Gentlemen, start your engines!

-

Hello, is this thing on?

Popular posts from this blog

Jam tomorrow

-
My heart goes out to Robert Kubica. This time last year, he was fighting for the F1 world title. At one stage, he even led the championship . Things were going brilliantly for him, he was driving well and people were saying some very good things about him. Fast forward to 2009 and where is he? Nowhere. Where's the press coverage and hype about his talents? Nowhere. It's as if he's fallen off the face of the planet. What went wrong? From what I've read, halfway through the 2008 season, BMW decided to shift their development efforts to the 2009 car, despite the success they were enjoying in 2008. The effect of this was that their 2008 season quietly tailed off, taking their #1 driver from championship leader to frustrated also-ran. If I were Kubica, I would've been mad as all hell. What makes it even worse is that, while Honda adopted the same approach and built a pretty awesome car for 2009, BMW completely failed to capitalise on their long development time for...
Read more

Nostalgia: GP2 and racing lines

-
Funny how songs can bring back specific memories so vividly. Here I am, sat at my computer, and I put on OK Computer by Radiohead. Airbag kicks into life and I'm instantly transported back to 1998, designing my first track using the Grand Prix 2 Track Editor . Based on the Estoril circuit — as nearly all early tracks were, thanks to its simple pitlane layout — it swept down and to the right from the start/finish straight. The opening bars of Airbag often accompanied this stretch as I popped in a CD before starting play-testing. That first corner will forever be strongly connected with Radiohead for me, which is no bad thing. I loved creating tracks and I still love OK Computer. The track, I believe, was called Cheviot, named after the hill in Northumberland . This was a highly apt name, as I completely misunderstood the editor's height settings. What I thought was a change in absolute height was actually a gradient change. Consequently, when I tried to make a slight h...
Read more

Pistonheads @ PalmerSport, Bedford Autodrome

-
Image
In the PalmerSport brochure, this event is described as "A driving day like no other". Having just experienced it, I cannot agree more. Un-chuffing-believable. Our day, organised through the excellent Pistonheads website, started at an ungodly 8am. Registration was quickly over and we were all assigned randomly to a 'team' for the day: Senna; Schumacher; and my team, Piquet. This was basically just to split us up into groups that could use different areas of the facility concurrently. The upshot of it is that the order in which you drove the various cars was equally random. I got lucky; my day finished with the most awesome drives available. More of that in a bit. :) First for Team Piquet, it was the Caterhams on the tight and twisty East Circuit. Sadly, I didn't realise just how cramped the pedals would be and I struggled to change gear while braking. The sun strip on my visor was also so low I couldn't see more than a few yards in front of the car. Add t...
Read more