Motors and Me

Various things conspired this weekend to ensure I missed every bit of the Monte Carlo Rally . Tonight, I finally got around to checking out the result and what a result! The fact that Loeb excelled doesn’t suprise me, but to see both McRae and Sainz immediately up there on the podium was a shock. So much for all of the “out with the old, in the with the new” stuff that was being written in the motorsport press when Solberg won the Rally of GB. Long live the old flesh! :) P.S. Sorry about the shockingly bad headline. You’d think I wrote for the 4car rally newsletter or something.

Got an enticing leaflet in the post yesterday. Karting North East have a special offer going at the moment - £25 for half an hour of karting on their superb Warden Law circuit. The format is that of a mini-GP — 10 minutes of practice followed by a 20-minute race, with a trophy to the winner. It’s about time I added to my collection. (If any workmates read that last sentence, I was only joking, honest! Please don’t punt me off! :) BTW, if you don’t fancy the sound of racing outdoors in the current weather, there’s always the indoor circuit in Gateshead, where they’ve got a similar offer on.

That stuff about the Stig, while attracting more hits to this site than I’ve ever seen, was just a scurrilous rumour. Or so everyone’s telling me. Even one of the Top Gear pages points out the following: Nobody, not even the crew, knows who the Stig really is. However, I can reveal that he’s a bit on the short side and he speaks with a strong French accent. Doesn’t exactly sound like Perry McCarthy, does it? Hey ho.

Signal vs. Noise in motoring-related thread shocker. To be fair, they do talk about SUVs quite a bit, but this time it’s German engineering, rather than environmental issues, that’s coming under the spotlight. Having read a few things recently about declining standards in various German car-makers’ output, I’m starting to wonder whether this article’s highlighting a genuine trend. It’ll be interesting to see what people have to say about it...

This may just be a scurrilous rumour, but it seems the identity of the Stig from the BBC’s Top Gear may be out. Perry McCarthy , one-time Formula 1 flop, is said to be the man with incredibly bad taste in music, although Julian Bailey did deputise on one occasion. Not only that, but he’s lined up to be a co-presenter in the next series. Source: mini2.com . Of course, whether any of this turns out to be true is anyone’s guess. I’m still just reeling in shock from the sheer quality of the last series. While Channel 5’s 5th Gear plodded along in the style of the old Top Gear and Channel 4’s Driven just lost the plot completely, Top Gear under Clarkson’s guidance has been superb. Roll on series two! :)

Is it just me, or does the new Rolls Royce look like it was designed especially for black American rappers? Not wishing to stereotype — Jay-Z, Nelly and the rest do it well enough in their videos — but it definitely has a very US-friendly, almost gangsta-esque style to it. Gone are the flowing curves of Rollers of old, replaced instead by hard-cut shoulders, gun-metal grey paint and a grille you could use as a barbecue rack. Not only that, but the whole thing is huge. If that’s not pandering to American tastes, I don’t know what is.

So then, the reason for the reduced output on sniffpetrol has been revealed. Richard Porter, its chief protagonist and also a Top Gear script-writer, has just joined the ranks of Evo magazine as a columnist. Yep, that would explain it. Oh... and the name for his new column? Petrolhead. Gah! Of course, I’d like to claim I’m a trend-setter, but it appears petrolhead.co.uk got there before me anyway. Hmmm... perhaps I should’ve done a quick whois search before naming this place?