Ridin' With My Top Down

Look at this video I found:

That's Clay Regazzoni taking his BRM for a recon lap at the Österreichring in 1973. '73 gave us Smoke on the Water and Nutbush City Limits in music, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that in Formula 1 it was a year of both triumph and tragedy as well

You might think you don't know this this driver, but if you've seen Rush then you kinda do. This is the guy with the Dolmio moustache who befriended Niki (as much as you can befriend someone like Niki) and smoothed his path to Ferrari. A man with a name every bit as dashing as his face: Gianclaudio "Clay" Regazzoni.

They had to tone down the mow for the movie, cinemas couldn't afford the dry-cleaning. (Image via GrandPrix.com)

In legacy he was a bit like Gilles Villeneuve - didn't actually do much winning, but the tifosi loved him and never forgot him. Enzo described him best:

The inimitable Clay never lets up. Bon viveur, dancer, playboy, footballer, tennis player and, in his spare time, driver. He’s the ideal guest at the most unusual fashion shows, the great resource of women’s magazines. – Enzo Ferrari

Thing was, in 1973 he was kind of "between contracts" with Ferrari, so he found a job with BRM instead - a team half-forgotten now, but well-known and weirdly popular in their day. BRM had been founded as a British pride team, a massive, industry-supported team intended to showcase British engineering expertise. On that level it backfired badly, as they were never especially good at it, and even in 1973, nearly 30 years after their founding, the handicaps of that approach were still weighing on them. That year's car, the P (for Project) 160 had a handicap located between the driver and the rear wing called the P142, a V12 engine built by BRM themselves. In those days only three teams built their own engines, and of the three BRM had the smallest budget to do it on. Consequently, their V12 was completely gutless, the drivers complaining "all the horsepower went down the exhaust pipes."

Turn up the volume and watch it again. Yeah, it's no Matra, but still a great set of pipes.

On the other hand the balance and handling of the P160 was said to be quite good, but I have to wonder about that myself. Any car's handling seems better when it hasn't got any power, like my Corolla, which seems to be suspended on rubber bands but goes okay thanks to a miserable 1.6-litre engine.

Unboxing the sports suspension pack.

Either way, the BRM was going to be at a huge disadvantage here at the Österreichring, the "Austria-ring" in the former Habsburg playground of Styria. With those stunning mountain views, that first blast along the top of the ridge with bare dirt either side, it looks more like Pikes Peak than a Grand Prix venue. If you don't recognise that section, that's because it isn't there anymore. Twenty-four years after Clay's lap, Austrian phone company A1 put up some money for the track to be rebuilt, and the fast, mad part of the lap was ground off. The new A1-Ring became Michael Schumacher's bogey track and ground zero for most of his worst moments. It hasn't hosted a Grand Prix in years, but in 2011 it was bought up by a prominent Austrian soft drink company who are refurbishing it yet again and hoping to stage a Grand Prix. I'll let you have a wild guess who that might be.

You can see why they had to clip its wings though: the last race in this configuration was in 1987, so God only knows how frightening it was in a 1,000-horsepower turbo car. The second turn, the long, banked right-hander with the red-and-yellow Bosch sign on the outside, that's the Boschkurve, a corner that used to keep the drivers getting any sleep at night. The G-forces must have been just incredible, and with an Armco barrier only metres from the track they were probably on your mind, reminding you of just how hard you were going to hit the barrier if anything let go. With slick tyres and downforce to make the steering nice and heavy, Stefan Johansson once said, "At Boschkurve I literally have to wedge my elbows against the cockpit sides to put enough force on the wheel."

But Clay's not milking it very hard today, just cruisin' with a nigga lean, having a look at what the track, or the car, or both, are like today. Nowadays we'd call it an installation lap - kick the tyres, check for oil leaks, make sure the brakes are working (that's important) - but of course Clay has no data sensors sending telemetry to the pits, just his own ears, his own eyes, and his own arse telling him what the car is doing.

So on the exit of Boschkurve he stays wide and lets a dark-blue car past. No mistaking the white helmet with the tartan band, it's Jackie Stewart in his Tyrrell. Just two weeks before, Jackie had won the German GP at the Nürburgring, his twenty-seventh and last win, a figure was going to remain a record for a long time yet. In Italy he was destined to have a few problems, but still nail down enough points to make his third World Championship a done deal.

Then at the left-hander we see one of the sinister black Shadows go by, driven by I-don't-know-who (anyone know for sure?), but I'll take a guess at Jackie Oliver, who'd later rip the guts out of the Shadow team by becoming a founding partner at Arrows. After that it's a white March with a tall airbox - well that could only be James Hunt, in his debut season driving for Alexander, third Baron Hesketh of Hesketh, who'd taken to the sport in a way nobody had seen before.

Champagne and pheasants in hired marquees with Lady Hesketh, Alexander’s mother, complete with black eye-patch, presiding in a state of distraction; helicopters that flew ice and birds and more champers in and out of circuits; Master James cavorting among the Beautiful People with the exquisite Suzy, his model of a wife who eventually left him for the actor Richard Burton. It was a year of parties and night life, some good race results in an ever-improving car designed by Dr Harvey Postlethwaite, PhD. – Keith Botsford

James later got an awful lot of support from Marlboro and had to get into a habit of transferring his Rothmans cigarettes to Marlboro packets, which must have taken a while because he was a 40-a-day kind of guy. Marlboro of course were in bed with McLaren by then (not the mention the Holden Dealer Team), and would later switch to Ferrari, but if you want to know where Marlboro started in motorsport, it was right here, with BRM. Yes, the single most recognisable racecar livery of all time, and its first deployment was on a car nobody remembers.

