perkonis

Since the team cars in F1 have to be painted substantially same (or however they phrase that in the regs), the best way to tell drivers apart is by the color of the camera above the air box. Since I can’t remember which driver has which color, I go with method 2 which involves their helmets. They could go back to putting great big numbers on the cars, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that.

If you’re looking for a good list of drivers’ helmets, look here. There’s even a page here for the test drivers. Laugh if you will, but I think Montagny’s helmet is pretty cool.

Isn’t it a little odd that Gmail tossed a delivery failure from its own mailer daemon into the spam bin? You’d think mailer-daemon@googlemail.com would be whitelisted.

I read this story earlier and this nonsense irritates me to no end. Bridgestone has to mark their option tires so that they are “visibly distinguishable when the car is on the track.” Sounds easy enough, right? They do the same thing in Champ Car. Make the whole sidewall red so everyone can see who is on the soft option tire. This is the kind of decision that I would expect to take all of about five minutes. Maybe ten if they can sneak in a smoke break.

This being F1, of course, they managed to royally cock it up. The tires in Melbourne had a little bitty white dot that blended in with the white lettering when the tire rotated (which, as I understand, they are wont to do). Not sure who’s bright idea that was, but the rumor is that Bernie didn’t want to be perceived as stealing ideas from the lowly Champ Cars. Now they can’t decide what to do about it for Sepang. And even once they decide on a permanent solution, they can’t implement it before the Spanish Grand Prix. Yes, this is such a huuuuge ordeal that it will apparently take weeks to fix.

Should they paint a dot on the sidewall, or should they paint one of the grooves (which shouldn’t be there any way, but I digress) white? And there was testing involved too. Testing. For a dot on a tire. Yes, they actually decided to test a couple of ideas on “how to mark tires” on Wurz’s car today.

In case you missed that, Bridgestone was testing different kinds of markings on the tires. In fairness, Wurz was already testing so it’s not like they scheduled a test just for this. But still, they can’t decide on how to mark a tire without testing it. I’ve been following F1 for over thirty years and this kind of nonsense makes me want to quit this and watch lawnmower racing. Someone needs to get some attachments and tell everyone in the paddock how it’s going to be. “Hey, were going to paint the sidewalls neon pink and one of the grooves fluorescent green. Don’t like it? There’s the gate.”

I have a practical, if somewhat inelegant, solution: get me a pit pass, a flight to Malaysia, and a couple cans of Krylon in some color other than black, white, or grey. Something bright. Neon pink or fluorescent green will work. We can go with red if that’s too flamboyant. There you go. Problem fixed before Q1. This problem cannot possibly be as difficult as it’s being made out to be.

Yesterday mixed in with my normal run of spam I saw something that made me stop and laugh. A spambot actually apologized for what it was about to do. It started out “Sorry for this” and then proceeded to post a dozen links. And then it did it 5 more times.

I guess it’s the thought that counts.

This week’s Nextel Cup race brings with it the much anticipated Car of Tomorrow. If you haven’t seen these things yet, they are about as boxy as that picture I drew over there.

OK, they aren’t that bad. They looked absolutely hideous in testing, but with paint on them and hauling around Bristol, they look much better. (The paint isn’t likely to last long at Bristol) The Camry’s actually look pretty good. The Fords are OK. The Chevys and Dodges, not so much.

If nothing else though, the new inspection process for these cars is pretty cool. I just saw that “claw” contraption on Speed (pic via Jayski). The idea is to put all the templates on the car at the same time to both speed up inspection and ensure the cars are all built the same way. The car either fits in the claw or it doesn’t. Before the templates were checked individually. A car could pass each tech station by itself and still be so out of square it wasn’t funny. At least Hendrick and Gibbs didn’t think it was funny when NASCAR took away their cars for doing just that.

So what should the COT be? Here you go. Front splitter? Check. Rear wing? Check. 4th grade art class body design? Eh, sorry but no. These things even have the luxury of this new fangled fuel injection thing. I look for that to replace carburetors one day.

OK, that’s enough rambling for one post. I’ll try to actually post something coherent later.

I got back into the office after being gone for 7 weeks to discover a horrible noise coming from a relatively new gigabit switch. One of the case fans had decided to eat its bearings. Just a little bitty 40mm fan. Nothing that would tear a hole in the space-time continuum. It still turned and moved air, it just made a horrible noise. Not a big deal right? It’s a 24 port switch that is so underutilized right now that I could probably remove all the fans from it and not suffer. Oh how wrong I was.
Of course the powers that be wanted to make a federal inquiry out of this little bitty part failure. Oooh, it’s a D-link, it shouldn’t do that! (Yes it should. That’s how you know a D-Link is plugged in.) Who can we contact to get this resolved? (DHS. This is obviously the work of terrorists.) Why did this happen? (Well, it might have something to do with the ginormous dust bunny that had formed in the case in the past few weeks. Did everyone forget how to vacuum while I was gone?) Blah, blah, blah. (Yeah, I quit listening at this point.)
Being the quick thinker that I am, I managed to derail the inquiry portion of today’s show with a highly technical two part answer. 1) It’s a $5 part and 2) shit happens. Then I went and ordered a new fan (which was actually $6) and the peasants rejoiced.
It’s good to be back?

The Formula One circus is about to interrupt their regularly scheduled testing to actually hold a race. The ING Australian Grand Prix is set to open the 2007 F1 championship season at the Albert Park circuit in Australia.

Per long standing F1 tradition, the season will open with controversy. Sir Frank Williams and Colin Kolles, DDS have stated very publicly their desire to protest the legitimacy of the Super Aguri and Toro Rosso cars. If they don’t get their desired response from the stewards, this stands a good chance of winding up in the Australian courts as did the Minardi fiasco of a few years ago. Mad Max Mosley will decree from his Ivory Tower that unless everyone can play nice, he will remove all FIA sanctioned events from Australia as well as all forms of motorized vehicles leaving the Aussies with nothing more than the horse and carriage. Nobody will bother pointing out to him that he can’t do this. Bernie Eccelstone will be seen lurking about with a copy of the Concorde Agreement muttering something about my preciousssss.

Somewhere along the line, someone will realize that if the Ligier JS43 was different from the BenettonB195 because of a different winglet and the Sauber C23 was different from the Ferrari F2003GA because it was blue, then the Toro Rosso is different from the Red Bull because it has different radiators and the Super Aguri is different than the Honda just because. Well, that and someone will pay an unreal amount of cash to someone else to make the whole matter disappear. Despite all the Machiavellian machinations, the 11 teams comprising the 07 Formula One World Championship will actually manage to race a few times and it should go something like this…

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