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Archive: 2008 September

From the vaults: Old F1 magazines

26 September 2008 00:30

Categories: History

Okay, so it’s not from the vaults, it’s from my attic.

I just happened to mention in passing to “me” from Sidepodcast on Identica the short-lived F1 magazine GPX. He asked me to upload it so that he could see what it was like, so I took photos of the two issues of GPX I own and uploaded them to Sidepodcast’s Dropio. I hope the people at Haymarket don’t mind too much. But this is over ten years old and it obviously didn’t make them much money at the time, so…

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

If you’re interested, Issue #3 starts here, and you need to click the left arrow to go through the magazine. Issue #4 starts here.

Issue #4 was the final issue of GPX. Obviously Haymarket had high hopes for it, and I even remember seeing posters in the window of a WH Smith advertising it. The magazine totally tanked though.

Originally designed to be a “laddish” magazine, issue #4 shows some signs of desperation with features designed to appeal more to females, including the “Top 20 sexy F1 drivers of all time” and a “hunky” poster of Mika Salo. Stuart C from F1 Racing has a bit more on GPX over at Sidepodcast here and here.

In retrospect, GPX wasn’t a quality magazine. It did have some good gags in it though. I like ‘Brainstorming with the Prost team‘ and the joke about spelling out ‘Schumacher’ with beer cans made me chuckle at the time.

The magazine as a whole has slight shades of The Red Bulletin and Sniff Petrol. In fact, GPX might actually have had a chance if it was as consistently funny as Sniff Petrol…

While I was rummaging for those issues of GPX, I found some other interesting old F1 magazines and various other bits and pieces. Most of these almost certainly came free with F1 Racing. Click below to see what I found.

Click for more »

8 comments

Policies from Un-America

25 September 2008 21:00

Categories: Current affairs, Economics, Politics

I don’t know whether or not the proposed bailout in the USA is a good idea. But it does amuse me that one of the more widely-quoted arguments against the bailout is Senator Jim Bunning’s view that it would be “un-American”.

It’s another aspect of American politics that I find to be a turn-off. That’s probably partly to do with my dislike of patriotism. But even the idea that some policies are inherently American and others are “un-American” is strange. And the idea that you would judge a policy on its American-ness is even weirder.

I mean, do these guys sit around the place reading policy proposals thinking things like, “Pah, that sounds like something a Canadian would support.” Or, “Only cheese-eating surrender monkeys believe that sort of thing!” I suspect that they actually do. What is wrong with, “Blimey, that doesn’t sound like a very good idea and it goes against my principles”?

This isn’t a one-off and you do hear from time to time people dismissing something-or-other for being un-American. I know the USA is a very patriotic country, and whether that is a good thing or not is a separate argument. But I doubt this kind of thing would wash in many other countries. Can you imagine some shadow cabinet spokesperson bemoaning a government’s policy for not being British enough?

The thing is that it just seems like such an arrogant thing to say. The only decent solutions come from America and no-one else in the world has a valid input to make? And they don’t understand it when some people have an iffy attitude towards the USA?

I don’t mean this as a dig towards the USA as a whole. I think it’s a wonderful country with some great people. I just find it amusing that being “un-American” is such a heinous crime according to some.

9 comments

Unwanted phone calls

25 September 2008 19:12

Categories: Current affairs, General, Personal, Politics

I’m quite glad that the Lib Dems have been told off for their cold calling stunt. It’s difficult to imagine quite what was going through their minds when they came up with that one.

I am no fan of telephones at the best of times. In fact, I come close to detesting the things. Mike Smith had a brilliant rant about it a few months back that pretty much sums up my feelings.

As if it’s not bad enough that someone expects you to drop everything, some people have the audacity to do this with the aim of extracting pounds from your wallet. I will never forget the time I answered the phone only to be greeted with this almighty rude salutation, delivered in a gruff, hectoring manner: “This is just a survey, I am not trying to sell you anything. How many windows do you need double-glazed: two, three, four or the whole house?” I just love the fact that zero and even one were not options.