Once Marlboro left them for McLaren, BRM never recovered. They closed up shop in '77 after their new car turned out to be too big to fit into a packing crate (not a good sign). Their final driver decided all Formula 1 teams were morons and returned to his home country - which, since his name was Larry Perkins, was here. Alan Jones was buying rides by then, so was the last time there were two Aussies in Formula 1 until Webber and Ricciardo last year.

As for Clay himself, he lost his job at Ferrari thanks to Niki's accident in '76. Ferrari hired another driver named Reutemann to replace Niki, and since Niki stubbornly refused to die, there was no room for Clay and he found himself bumped. From there he fell into one backmarker team after another, racing just because he loved it, until his career abruptly ended in loud noise and twisted aluminium. At Long Beach in 1980, his car lost its brakes in the worst possible place - the end of Shoreline Drive, where he was doing about 280km/h - and unable to stop, he ploughed into a retired car. When he regained consciousness, Clay realised he couldn't feel his legs. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, but being the sort of man he was, he didn't let it upset him for long.

I was in hospital for a long time, and felt very sorry for myself, but when something like this happens, you move into a different world – a world you never thought about. And you feel ashamed. I remember Gunnar Nilsson talking about the children in his cancer hospital, how he had had years of good life which they would never have.

As for me, I can drive my Ferrari Daytona. I have my driving school for handicapped people. I can still go to the races, be part of them. I don’t want to be pitied. I have accepted that the miracle will not happen, but life can still be worth something. – Clay Regazzoni

But my favourite anecdote about Clay, the one that sums him all up, really, comes from Jonesy - and refers to the very same year as our video above:

Clay was once invited by Louis Stanley to look over BRM. Lou was there in his three-acre office and took Clay through his works and said, "My boy, you have seen my car and my organisation – with my team and my factory we will make you World Champion.” Clay said: “Fucka the Championship, how mucha you pay?"

Bahrain + Shanghai - "Daniel Is Faster Than You"

Watching the Bahrain and Chinese GPs - watching Lewis Hamilton take one easy win and one hard-fought one, listening to Vettel get the call to "move over and let Daniel by please," twice - I felt a bit like Beavis & Butthead watching an arthouse movie: "This MEANS something."

Image via ibnlive.com

It's not just the relief that my favourite driver is on track for his second World Championship - it's waaaay too early to be making calls like that. The F1 World Championship is a three-stage thing, like a good trigger sequence. First there's the early fly-away rounds that are run with the same machinery each time, purely because it's too hard to get upgrades made and flown out to whatever up-and-coming national economy Bernie's decided to grace next in a timely manner. So all the early rounds are usually won by the same people representing whichever team built the best car in the off-season. At the moment that's Mercedes, who did a Brawn and sacrificed last year's dead-end car to steal a march on this year, not that surprising when Mercedes IS the old Brawn team under new management. They've now laid the foundation for a run at the title, but that's in no way the same as clinching the thing for real because the next phase is the hard part - the long European summer, eight races run only hours from the team factories churning out new windtunnel data and upgrade gubbins 24/7. The real season, in other words, the bit that makes it Formula 1 and not just GP1. That's where titles are won and lost. So all credit to Nico and Lewis for taking four-from-four, but it's not done yet. They've only taken the safety catch off.

So the real interest is over at Red Bull, especially the RB10 driven by Daniel Ricciardo, which seems to be much faster than the one on the other side of the garage. Let's be honest, did any of us ever expect to hear Vettel get the call, "Sebastian, Daniel's faster than you, move over and let him by please"? No way. This was supposed to be Sebastian's team, wasn't it? The one where he'd spend his whole career raking in titles as Red Bull's golden boy? It's come as a very welcome proof of how F1 teams operate, that there really are no favourites, that fast is fast.

It doesn’t matter if the guy has got number one written on his forehead or tattooed over his whole body. If he’s second fastest, he’s number two. Period. - Alastair Caldwell, former McLaren engineering chief

You cannot make someone slower by contract... If he’s faster he’s faster. And whoever is faster is going to be the number one. – Michael Schumacher

The Schumacher quote is chosen deliberately. It was originally said when Rubens Barrichello joined him at Ferrari, and although it's finally starting to fade into history, the modern sport of Formula 1 is still run under the shadow of those days. We never got to see Schumi get his comeuppance for dominating so completely (and we're not sick enough to see a severe coma as any kind of justice - #KeepFightingMichael) so I have to wonder how much of the glee at Sebastian being shown up by his junior teammate is leftover from the red days a decade ago.

