FIA World Championship – The final battle… Hamilton versus Men in Blazers

After a month with no posts, we arrive at the final round in Brazil.

All bar Massa and Hamilton have fallen by the wayside, the FIA have perhaps shot their bolt. Which way will the dice fall ?

Hamilton has a large target on his back. Certainly Alonso has said as much, Hamilton is distinctly unpopular with the establishment. He has to do it better, sharper and cleaner than the rest. Having said that if he comes home in fourth place the championship is his, FIA interference allowing. He has fallen at the last fence before, but we are a year on. In strictly mathematical terms, he is the odds on favourite.

Massa has been the class act at Ferrari for most of the  season, Raikkonnen apparently falling asleep in the second half of the season, although both have suffered from reliability issues from time to time. Massa must remain motivated and must finish. Essentially, he has to win or his championship is done. Why he is still in contention at all comes down to the FIA’s actions in Belgium and there are those who will feel that the win he was handed there was tainted. I admit, I’m one of those.  His insistence in China that his pass of Kimi was a glorious legitimate racing pass was laughable and offensive both to Kimi and fans of the sport. Almost as offensive as his take out of the McLaren at Fuji, and the penalty applied to Bourdais.

What of the best of the rest, the select handful who were in contention until the late stages ?

Kubica – BMW terminated development of this years car pretty much before we passed the seasons midpoint. It was always going to be uphill given this. Predictably, whilst McLaren and Ferrari moved forward, Kubica could no longer pull off miracles, his personal form taking a dive in recent weeks in any event.

Kimi – Kimi’s motivation and application has been criticised in the past. The second half of the season has demonstrated that the critics were right.

Heikki – Looked to be a good match to Hamilton early in the season, but has fallen gradually behind. Many point the finger at team management, saying he has been forced to accept a supporting role. If this were the case, he’d need to be quicker, capable of hauling his car closer to Hamilton. Sadly this hasn’t been the case, even before his engine went sick in China for example he was notably off pace.

The FIA – seemed determined to make themselves the front page story. I wouldn’t put it past them redacting the results on Sunday to hand the series to Ferrari. The only reason Massa is still in contention is because of the FIA’s penalties handed to McLaren.  If they do, they stand in danger of trashing the sports good name, what’s left of it. Recommendations – sack Mosley. Employ professional, unaligned stewards. Accept that the governing body should be transparent and that a successful weekend is one where the men in blazers are largely invisible.  They are on the brink of alienating fans and sponsors alike.

More F1 Stupidity from the FIA

An aggrieved McLaren appealed the penalty handed down at the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa. In order to make the appeal, they had to pay a fee (in thousands of dollars), contract lawyers (more thousands) and spend time assemling a case ($$$$$$$). On the basis that a similar penalty involving a Toro Rosso was left open to appeal last year, McLaren did so.

Here’s the kicker…. The judges sat and heard evidence for a couple of days. The FIA took the fees. The judges simply slung the appeal out as inadmissable. In the midst of this the FIA misrepresented one of their own stewards and Ferrari, were permitted representation in a court convened to discuss the penalty handed down to a third parties driver. Pardon ? Ex-squeeze me ?

I’m increasingly of the opinion that whilst proof of Ferraris privelege would be difficult to gather, proof of the FIA bias against McLaren would not. Why was Massa not handed a “drive through” penalty for his antics at Valencia (where there was a very real chance someone was going to get seriously injured or worse), especially when another driver in a support race was penalised in the same circumstances ? Why not Raikkonen for his Monaco brain fade ?

Were does it end ? Answers in the comments of this article please……

Disgusted of Moseley.

Lehmans, HBOS and the whole sorry mess….

My previous post where I pointed out the people to blame for our current Western Hemisphere economic problems appears to have been born out.

To sum up….. It isn’t racial minorities, immigrants, benefit claimants or the group that our goverments “focus groups” keep pointing at. These minorities do not have control of the kind of finances that are involved. It’s superstar fund managers, merchant bankers, the politicians that enable them, the investors who idolise them and the companies that insist on re-employing them despite histories of failure. These financial wonks have grown rich, extremely rich, most likely off the contents of your pension fund. The politicians have let them get away with it and allowed short selling, naked short selling and abusive naked short selling, all contributing to the downfall of institutions that we rely on.

