Category Archives: Cars

The Sonoma Historics are on the weekend of June 4th and 5th

Cars

Be sure to pass this on to Al Grubbs if you know him and his whereabouts.

This year the Sonoma Historics will feature McLaren cars. McLaren – like Ferrari in the 60s – is a company who exists to race and has made some very memorable race cars. Their late 60s early 70s Can-Am cars are especially fun to watch. Sporting huge American V-8s stuffed into lightweight, mid-engine, racing chassis (es?); they were loud and spectacularly fast.  McLaren has raced in Formula One since 1980 and will bring several F1 cars to Sonoma. It should be great fun for anyone who really loves cars and racing – that means you, Al.

Adrian Newey and the theory of “everything is progressive”

Cars, Current Affairs, Sports

General Grant once said War is progressive, when he was accused of not following the old rules faithfully enough. I will go a step further and say Everything is progressive. Everything is built on the past which was, of course, built on its past. Especially in sports which are – when you think about it – war with a better set of rules.

Part of  Everything is progressive. is that nobody stays on top for long. Think football. Every decade, there is a Team of the Decade, but then new coaches come along and build on what was the newest latest thing but no longer is. For example, the San Francisco 49ers' Bill Walsh. He was a genius and he changed professional football, but, after a while, his opponents began to understand what he was doing, then how to stop him and then incorporate what he was doing and then build on it.

Like football, Formula One Racing is a team sport, and like football, a team is strong for a while, then another team comes along and replaces it. Except for teams that have Adrian Newey. Newey is an racecar engineer specializing in aerodynamics.
When he worked on CART cars in the United States he took Al Unser and then, Bobby Rahal to championships in the 1980s. In the 90s, he worked for Williams in Formula One and took them to several championships. Then he moved to McLaren F1 and they won. Now he is at Red Bull as the technical director and they are the fastest car, by far, this year.

Ferraris, McLarens, Mercedei, and Red Bulls, Oh my….the F1 season starts

Cars, Sports

Ferrari pit stop

The weekend, the Formula One racing season starts in Bahrain. I am thrilled. The favored cars are Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes, and Red Bull. (For an earlier post that is a very short explanation of F1 – as it is usually called – click here or click here for a longer Wikipedia explanation.) The fact that Red Bull is one of the favorites just goes to show how much money can be made in the energy drink biz.

F1 is pretty much considered the pinnacle of auto racing. In an effort to slow the cars down and bring the costs back into some form of reasonableness – the top teams were spending over $400 million per season – the engines have been made smaller; but they are still staggering fast cars. They are now only 2.4 liter engines that can rev to 18,000RPM and put out around 700HP – in a car that only weighs 1334 lbs. They can go from 0 to 100 km/h (62mph) in about 1.5 seconds, and 0 to 200 km/h in about 3.8. Over and over again for a couple of hours. They have a top speed of about 225 mph.

One thing I like about F1 is how international the drivers are with 2 British, 6 German, 1 Australian, 2 Brazilian, 3 Spanish, 1 Polish, 1 Russian, 2 Italian, I Swiss, 1 Finnish, 1 Indian, and 1 Japanese driver racing this year. That is a total of only 22 drivers and they all must have a FIA - Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile -Super Licence.

The favorite drivers are Fernando Alonso, Felipe Massa, Jenson Button,Sebastian
Vettel, Lewis Hamilton, Michael Schumacher, and Nico Rosberg  shown below.

Nico Rosberg
 

The cars themselves are ridiculous in their complexity with all sorts of little areo devises to make them slip through the air – every team has it's own windtunnel – and inverted wings to push them down to the ground so they will hang on to road better. The cars are meticulously made, but the resulting design is an acquired taste at best.Red Bull F1

.Mercedes F1

 

Formula One

Cars

Formula One is the most over the top car racing ever conceived of by man. No, really. It is what happens when guys with unlimited budgets race cars. It is nuts!  And, for me at least, hugely fun to follow. 

This week about half the F1 teams started their winter testing. A big deal for us fans – sort of like baseball's spring training, I guess.

When I was a teenager, Formula One cars looked like this and one of the great drivers was Sterling Moss – shown here driving a Mercedes Benz W-196 in 1955. Moss was one of my real heroes, so much so that I had a picture of him on my wall.

Stirling_Moss_W196 

Fifty five years later, the cars have become insanely fast and they have become so complicated that the steering wheels look like this.(Double click on the image for more detail and check out the windshield.)

2010_f1_test_3 

Instead of a short sleeve polo shirt and lightweight helmet, the drivers wear fireproof long underwear, a fireproof driving suit, and a helmet that covers their whole head including their face. For the first time since 1955, Mercedes is back with their own Formula One car. Their number one (I guess I should say die nummer ein) driver is Michael Schumacher – probably the best driver ever, I am somewhat reluctant to admit – who came out of retirement to drive for Mercedes.

Valencia-day-3-michael-schumacher-8

I can hardly wait for the season to start in March.