Image via CNN

But why is the lad with the hips from WA suddenly on top at Red Bull in the first place? Well, I'm a bit annoyed that Crofty and Brundle said it on the telly first and I won't get any credit, but I'm guessing Seb just doesn't have a feel for this new car. It's certainly not because he's suddenly revealed as an average driver (that would amount to saying the same of Mark Webber, and no true Aussie is going to say that). Seb really came into his own with the arrival of Pirelli's tyres - he won two championships easily by sprinting away at the start and controlling the race from there. What's interesting is he was able to be light years faster than anyone else without ruining his rear tyres, which speaks of some truly phenomenal throttle control. He drives with an amazingly soft touch, like a classical violinist, pushing the car right to the edge of its grip but not a bit beyond. Throw in blown- or double-diffusers sticking the rear of the car to the track, and you get a driver that's probably found a lot of his speed since 2009 by getting on the throttle early and modulating it to the contours of each corner just right.

Beautiful. Now put him in a car with turbo lag.

Image via telegraph.co.uk

These aren't the big-boost turbo cars of the 80's, of course, more like the old Lola-Fords of CART's glory days, engines with a fantastic stack of torque up to 11,000rpm and then a brief whack of turbo at the top. Seeing the onboard shots of drivers getting caught by surprise and correcting it mid-corner looks startlingly like Alex Zanardi back when he still had his legs. Fun to watch, and fun for the driver who doesn't mind getting sideways, but for a softy like Seb it's bam, advantage gone. The car's always kicking sideways just when you don't want it to, no matter how carefully you apply the power. Contrast that with roughly-hewn mastery of Lewis Hamilton, the metal guitarist to Seb's concert violinist, equally precise but much more comfortable with some on-the-spot improv. Lewis is at his best arriving at the apex in a four-wheel drift, and he spent some years in McLarens that handled like dogs, he's not especially worried about turbo lag kicking out the rear end every so often.

And on the other side of the Red Bull garage? A young man hardened by a few years in awful backmarkers with no power, no grip and almost no crash testing - Red Bull bought him a seat at HRT, remember. A man with no experience of the RB9, 8, 7 or 6. A man who doesn't know what he's been missing.

*Kssh* "Sebastian, vamos Daniel través por favor... Daniel es más rápido que tú... Déjalo por favor..."

Winton Wrap-Up: Celebrations with Fine Print

What a fantastic weekend! The breaks might not have all gone as the fans wanted, but the important stuff - the on-track mayhem - came thick and fast, with some very popular wins.

(Image via V8Supercars.com.au)

Huge congrats are in order for Lee Holdsworth, Betty Klimenko and the whole Erebus Mercedes team for their breakthrough win in the second 100km race on Saturday. Somebody had to end Holden's winning streak, and it couldn't have happened to a more deserving team. We're used to team bosses being very hard-nosed bastards, the emotions just barely seeping through the cracks in their stoney faces, but Betty seems to be an entirely different breed. The live feed of the Erebus garage in those last few laps made some of the tensest, most emotional television I've ever seen, and after all the hard slog and frustration of last year, no wonder.

And she still looks like P!nk's mum. (Image via V8Supercars.com.au)

Racing is a zero-sum game though, and making a winner requires a corresponding loser. To me, though, the big losers at Winton weren't Russell "the Enforced" Ingall and anyone caught out by the pit lane radar trap (and it really was a radar trap like the police use, right down to giving inflated speeds (amirite?). However low-budget it looked, it was all pretty typical of this sport's DIY ethic, and rather clever - point it at a car entering pit lane and the readings were all clearly visible to the TV cameras...). They get no sympathy because the readings were fine once they had the limiters on, they just got too ambitious diving for the line and paid for it.



Much as I'm delighted for Erebus, their breakthrough win came on a weird day when tyre wear was off the scale and throwing a wrench into everyone's carefully-planned race strategies. Everyone looks forward to a rainy F1 race because you might see something different, and it was the same principle here. Ergo, although Lee Holdsworth says they'll have upgrades on the car before the next race at Pukekohe, I still say they'd better be ready for a return to normal service when they get to East Bondi - if they want to win again, they'll have to outrun that #33 Volvo.

So to me, the big losers to me were Scott McLaughlin and Mark Winterbottom, for whom all three races were up for grabs. For the first time in his V8 career poor Scotty couldn't get a break - qualified on pole for one race, but didn't even get to start thanks to engine troubles. Led on Sunday for a third of the race, only to fall afoul of more engine gremlins and park it yet again. Clearly the speed was in the car, but he never got to use it.

More's the pity, we never got to see him late in the 200km Sunday race, with his rear tyres ratshit and Frosty playing the Jaws theme right behind him. What a race that could've been. Winterbottom finished all three races despite the high attrition, and more to the point, finished well ahead of where he started: for the first race of the weekend, he managed to come 7th despite starting from 23rd! And it looked like he could keep up that speed without lunching his tyres too, so if he'd started higher up it seems pretty clear he could have gone three-for-three and made the Winton 400 a sky-blue whitewash.

Image via Motorsport.com

I'll be delighted if this is a portent of things to come, but let's not get excited. If they moved the Italian GP to Fiorano (and with Ferrari's pace this year, they might), would anybody really be unable to predict the result? That's kind of the situation for Ford Performance Racing at Winton. FPR has a bigger testing budget than anyone except maybe HRT, and Winton is only an hour and a half from their factory in Campbellfield. FPR all but owns that track. It would be a bit premature to read much into Frosty's performance on a track where he's turned so many laps and recorded so much data.

