I'd better do a quick entry about today's stuff, because tomorrow will be the first day of my placement. I expect I'll end up blogging about that, so I'll just write a short bit about the Grand Prix. (Famous last words.)

I apologise to everyone who reads this regularly that I didn't namecheck yesterday. I had no idea people would feel so hurt and disappointed. :p

Ezmee, Daisy, Shadow and (quite probably) James, I appreciate your readership, support and friendship over the years! (I feel like an Oscars acceptance speech.) I hope you never tire of my uninteresting, badly written weblog entries! (That sounds more like a curse than anything else.) Thankyou! My enduring thanks to each and every one of you!

Anyone else want to be namechecked? Anyone else have a weblog (or other thing) I can link to? Because Mr Geoff Random set one up purely for that reason. :p

Okay, so, the Grand Prix. The Brazilian Grand Prix. And yeah, it was overcast and a bit chilly here but wow, I'm glad I wasn't in Brazil. It was very wet. Which was a bit of a problem, considering that none of the teams had proper wet tyres. (Cue much slipping, sliding and frequent excursions into various tyre walls and armco barriers.)

The most interesting corner on the circuit was undoubtedly turn three. I think about eight cars went off in roughly the same place; due to someone's clever planning meaning water was draining onto the circuit. The cars hit the water, aquaplaned and ended up in the tyre wall. It wasn't a matter of the inexperienced falling victim to something that could have been mastered - even the mighty Michael Schumacher ended up sliding off of the track. Yes, this year's world championship attempt isn't looking so good at the moment...

The race was a patchwork affair of intermediate tyres that were either wearing out on the dry parts of the track or failing to grip on the wet parts, the safety car leading them around after yet another incident, and bizarre happenings that made the end result a bit of a lottery. Rubens Barrichello failed to win, even though it looked pretty certain, when his car mysteriously broke down. The poor man has never even managed to finish his home Grand Prix, let alone do well in it!

And the end of the race... well, it ended on lap 56 of 71 due to two huge accidents on the start/finish straight. Poor Aussie Mark Webber (after doing so well in the not so great Jaguar) somehow lost it and removed half his car via the armco barriers. Then the star of the last Grand Prix, Fernando Alonso, arrived. He crashed into one of Webber's unattached wheels and totally smashed up his own car. He didn't manage to walk away from it like Webber, though.

The race ended there, with carbon fibre strewn across the track. Confusion reigned. Who'd won? Was it the person who'd crossed the line in the lead on the last lap? Or the lap before? Was it the extremely excited Jordan driver Giancarlo Fisichella, or the incredibly boring (or laidback, can't quite figure him out) McLaren driver Kimi Raikkonen?

In the end they decided it was Kimi's race. Amongst the confusion over the results there were a lot of strange goings on. Fisichella's parked car appeared to be on fire. Jarno Trulli seemed to be singlehandedly pushing his Renault along the track. Fernando Alonso was sitting propped up against the armco barrier, clearly in pain. Eventually he was bundled off into the back of an ambulance. He was classified as finishing third, but the third place step on the podium was occupied by nothing more sentient than a bottle of champagne...

The annoying thing is that David would have won if he hadn't pitted when he did. Two laps earlier and he'd have been on the top step, not Kimi. Ah well, there's still time. I can't believe I've been saying that since 1995. Eventually he has to win a championship, right? :p

I can but hope.

My grandad calls David my "young man", too, so I suppose his previous comment about Mark may well have been entirely innocent.

Heh. ;)

posted by Fiery Fred @ 10:57 PM