I’m not proposing communism. I am proposing that you let your elected representative know how you feel, squeal long and loud. Whilst doing so, I suggest you ask them why they believe all versions of short selling benefit anyone but the vendor, and why they support this widespread market manipulation and wrecking. Remember that in naked short selling these buggers a selling what doesn’t belong to them and they don’t actually hold in order to lower a share price. Tell it like it is but keep it polite, they are obliged to answer you, although as you will doubtless find, those replies frequently make no sense at all. You can find contact details for your MP here if you are resident in the UK. I’m sure those readers in the US and elswhere have similar resources. If you don’t like the answers they give you, then hammer your representative again. If necessary “wash, rinse, repeat”. 

…..Most of all though remember this – It wasn’t these groups that the media tell us everyone loves to hate. It was the guys in the expensive suits, who all thought themselves, “The Smartest People in the Room”.

 

Stop Press – It would appear that the powers that be in the UK have realised that short selling has been a factor in creating the instability afflicting the economy. As of 0000 hours today, the 19th September 2008 shorting has been outlawed. Doubtless those who have made this money making wheeze their own will be a little upset and will want a new tinker toy to play with. In the mean time, markets are showing signs of modest recovery. The days of putting 100% of the shares in a company into your sock drawer, then witnessing dealing to the tune of 300% of the available shares on the markets are, for the time being, over.

Proper Sportscar Racing Lives !

Little did we know in 1989 that we were getting toward the end of a golden age of sportscar racing. The FIA Group C rules which had given us a diversity of engine and chassis philosophies, manufacturers were numerous and crowds growing. In Paris there was disquiet. The FIA were unhappy that manufacturer involvment in F1 was effectively Ferrari and a bunch of sundry engine suppliers, whilst sportscars had full works entries from Porsche, Mercedes, Jaguar, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Aston Martin, Peugeot were on the way a year later, and these are just the entries I can remember off the top of my head. In order to siphon off these premium brands, new rules were confected in Paris specifying F1 engines in chassis that were pretty obviously going to cost as much, if not more in R&D and manufacturing, as a full blown GP car.

Within a few years entries in sportscars had fallen to two Peugeots, a couple of Toyotas, a Nissan on a good day and a handful of makeweights. It spelt the end. Le Mans had some strikingly thin looking years and the FIA quietly cancelled the whole sportscar class. Mission accomplished – F1 got a large injection of works engines, teams did deals and we reached where we are now in GP. Ruled by corporate entities for better or for worse and innovation increasingly squeezed out.

Quietly though sportscars went into one of its regular rebuilding periods. Initially, back in the nineties, the signs weren’t good, slow tricky cars that made drivers appear hamfisted. Now in 2008 we’ve got a partial return to health. The cars are now undeniably quick, practice times for a LeMans this year, even with the track blighted by yet more chicanes were not dissimilar to those recorded at the end of the eighties  If the weather had held Van Lennep/Marko’s record average would quite possibly even have taken a pasting. 

In America Daytona Prototypes being notably old school in their approach and slower than FIA GT2 cars (they were recently outpaced to the tune of about 20 seconds a lap by support race for historic GTP cars at the Rolex 24 hours) but now see strong entries and races that are far from a foregone conclusion. The budgets for the LeMans series are a lot higher, the rules and the pace broadly on a par with the LMES series in Europe.

In Europe we have LMES mixing increasingly high tech prototypes and FIA GT1 and 2 cars. Grids this year have been large in Europe, and attendance has improved, Silverstone seeing a new record of 53,000 for a six hour race but I get a niggling feeling…..

All of this years races have been won by Diesel powered entries, under rules tipped in diesels favour at the request of the manufacturers concerned, the same manufacturers that are unprepared to make the same engines available to anyone with the money to pay. All of the races bar one have been won by Peugeot overall, despite which both titles have ended up at Audi. The only time a petrol engine has shone was in a race where all of the diesels had trouble and half were seriously delayed. Even then it was laps down despite suffering no such delay itself.

In my opinion, the rules need a tweak to equalise petrol and diesel technologies, or the manufacturers of the diesels need to start making engines available so that we have more than 4 potential winning cars. There is certainly no shortage of diversity and creativity in the chassis market, there are a lot of talented drivers. In my view, if the disparity of engine tech were tackled, or suitable engines released to privateers, with more possible winners, I think the days of a 53,000 strong crowd might just become the rule, not the exception.