So overall, there was plenty to celebrate at the Winton 400 - but in all cases the cheering comes with a definite asterisk.

Bahrain Preview + Winton Claustrophobia

A Bahrain/Winton double-header this weekend, and only seven days after a Malaysia/Symmons Plains double header too. Busy, busy...

Via Getty Images

First things first: the Kingdom of Bahrain is a postage stamp of an island in the Persian Gulf. To their credit, the Bahrainis were the first people in the region to have moved their economy away from oil, having converted to banking and tourism around the same time they decided to be a kingdom instead of a state. Overall a smart move - we all remember that this was the same race cancelled in 2011 thanks to protests, and run under a dark cloud in 2012 because of the "excessive force and torture" being used to keep the former protestors in line. The fact is the ruling Sunnis sit nervously on a majority Shia population, which is a bit like an Islamic version of Northern Ireland, where the people at the top were Protestant but most of the people under them were Catholic (if you're too young to have heard anything about that, do some Googling already). I'm not sure how much tourism a Gulf kingdom expects to get, but sun, sand and palm trees do make for nice beaches, even if it's a faux pas to swill margaritas while enjoying them. Unlike tourism, oil doesn't create many jobs where it leaves the ground, so I imagine we'd have seen a lot more races cancelled if the Shia plebs didn't have service jobs bringing glasses of fruit juice with umbrellas in them to disappointed tourists.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying, if you're wondering why the Bahrain Grand Prix is still run in front of empty grandstands, there's your answer: bankers aren't interested in motor racing, because money is boring, and waiters can't afford it. Ticket prices keep a surprising number of Aussie fans away from Albert Park, let alone despised Shia underlings. If they're not afraid to torture these people to stop them Taking It To The Streets, I doubt they'll be in a mood to raise their wages to Formula 1 levels any time soon.

Anyway, the track. My favourite detail about the Sakhir International Circuit is that they've glued down the sand to keep it from blowing across the track and burying it, without spoiling those authentic dashing-through-the-dunes visuals. I'll give them credit, it's a unique aspect and it looks pretty good on TV, and that should go double with this weekend's evening race, but the special effects can't hide the chronic shortage of plot.  There's never been a very interesting race here, and no wonder. Have a look at this layout:



There's really not a lot going on, just long straights and tight corners that make for some brutal braking zones. The only fun parts are Turn 12, which is a bit like Lukey Heights at Phillip Island where you can feel the car get light as it crests the hill, and diving into Turn 9, because braking and turning at the same time is always a bit exciting. With the desert heat this is the toughest race of the year for brakes, which means look for someone using tough but kinda-numb Carbon Industrie brakes to win, rather than talkative-but-soft Brembos.

Apart from that, it's sometimes true that anyone who does well in Bahrain isn't going to be fighting for the championship. The long straights prioritise cars with low drag and lots of power rather than the tonnes of downforce you need to clean up the rest of the calendar, so occasionally you see the grid get turned upside-down. Best example, the Toyotas (remember them?) in 2009, when they qualified first and second in Bahrain... then 19th and 20th (meaning last) in Monaco. Explaining that to head office in Aichi couldn't have been fun.

Anyway, my pick to win would be one of the Mercs, because they seem to have the legs on the rest of the field at the moment, and of them, I'll go with Britney Nico Rosberg. Nico seems to have a knack for the place ever since he set the fastest lap in his debut year in an unfancied Williams (and much as I love Lewis Hamilton, there isn't really anywhere for him to show his chops at this place. Lewis shines when the others get nervous about the tail letting go on entry to the corner. Since Bahrain never really makes them nervous that way, he's kind of just another driver here).

Via V8Supercars.com.au

Anyway, now Winton, my least favourite track in a V8 Supercar, but one of my very favourites in just about anything else (and not just because my only rFactor version is buggy as hell). Winton is a tiny little town in the Hume wasteland between Albury-Wodonga and Melbourne, only a stone's throw from Glenrowan, where Ned Kelly finally got his legs shot out from under him. It's the opposite of Bahrain, being short with tight, twisting corners, including a complex named with typical Aussie grace and subtlety, "The Tits". See if you can spot it here:



Winton is a fantastic club circuit, and I can't think of many places I'd rather drive in the Commodore or Excel Cup or those hilarious Aussie Racing Cars, but a V8 Supercar is a different beast. They might have less power than NASCAR, but it's still a lot more than anything with a roof in Europe, and on a track this short they never really build up a full head of steam. It's about as fun as swinging a sledgehammer in a backyard dunny, or locking a tiger in the cage you use to take your tabby to the vet. The winner will be whoever can maintain their focus and be precise without getting frustrated - meaning, in my opinion, Whincup or Lowndes. As we speak though my Facebook feed is showing Fabian Coulthard and Scott McLaughlin qualifying at the top, and if the Holden Racing Team can put a decent car together I'd say Garth Tander as well.

But let's be honest, if they could put a decent car together, they wouldn't be Holden. would they?

Race Relations 02/04/14

More opinions I am not qualified to have.

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Apparently the feng shui in the heart of the RB10 is all wrong - no wonder it kept breaking down. It's also remarkable how closely the controversy over Daniel Ricciardo's disqualification at Albert Park followed the pattern set in 1987.

