15). It certainly could have been a lot worse. Jarvis had nothing to be embarrassed about.

‘Wishful Thinking’ is probably the strongest song, although ‘Refuse to be Blind’ is an interesting glimpse into the slightly experimental approach that Pulp were taking even in their very earliest days. It does sound as though they were a bit overawed by all of the equipment they had at their disposal, but it doesn’t sound too bad for it.

With the first session out of the way, we skip a decade to the period when Pulp were first getting noticed in wider circles. The contrast is huge. It is a very different band. Jarvis is the only member remaining from the original lineup. These performances from the mid-1990s are not actually particularly strong. Cocker sometimes appears to forget his words, or miss his cue. Instead of putting in a quality performance, Cocker relied more on his charisma.

I can’t help but feel that most of Pulp’s eventual success was down to Cocker’s charisma. His famous idiosyncrasies, absent from the 1981 session, are in full force in the later sessions. Of course, the songs themselves aren’t bad. But it doesn’t quite sound like the Pulp most people probably remember.

The performance of ‘Common People’ is especially jarring. It sounds nothing like the powerful epic that would go on to make Pulp the kings of Britpop. It sounds like a really hastily-organised first rehearsal; a cheaply put-together demo tape. It starts of with a weak synth intro and Jarvis’ performance is nowhere near to being the rip-roaring interpretation that made the song what it was. It generally sounds as though their hearts aren’t in it. Imagine if the song had been produced by somebody else — they might never have been as big as they became.

Their later, post-success performances, are easily the most impressive on this collection. It exhibits a more back-to-basics, down-to-earth and comfortable band. They were no longer desperately seeking success, and they were no longer trying to cope with the success when it eventually came.

While We Love Life was not as popular as their previous three albums, I feel as though some of their strongest material came from this period. The assuredness of these performances echo this. ‘Duck Diving’, essentially a charming short story read out by Cocker, is a particularly good inclusion. I had not been aware of the existence of this at all.

CD2 is made not of conventional Peel Sessions, but of special concerts broadcast on Radio 1 including a celebration of John Peel’s 40^th anniversary in broadcasting. Sadly, as we know, there weren’t to be many more years. The inclusion of a jokey remark from Cocker that their performance of ‘Help the Aged’ is dedicated to Peel is a tad unfortunate. Luckily, when it’s all over we hear Peel himself make a sarcastic remark about it.

Although Pulp’s limitations as a live act are exposed here (for instance, what is going on in that out-of-tune performance of ‘Common People’?), these live performances are generally stronger than the actual Peel Sessions themselves. It’s a fairly broad selection of songs aswell. In a way we have been treated to a Pulp live album of sorts.

All-in-all, The Peel Sessions is a great album. It not necessarily great because of the quality of the music. But it is certainly an interesting document of Pulp’s evolution. We see three distinct phases exhibited on this album — from the slightly lackluster experimenting youngsters to the popular Britpoppers to the more mature, post-success, relaxed band that went on hiatus in 2001.

A very good documentation of the career of one of the key bands of the 1990s as filtered through the ears of John Peel.