Others try getting you to spend half an hour answering tedious market research questions. Some despicable people even try to get you to vote for them!

I am quite disappointed in the Lib Dems. It has become a bit of a theme of this blog that I am disappointed in all of the parties and am considering not voting. As things stand, the Lib Dems are the only party that I would even consider voting. But their odd decision to interrupt people’s lives with a robotic version of Nick Clegg just makes me wonder what is going on with them.

What makes it all the worse is that you normally expect the Lib Dems to be dead against this sort of thing. They have pretty sound views on privacy and have campaigned in the past against cold callers. I think a lot of people who are members of the Lib Dems normally take a dim view of this sort of thing. It’s good to see that, for instance, Stephen Glenn has criticised the tactic and the people at Lib Dem Voice seem fairly unhappy about it as well.

These calls do invade your privacy, they are intrusive and annoying. Nowadays I do not answer the phone if the number is withheld unless I am expecting a phone call. If I have been at the receiving end of this phone call by a recorded Nick Clegg, I would probably decide not to vote for him.

6 comments

Losing the blogging mojo

25 September 2008 02:02

Categories: Blogging, Commuting, General, Internet, Personal, Technology

It’s not great. Technically, I’m still a bum — but I don’t have the time to blog? Something is wrong.

I guess this is all to do with that theory. If you have a demanding full-time job, go to night college, look after kids and do all the shopping and you have to do something, no bother, you just do it. If you are a bum who does nothing all day, gets up in the afternoon and spends two hours deliberating over what you should have for breakfast, you just get nothing done. I’m in the latter stage at the moment. I’m working on rectifying that, but it’s difficult to get going because I spend three hours a day deciding which font I should put on my CV.

It’s not that I haven’t been blogging. You may know that I have another blog which is dedicated to Formula 1. It’s that stage of the season where there is always something happening, even if it has to be contrived by the FIA. And since F1 is just a big soap opera with races in between, you don’t even need races to have loads to write about. So now I spend much of my time pontificating over the finer details of the debate over whether Buemi or Senna should get the second Toro Rosso race seat.

In the meantime, I’ve been neglecting this blog. And it becomes worse when you spend such a long time away from a blog, because then you feel this pressure to make sure the first post back is a good one. I could have easily written three or four posts by now, but I was worried about them for one reason or another. Blog depression, a truly 21st century disease.

It’s silly to get worried about it. But when you lose focus for a couple of days, suddenly it becomes a couple of weeks and then it becomes a struggle to avoid it becoming a couple of months. I’ve been blogging for a few years now though so I know how these things work. If I can just get going I will be back in the swing of things. But now it’s got to the stage where I have to either write this grovelling excuse or practically throw in the towel completely.

So I’m sorry, this is the one. I make no apology if I write about loads of nonsense for the next week or so until I get into the swing of things, although I do promise to write something or other here.

I recently bought myself a new toy, an Asus Eee PC. I did this partly so that I could get some blogging done when I’m not at home, perhaps if I’ve missed the train in Edinburgh and find myself having a couple of hours to kill (damn cheap day returns). I normally spend those couple of hours wandering around the streets of Edinburgh trying to convince myself I’m busy. Now I can tap some keys on my laptop trying to convince myself I’m busy.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that I’ll find any wifi hotspots so I am discovering the joys of Windows Live Writer. I heard rave reviews about that when it was first launched, but I had no need to use it because whenever I was at a computer I had internet access. Now I am using it on my Eee PC and can say I am quite impressed with it.

The thing about it is that I can now effectively blog in my bed. I have not yet decided if this is totally awesome or totally pathetic. In one sense, it is a great way to use that time I spend being unable to sleep doing something that I can pretend is vaguely useful. On the other hand, that is probably a sign of dire internet addiction.

I’m currently umming and aahing over whether I should buy a wireless router to accommodate this new toy. The current router is full up so when I’m blogging in my bed I’m actually doing it offline. And then the next day I have to faff around with the cables just to be able to do something with the excellent writing I did the night before. I can see that wearing pretty thin.