Silverstone today was a great reminder of sportscar racings glory days. I’d like to thank the chaps at Gamers-Crib for a first wicked meet up, and very especially the the Barazi-Epsilon Team, Fernando Rees and his folks who made us all feel like friends and honoured guests. Links to the guilty parties to be added after I get a couple of hours kip, by the way.

Cheers

FIA Spa Controversy – Formula 1 1950-2008 RIP

The FIA seem to be doing their best to lower the tone of F1 to something more appropriate to Mexican Wrestling. Punishing a McLaren driver for avoiding a collision caused by a Ferrari driver pushing him off the track…? Awarding the win to someone who never looked remotely likley to lead the race, and in fact never did so …? I have to ask a few things of Stewards and Max Moseley….. It couldn’t be a personal matter between Max and Ron ? Or could it just be that in the view of the current FIA that any result that doesn’t have a Ferrari at the head of the field is wrong ? It couldn’t be because Lewis is the worng colour for someone could it ?

One of my earliest memories was watching an ancient piece of footage on tv, Stirling Moss at Monaco in a Lotus 18. There have been great days- Dijon 1979 or even this Sunday at Spa, and there have been awful days – Imola 1994 springs to mind. But this weekends attempt by the stewards to devalue the sport and the lives of the guys competing has taken the biscuit.

The FIA has lost whatever faith I had left and I wont be back in a hurry. Max must go, for the good of the sport. F1 needs transparency and proper, professional, experienced officials. When Max goes and F1 gets credible officals, I’ll be back to watch. Not before. The danger of course, is that he doesn’t, that the status quo remains as it is. In which case F1 will shortly join Saturday afternoon wrestling and that can’t suit anyone.

I’ve never felt actually ashamed to follow my sport, but I do now.

Impressions from Liverpool

Apologies for the delay. As it turned out, Holiday Inn on Lime Street was ideally placed, but the promised free wireless internet access in public areas was a no show…. Hence, now we’ve returned from Liverpool, this is our first blog posting since seeing La Princess. 

The crowd waiting for the spider to venture out

 
 

More of the Spider

Arachnophobes read no more.

The show was breathtaking, but the portions of the show with the spider wandering through the street whilst we were present were held entirely at night, making photography with our wee Nikon compact a bit of a problem.
Unlike the Elephant that we saw in Calais, we suspect that the health and safety office held a whole lot more sway so it wasn’t possible to approach quite as closely as it was for previous shows. Then again La Princess has a whole lot more legs with which to cause mayhem.

Our first night had La Princess perambulating down Lime Street to the station frontage, directly past the vast window of the Holiday Inn bar. Having had our car arbitarily shunted leaving Birmingham by someone driving inappropriately close in the rain, we chose to relax with a glass of wine and enjoy this part of the show from the best seats in the house (our hotel bar overlooked the arachnid’s resting place). What had been a substantial crowd swiftly reached epic portions as the spider preceded by her musicians approached. We ventured out as the Princess concluded her routine and was secured to an office block which is being prepared for demolition.

At the conclusion of the show, at long past ten pm, hunger was taking charge so we sampled one of Liverpools more up market curry houses. Those of you reading this who have experienced Birminghams great curry and balti houses might be interested to learn that Indian food in Liverpool is alive and well. It might be because this was an upmarket restaurant, whilst excellent, we found the food a little bland, still great, but not what we’re used to.

The view from the pub

 

Pubs…. After food, off some real ale. All weekend we had a great time in Liverpool pubs, the folks and the beer are what makes any pub, and all the pubs we’ve visited were excellent. We’d like to make a recommendation though. Cain’s is proper Liverpool brewery who are having hard times at the moment. There ales are something special. Fi would like to recommend their Formidable (about 5.2%) and organic Wheat beer (about 4%) brews, for myself I’d go for the Celebration (also about 5.2%) and the Raisen beer (about 5%). They are real characterful beers. Where to drink them ? Go for the Doctor Duncan not far from Lime Street. Special thanks to Jan and her mum, Margaret, who were also in town to see the spider. Delightful company and providers of great local info, cheers!

Sundays show started well into the evening concluding at the entrance to the Queensway tunnel. More musicians, more water, wind and snow machines topped off with fireworks and fountains of water surrounded by a massive good natured crowd. A real finale.