Image via Today Online

Essentially Daniel's DSQ was inflicted for failing to comply with the FIA's orders. The rules limit the fuel flow to a maximum 100 kilos per hour (although since they're limited to 100 kilos for the whole 90-minute race, they mostly have to run it at a lot less). The hassle was, Daniel's car had been fitted with a faulty flow meter. Christian Horner and all the crew at Red Bull knew that, and so did the FIA, so the FIA told them to adjust the readings to compensate. They did this, but using their own telemetry found the FIA's adjustment was a bit harsh - Daniel could run a bit more flow than they said and still be under the 100kg/h limit, just not according to the FIA's meter.

So although I hate siding with the FIA, it's pretty clear to me that Red Bull are the ones in the wrong here. It reminds me of that line from A Few Good Men, "It doesn't matter what I believe, it only matters what I can prove!" The rules say from the outset that the FIA's homologated flow meter will be the one they use to judge fuel flow, not your own, so protesting that you complied with the regulations according to your own telemetry isn't going to save you. Let that by and the standardised fuel flow meter will become irrelevant, the F1 version of an appendix, hanging around in the guts of the machine but long since engineered out of the loop. Everyone will switch to their own monitoring systems instead and when it squeals they've gone over the fuel limit they'll just shrug and say, "Gosh, another faulty one? What are the odds!"

Or to put it another way, you can swear until you're blue in the face that your new laser-cut metre rule is a more accurate one-metre length than the one in SI vaults in Paris, but it won't matter. The one in the vaults is the one everyone's agreed to use.

But the shape of the drama reminds me of the introduction of pop-off valves in 1987. Fitted to the monstrous turbo cars of the 80's, they were designed  to limit the cars to 4.0 bar (about 59 psi) of boost to keep power outputs manageable. Like the fuel flow meter, they were standardised pieces of hardware handed out by the FIA, and like the fuel flow meter, they proved faulty right away.

"Don’t talk to me about bleeding pop-off valves," said Arrows driver Derek Warwick after his first Friday session. "Most of the time mine was cutting in at 3.5 [bar] or thereabouts, and some of the time it was at 2.6! The whole thing’s a joke.” Benetton's Thierry Boutsen confirmed: "One turbo was cutting at 3.7, and the other at 2.7." But at the second race? Nothing. Not a peep. The bellyaching about the pop-off valves had completely disappeared: the teams realised that you really only ran into trouble if you actually used the valves, which tended to weaken them. Work around them and most of the problems just disappeared.

How much complaining about fuel meters did you hear in Malaysia?

None of this is to say the FIA doesn't have a responsibility to provide working equipment. But maybe someone should take Red Bull to a cricket match some time this week, and whisper that old truism in their ear: "No, the umpire isn't always right, but he's always the umpire." Or if that can't happen, would it at least be possible to see Charlie Whiting mouthing off like Jack Nicholson in the court of appeal? "Horner, I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Ricciardo, and you curse the FIA. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know - that Ricciardo's DSQ, while tragic, probably saved the sport. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves the sport. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a team who rise to become World Champions under the blanket of the very regulations that I provide, and then question the manner in which I provide them. You want the truth? You can't HANDLE the truth!"

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Next problem: the new F1 engines sound awful. It's true, here's a fantastic video that shows the difference from 2013 to 2014 (and also gives a fantastic impression of how they sounded when you were actually there).

Be sure to watch the video soon before they take it down again: for such a high-tech sport, Formula 1's guardians are amazingly reticent about letting us experience it online.

Anyway, there's no denying it: last year the sound of an F1 car at full speed was pure aural sex; now they sound like a Kenworth got frisky with a Victa. So it seems to me the clear solution - the ONLY solution - is to record each race without the sounds, and then let each viewer to dub in whatever engine note they'd prefer to hear. The possibilities are endless: Matra V12, Ferrari Breadvan, M1 Procar, or hell, why not the Renault that won the very first Grand Prix back in 1906? If we're going to stick with the principle of older = better, then surely that's the oldest, bestest GP car of them all? Mmm, just think of that old monster chugging along at 1,600rpm like a a vintage tractor... No?

Image via Wikipedia

Look, I miss the old engine note too. It was glorious. But I wouldn't have it stick around at the price of becoming a mere special effect. As I've said before, a huge part of the appeal of F1 is that it's real. From 2006 to 2013 the cars were really glorified karts, and that undercut the whole programme in many peoples' eyes (including mine). Formula 1 is not the WWF, where everyone knows it's just a show and the competitors in the ring know you know. Formula 1 is reality TV. The director might have to interfere to shake things up occasionally, but on the whole the appeal is watching real people have real meltdowns over the achievement of real goals.

If you want something shallow but entertaining, NASCAR's a-waitin'. Meanwhile, the real irony of the noise complaints is that F1's glorious soundtrack didn't vanish at the end of 2013, it vanished at the end of 2005. I was once at Albert Park when they were giving rides in the 2-seater Minardi, fitted with the last of the 3-litre V10 monsters. On one pass I tried it without ear plugs, and never did that again. The V10 was just on another level, as far above the V8s as the V8s were above this year's turbo sixes. Sweet, singing, piercing, eardrum-shredding magnificence.

And dead as the Nazi Empire. The past is great and worth celebrating. But it's also the past. Remember that.

