--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, cardemaister <no_re...@...> wrote: > > Nothing short of ultrahypermegasensational! Force India (Fisichella) > ended up second after Ferrari (Kimi The Red-nose "Drunkard")! > FI had zero points before this race! > > That might well be "ominous", let me tell ya...
Your enthusiasm about F1 reminds me of my youth, Card. I spent (or misspent, depending on your POV) some of it following racing, and even doing a little SCCA racing myself. I never had a competitive car, and did it Just For Fun. The *most* fun, however, was making friends with a guy who had an old F1 car (a Lotus, from the 3.0 liter non-blown days of racing). I sucked up like mad, and it finally paid off when he let me drive it around a track for a few laps. Driving a Formula 1 car on concrete has been likened to driving a high-powered sports car on hard ice. That analogy is correct. It scared the shit out of me. I could "put the pedal to the metal" on a straightaway at 130 miles per hour and spin my wheels. Suffice it to say that F1 races are won by tenths of a second and my lap times were 10 to 20 seconds away from the regular driver's. I gained a great respect for the level of skill that F1 drivers bring to the cockpit that day, and a realization that I was not even remotely in their class. So who's good these days? And is F1 racing more about the car (the best equipe wins) these days, or the driver (a good driver in a less-than-top-rank car can still win a race)? It sounds to me from what you are excited about that the latter sometimes still rears its head. That's exciting. I'm old enough to have seen Stirling Moss race. I once saw him win a race in a car that was not given a ghost of a chance of even finishing in the top ten.