Anyway, that’s my comeback post. Sorry for disappointing.

9 comments

Final thoughts on the GP2 season

24 September 2008 20:35

Categories: GP2, Opinion

Another thing I haven’t got round to writing about yet is the climax of the GP2 season which happened in Monza.

As it was, Giorgio “Pants” Pantano took the championship with a sprint race to spare. He had a commanding lead in the championship for a long time running up to Monza, so that was no real surprise. However, in the feature race he managed to underline why he finds it so difficult to find an F1 drive.

What should have been a relaxed cruise to a vaguely good result from pole position (he only needed to come 3rd) was made a lot more touch-and-go when he made a silly mistake coming out of the pitlane. He crossed the white line — and not by a little bit. Astonishingly, almost half of his car was over the white line. For a driver with that amount of experience, that is simply unforgivable. Pantano has had 78 GP2 starts plus 34 Formula 3000 starts in addition to his 14 F1 starts.

Getting such a silly drive-through penalty in such a high-profile situation was unlikely to endear himself to many F1 teams. Ian Phillips, who worked with Pantano at Jordan, was speaking on Radio 5 Live over the course of the Italian Grand Prix weekend. He was pretty disparaging about Pantano, saying he never saw what was so great about him and that none of the teams are particularly interested in him.

Earlier in the season Pantano seemed quite optimistic about his chances of getting an F1 drive for next season. But his demeanour after the GP2 feature race in Italy spelled it out — he’s going nowhere. After four wasted years in GP2, Pantano looks set to head to the States to try and carve out a career for himself over there.

The demeanour of Bruno Senna could hardly be more different. Despite losing out to the GP2 championship, he looked happy, relaxed and confident. He says he has spoken to most of the F1 teams except for Ferrari and he is almost a certainty to be in F1 in the near future.

Whether he is ready to get a drive for next year is uncertain. Despite a few strong performances early on in the season, he tailed off a bit towards the end and does not quite look like the complete package yet. Although he was strongly linked to a race seat at Toro Rosso for next season, Red Bull’s people appear to prefer Sébastien Buemi and it looks increasingly likely that Senna will be unable to find a seat for next year. In fairness, another year in GP2 would probably do Senna a lot of good.

Coming third in the championship was Lucas Di Grassi. This is a rather impressive driver who managed to come close to the top of the table despite having missed the first three events (worth a potential 60 points)!

I am not so sure that Di Grassi is quite ready for F1 yet. He doesn’t really stand out on the race track, but he certainly gets the results. He already has very strong ties with the Renault F1 team as a result of his participation in the Renault Driver Development programme. He is already a Renault test driver, so could be a very good shout as a replacement for Nelsinho Piquet.

Another Renault Development Driver is Romain Grosjean. He was pre-season favourite to take the title, having dominated the GP2 Asia series last winter. But he waned in the main GP2 series and could only finish fourth. Grosjean looks like a potentially exciting talent for the future, but he needs to clean up his act a bit before he can be seriously considered for F1. He is in danger of becoming known for his overly-aggressive moves and he has picked up one or two penalties as a result of his ham-fisted defending.

In fact, the person who looks most likely to get a seat in F1 next season is the aforementioned Red Bull protégé, Sébastien Buemi. He only finished sixth in the GP2 championship, behind Pastor Maldonado. Buemi has shone once or twice this season, most notably in the French sprint race. However, for much of the season he has been rather anonymous, collecting plenty of points but with relatively little fanfare.

Whatever, the people at Red Bull clearly feel that they have got a good return on their investment so far and look set to put him into a Toro Rosso seat for next season. Is it wise for Toro Rosso to select Buemi over Senna? I’m not so sure. I feel that both could do with an extra year in GP2. And both have undoubtedly shown flashes of talent. But Bruno Senna feels like the more complete driver so far.

Given the marketing value of the Senna name, it would be a bit of a surprise if Buemi gets an F1 seat and Senna doesn’t. At least I suppose it would show that F1 isn’t all about money. Not quite yet.

1 comment

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