Get Out Your Map of Tassie

The V8 circus currently has its big top pitched at Symmons Plains, Tasmania, a track you can see on the new Google Maps right here (the tilt function especially makes it a bit more real - the geography lets it down a bit, sadly, but Mount Panorama is a mountain, so it looks fantastic. Doesn't quite give the full impression of what a rollercoaster ride it is, but gives you a much better idea of the contours of the thing than a flat overhead shot).

Anyway, since its Symmons Plains, I thought I'd take the opportunity to dust off a favourite video of mine, also from Symmons Plains. It's only short, so stop and have a watch.

That's Jim Richards...

You know, this bloke.

...in a JPS-sponsored BMW M3 powered by an all-new 2.3-litre motor, racing Peter Brock in a Mobil-sponsored VK Commodore powered by a 5-litre V8 that was brand new in omigod 1969!  This is the side of Group A we don't remember today. Mention the era now and all you'll get is grumble-grumble-Godzilla-bloody-forrin-cars-scratch-me-Holden-grumble-grumble. But in fact, in the early years, it was a fantastic example of racing regulations gone right.

CAMS initially adopted the Group A rules in 1985 because they were sick of all the argy-bargy involved in making the ATCC a fair fight (with five manufacturers on the grid and protests about Volvo's aero package already kicking up dust, it's a situation AVESCO might soon be intimately familiar with). One of the main attractions of the international Group A rules - in force in Britain, continental Europe and Nippon since 1982 - was that all the performance concession-whoring would be the FIA's problem. CAMs gave themselves an eight-year breather that lasted until, oh, what's the date today? (It's not often mentioned, but to this day V8 Supercars is a "pirate" series with no official sanctioning, like the Indy Racing League and NASCAR. Just one of the reasons it's not called "the ATCC" anymore).

Anyway, in Group A you started with a normal road car, a mass-volume seller with four seats and over 5,000 registrations per year, welded in a roll cage and started speccing up the standard engine block it came with. The rules were amazingly lenient, almost formula libre by modern standards: virtually all components could be upgraded and heat/chemically treated. That was acceptable to the FIA because they'd specified all the intake stuff could be no bigger than the road version, so you could make it rev but you couldn't make it breathe. In a time when every part in a V8 Supercar engine has to come off an approved "control list" available to everyone, that's almost unthinkable - in today's world of Inconel, beryllium and DLC coatings, leaving the engineers with so much freedom would cost a figure high enough for a Wall Street trader to retire, satisfied. Even in the Gordon Gecko 80's, it wasn't exactly cheap: a normal BMW 635 would set you back only $60,000, but for the model that won the '86 ATCC, you'd better have a spare $225,000. In the Eighties.

By comparison, a pack of the cigarettes it was advertising cost only $2.35. Moving on...

But the real core of Group A was its equivalence system: a bigger engine incurred a higher minimum weight, but was allowed a larger fuel tank and wider, grippier tyres. In theory, that would equalise performance across a number of different models. In practice... go watch the video again. Two sports sedans from opposite corners of the world, racing door-to-door.

1987 was the last time Group A worked like that. The FIA had already stumped themselves by allowing the Jaguar XJS to compete (a car that almost certainly never reached 5,000 production examples per year), and they were seemed to have had the wool pulled over their eyes regarding turbocharging. Originally the rules said a turbo car found its equivalence by multiplying its engine capacity by 1.4 (putting the 2-litre Sierra in the 2.8-litre class) but honestly x2 or x3 would have been more realistic. Turbocharging was a gigantic loophole, and by the time Bathurst came around the grid had become a sea of Belgian Fords, and next year Dick Johnson would have the boost sorted on his blood red Shell Sierra and be ready to turn the series into a DJR benefit. And Nissan was hard at work behind the scenes polishing their next-gen Skyline concept...

But that was all still in the future. Right now, in 1987, it was all still working beautifully. And for any kids reading this, "JPS" stands for John Player & Sons, a cigarette brand, because in those days you were allowed to advertise ciggies on the telly. No, really! And they were even allowed to colour in the packs, which is why Jim's car is that sexy black and gold. With the recent efforts of the Australian government, though, it isn't hard to imagine what a modern JPS team car would look like.

My NASCAR Experience

I'm writing this now because I missed the boat on Clipsal 500 commentry (AWOL at my brother's wedding - congrats, bro!) and the F1 in Melbourne doesn't get started for another couple of days. So this will probably be my last chance to write it down before November, and by then the memories will have faded. Since I don't want that to happen, and to record this for posterity, here's my experience of life in a NASCAR stock car.

For anyone who doesn't know already, in November 2013 I took a weekend off work and headed to Melbourne, having booked a NASCAR ride with Adrenaline/Fastrack Racing, or whatever it is they call themselves. My reasons for choosing NASCAR over the more common "V8 Race Car" ride & drive package were four: firstly, everybody chooses the V8 drive, and I like to be different; secondly, on closer inspection those "V8 Race Cars" are just normal Commodores with lots of racing parts glued on; thirdly, having had a fair bit of fun with stock car racing on rFactor, I wanted to see what the real thing was like; and lastly, it was the cheapest thing they offered.