If we had reservations, we’d say that spiders aren’t something that folks engage with in the same way as elephants, although as I’m writing this, it’s still growing on me. For future events I’d beg councils that get involved to do something that music festivals have been doing for years – build a decent viewing platform for those with disabilities. The route for this show limited access somewhat, but ultimately folk seemed to be leaving pleased even after staking out viewing positions ours in advance. Without doubt, the last time I saw a crowd this size would have been Le Mans in 1989 (back then the organisers used to reckon on seeing around 300,000).

Royal Deluxe – Developments

How things change. It looked like we wouldn’t be able to get to Liverpool until Sunday, but Fi and I should now be able to make it on Saturday and Sunday, thanks to the schedule running late into the evening. We’ll be armed with camera and lappie and I’m hoping to be able to update the blog from Liverpool and add piccies after close of play each day.

In todays developments, the spider has been removed from the office block and ushered to the starting point of its activities for later in the weekend.

Have fun folks.

Royal De Luxe Liverpool September 5th to 7th 2008

The big day approaches. Fi and I are hoping to make it to Liverpool on Sunday, in the meantime keep an eye on one of the buildings overlooking Lime Street Station.

 

The show starts on Friday and the La Machine website reckons that waterproofs may be a good idea, having seen their elephant in action I wholeheartedly agree.
Have fun and enjoy the show.

Back to the serious stuff (or Who trashed the economy ?)

There’s something bizarre that the money markets do that you wont see anywhere else. If you own your house, then I sell it without any request from you. You’re going to be pretty angry I’d guess when a bunch of folks you never heard of turn up at your front door demanding entrance.

In the money markets there is a phenomena enjoying a certain currency that pretty much amounts to this. If it happened anywhere else it would be called fraud. It is after all selling what doesn’t belong to you. Money markets disagree about this and believe that even if a deal is bent it can improve market liquidity.

The mechanism is naked shorting and is dicussed in wiki at some length. Here however linky are some specific examples that go right to the bottom of the collapse of the two biggest American mortgage lenders. Whilst Bear Stearns and co did themselves no favours supplying money to those who had insufficient garanteed income to clear there loans and bought bad debt from other lenders, naked shorting managed to give the impression of panicking shareholders. In truth the shares never existed. This coupled with well placed articles in various financial organs reinforced what became a run on the banks.

Another example of “One law for them, one law for us”. Another reason to stop looking at the poor and start looking at the rich. Just as relevant, the bastards have the support of US politicians who only acted to protect the interests of a mere 19 institutions last week. In the mean time, the whole issue has barely broken surface tension here in the UK. Starting to make sense now ?

Royal DeLuxe – Liverpool September 5th to 7th 2008

Please note: As has been commented by Justin in an earlier post, the dates for this event initially published by Liverpool City of Culture as 26th to 28th September 2008, have changed, it is now going ahead on the first weekend in September 2008. Raisen1964 apologises for any inconvenience and suggests that Liverpools PR company may just have got things a little wrong when they initially publicised this event.

On with the show

Happy holidays to those who can afford to have them. If you’re looking for a cheap/free day out for the family in September, or if you can remember what it felt like to be a kid and wouldn’t mind being a big kid again for a few hours head to Liverpool for the first weekend in September 2008. Royal De Luxe are in town. 

The Liverpool show will definitely feature something new. Francois Delaroziere and his team has been working like a demon and the result of all the blood sweat and tears will be seen in Liverpool over the first weekend in September 2008. Members of the Royal De Luxe team and a handful of Liverpool local press are the only folks who know for sure, and they aren’t saying diddley. The Liverpool Daily Post printed a Royal De Luxe story on Saturday 2nd of August.

Hotel rooms in Liverpool are, I’m told,  always hard to come by at weekends, but the Missus and I are going to be there, even if we end up commuting by train. What will we see ? Who knows. But I am free to speculate….

What information I have managed to glean suggests that the spectacle is likely to feature a 37 tonne 60 feet tall mechanical creature. More specifically …… I’m not saying what I think it will be. Check out the official website  here .

In finishing this post, I’m going to leave another picture of the Sultans Elephant…. Gratuitously and for nothing….

The Sultans Elephant

If anyone has any more specifics do please leave a comment.