In retrospect, that's quite weird: in the briefing, the people in charge revealed the whole reason they started the business was so they'd have a way to run their race cars occasionally. The V8 Race Cars on the road circuit are just a way to pay the bills; NASCAR's where their hearts are really at (they even admitted that if they'd waited until today to bring NASCAR to Australia instead of trying in the late 80's it would have taken off a lot better - but of course now they have no money).

Anyway, the cars: the white #1 was patterned after a Holden Commodore and the orange #8 a Chevy Lumina, both ex-racing cars that saw plenty of action in the Thunderdome's 90's heyday ("This place used to rock," they told us. "We'd have 40,000 people here every Saturday night."). The engines were both racing-spec 358ci Chevy V8s; surprisingly, when I asked if they detune them to make them last longer, they said no, they just don't take them above 5,000rpm anymore. So there's probably still over 500 kW on tap there, if you hold off changing up... something to think about.

Walking up to the cars made me feel a little bit light-headed, buzzing. They're surprisingly small when you see them with your own eyes - on TV, dressed as they are in flashy sponsor colours, they tend to look larger-than-life, especially when the only people you see standing next to them are racing drivers. But racing drivers are short-arses like you wouldn't believe. Of the two drivers we had that day, only one of them - my driver, Mal Rose - actually stood taller than my shoulders. The other - George Elliot, who was actually Aussie NASCAR champion over the summer of '91-'92 - was about an inch shorter, and they were both kind of dwarfy dudes with pot bellies. But in their full racing gear, they were still pretty intimidating - think Kerry King, minus the beard but wearing a fireproof suit, and you get the idea.

Getting into the car is frankly humiliating if you're my size. I'm not a small guy in any dimension (ladies), and stock cars have no doors. They're just an aluminium skin draped over a roll cage, so the only way in or out is through the window. And it's not until you try to squeeze in that you realise these cars aren't built full-size, but about 80% scale. The "Holden Commodore" George Elliot was driving actually had a wheelbase about the same as my Corolla hatchback, would overhang maybe 200mm at both ends, and had a lower roofline. Squeezing down and twisting around the roll cage is the only way to get in, so if you're built like an NRL player I recommend taking up contortion as a hobby (alternatively, thankyou so much Dad for being a truckie who drove car-carriers and giving me a childhood of getting in and out via the window. The practice came in handy!).

Once you're in, the first thing you notice is the heat. It wasn't an especially hot day that day - high-20's maybe, with a cool breeze - but once you're inside the car it's nasty. You know how it is when you first get into your car after it's been parked in the sun all day? It's like that, the kind of heat dogs die in. Within seconds my forehead was beading with sweat. The difference is, there's no AC on a racing car, so it stays like that all day, even when you're doing 200+ with the window down. "Like sitting in a sauna with your overalls on," is an old cliche, but it's stuck around because it's accurate. Sweltering.

Despite the heat though, the cockpit was a surprisingly cozy place to be. Both cars that day were built by a guy named Marshall Brewer, and clearly he knows how to play Heavy Metal - you have four-inch thick steel piping all around you, some of it wrapped in the foam they make pool toys from. The seat felt like it was made of particle board and moulds to your back very nicely, even though I'm not really... erm... identically shaped to a real racing driver. Maybe that seat was made just for civvies. Anyway, all the solid steel and the way everything's so cramped makes you feel nicely cocooned, like you're wearing the car more than riding in it. But at the same time, it makes you nervous - like, gosh, there must be a reason they made the car this strong, right...?

When they fire the engine up, it sounds absolutely wicked. The engine note on an Aussie V8 is a bit too polite, a bit soulless (although Mercedes and Volvo seem to be doing their bit to fix that). Not on these. They snarl and crackle on the overrun and you get the distinct impression there's nothing between you and the cylinders - the exhaust pipe would barely be a metre long. The driver revs it like a pit bull straining at the leash, and for a second you decide that no, you don't want to do this after all... but then the spotter gives the cars a final visual check, and gives the drivers the thumbs up - and you're off.

The launch is surprisngly gentle - I've ridden in cars that should come with a neck brace, and this wasn't one of them (or maybe being hard up against the seat already took a lot of the shock out of it). The difference was, these guys didn't stop accelerating. All down pit lane they ran it up through the gears and the speed just kept building. The fastest you can go on Victoria/NSW roads is 110km/h: I'm guessing we were past that landmark in, oh, about three seconds. And we didn't drop below it again until we were safely back in pit lane.

So there I was, finally seeing the Calder Park Thunderdome as it should be seen. The sensation of speed was impressive, but not overwhelming... until we hit Turn 1.

The turns are where the experience went from "exciting" to "oh God, get me out of here!" For starters, in the middle of a race, I'm pretty sure you could lick a NASCAR brake disc and still enjoy a Mr Whippy afterwards, because the brakes will be stone cold. Yes, the drivers do slow down for the turns, but they consider themselves slowed down enough just by backing off the power. In NASCAR, the brakes are mostly decorative.

Next, the tyres. If you've ever been karting you'll know what I'm talking about already. For the rest of you... good God, you have no idea what slick tyres are like. They're nothing like the tyres on your car, which are really just to keep your rims off the tarmac and maybe clear some rain. Racing slicks are different, they hang on hard. Like you're welded to the track at all four corners, like you're hanging from the tyres but right-side up (I had a guy in a jobseeker class tell us it was a weird feeling, like the chassis was ready to slide but the tyres wouldn't let it. This is absolutely correct). The product of this is a simply incredible amount of G-force. The Fastrack page I linked above claims 2 or 3g, and I wouldn't dispute that, because for me it was only just below the pain threshold. You can feel your brain squishing against the inside of your skull and your left-hand lung trying to emigrate over to your right side. The closest thing to it is riding a rollercoaster - a rollercoaster that's constantly slipping off the rails and jumping onto some more.

That's the other thing about the turns - they're bumpy. Part of that is neglect (the 'dome never gets used anymore) and part is that racing cars simply don't believe in ride quality. Put together, the sensation is kind of like a speedboat bouncing from wave to wave. Every bump triggers another half-inch slide, and the driver's going at a speed that just allows him to land, grind out another slide and bounce to the next bump without losing control and careening into the wall.

I remember years ago reading a journalist who got to try out Sebastian Bourdais' title-winning ChampCar, and came away saying, "the faster you go, the higher the concrete walls seem. At full speed, it feels like you're driving in a squash court." Weirdly, I didn't get that feeling. In turns as steep as this, the wall is sort of hanging overhead, like the barbed wire section at the top of a security fence (in fact, it's so steep it almost feels like the turn is rising before you, like the tunnels in a waterslide). It never felt especially close because these guys hug the low line all the way around - but at the same time, it was what made the whole experience so thrilling.

Normal people, you see - me, you, anyone not-crazy - drive our cars according to consequences. We approach a corner at such a speed that, if we do get it wrong, we know we can recover or, at worst, hit that tree slowly enough that we'll emerge unharmed. The thing is, I didn't realise this was how I drove a car until I climbed in with someone who doesn't think like that. This was the real crux of the experience for me - all that G-force means you can feel how hard you are going to hit that wall when that monstrous grip finally does run out. And a racing driver doesn't care. Mal Rose barrelled into those turns like that concrete wall wasn't even there. While I was hanging on, fighting just to hold myself upright against the G's, he was giving it a bit more throttle and sliding through the rest of the turn - because he thought it was fun.

By this point the car was starting to seem less approachable than I first thought. You want to know the difference between a normal car and a racing car? It's that a racing car hates you. It's kind of like that scene in Avatar where Sam Worthington is trying to find a dragon-thingy to ride: "How will I know which one's mine?" "It will try to kill you." The impression I got from being in the cockpit at racing speed is that road cars are demure, helpful things that sort out a lot of stuff without you even noticing, like a good butler. A racing car is a pissed-off dragon you have to wrestle to the ground with sheer talent before you can make it behave. If you haven't got the talent, well...

On that note, Mal definitely had the talent. It never made sense to me that the career ladder for NASCAR starts with Saturday-night dirt oval racing, like the kind we have even in my home town Gilgandra. It does now: on a couple of laps, Mal (or as I shall call him from now on, Sir) held that car in a perfect four-wheel drift from the entry of the turn right through to the exit (and for the other laps, they were imperfect drifts, meaning he had to correct it with the steering wheel or, as to borrow Mr McLaughlin's phrase, with some jandal). Dirt-tracking on tarmac. With slicks, and concrete walls at arm's length. That is brave. Oh, and the banking sits lower than the straights as well, so you have to drop into it. In the photo the gradient seems gentle enough; at full speed it feels like a BMX jump. Remember all those times your dad ramped the family car into a sudden drop and left you dizzy with your heart in your mouth? Yeah, that, twice a lap.

So overall, you do a BMX jump and ramp the car into the turn, land with a thump, go sliding dunk-dunk-dunk across the bumps, trying to keep your insides from coming out while your driver deliberately provokes more sliding to find more speed, then do another BMX jump onto the straight. Where you'll get at most a few seconds' rest before it starts all over again.

The joke about NASCAR is that it stands for, "Non-Athletic Sport Centred Around Rednecks." I'm never making that joke again, because if that's the non-athletic version of racing then I'd hate to try the others. It's physically draining just holding yourself up against the G's, never mind all the strain of actually driving the car (we'll get into how incredibly heavy a brake pedal is another day...) especially in that 45-degree heat. Four laps is all they give you, but for me, four laps was enough. I was knackered, ready to get out. God only knows what it's like to do it for three and a half hours, with 40 other cars crowding you out. Afterwards I drove back to the motel with my brain ringing like your ears after someone slaps them, and had a good ten hours sleep. And the punchline I usually give is that these old blokes - in their late 50s, both of them - had both been in the car for over an hour by the time I got in, and the first thing Sir Mal said to me was, "I've gotta get back to Charlotte, they still let over-50's have a steer there!" These old guys are tough, tough like old leather, or a truck tyre. And they have absolutely no fear, none at all. God only knows what hard bastards they were back when they were in their prime.

And the next day, as I drove back home, all I could think was: "Do it. Hit the treadmill. Start karting. Get yourself a CAMS license. Get a car and go racing." It's an adrenaline rush like you wouldn't believe. Like Fight Club, after being in a racecar, everything else in your life gets the volume turned down. For the first time, I understood Maurice Trintignant's famous words: "Racing is life. Anything that happens before or after is... just waiting."

The waiting is killing me. I need to do it again.