Category Archives: Cars

Baseball, Family, F1, and Lewis Hamilton

Cars, Sports, Television, Uncategorized

Lewis Hamilton

Watching the Giants beating the Kansas City Royals Sunday evening – listening to the Giants beating the Kansas City Royals on TV while doing stuff in the other room would be more accurate – I was struck by the differences in the sports coverage in F1 and Baseball, especially in coverage of the driver’s/player’s family and girlfriends. I know that alot of players wives and girlfriends – here in after referred to as WAGS – travel with the team in baseball, because I have sat near them at games. But the WAGs are almost never shown on television and I don’t think that I have ever seen coverage of, say, a first baseman’s parents during a game.

In F1, the WAGs and parents – and in Hamilton’s case, even his brother – are often shown (one father, driver Jenson Button’s, always wore a trademark pink shirt that was frequently remarked upon; after his father passed away, Jenson even changed his helmet color to pink in honor of his father). One of the reasons is the size, in Formula 1, there are only twenty-two drivers – eleven teams of two drivers each – so the drivers, especially the drivers on the most competitive teams, are covered in more detail than baseball. It is not unusual to see a driver hugging his WAG or family after a race, often when they still have their helmet on. I am not saying that one is better than the other, but the difference is striking.

This may be just be an excuse to post something on Lewis Hamilton who has won four races straight as of last weekend, but I will try to make it as un-Formula One-ish as possible.  In Singapore, Hamilton’s car worked flawlessly while his teammate, Nico Rosberg, had a problem with his steering wheel wiring harness that knocked him out of the race.1 Since then, he has won two more races and is now leading in the Championship by 17 points. With three races still to go out of a total of nineteen, this has been an extraordinary season with more racing than any season I can remember. The primary  characteristic of the season has been the unreliability of  the fastest cars which has often forced drivers into high-risk racing. Both Daniel Ricciardo and Lewis Hamilton  have come from being impossibly far behind to win races. Hamilton, in particular, has driven more than several unforgettable races. After wandering through the wilderness, he is at the top of his career. As the season has gone on, I have become increasingly invested in Hamilton winning and, I think, it is for several reasons that are only slightly related.

Auto racing is expensive on almost every level and that is a major selection factor towards drivers with rich parents. Hamilton is an exception. He came from a family that was far from wealthy and, as racing became a bigger part of his life, it put big strains on the Hamilton family. Hamilton’s parents divorced and his mother didn’t or wouldn’t go to his races. When Hamilton first started racing, his dad was his racing engineer and manager.

lewis2_1017899iOf course, as Hamilton started racing at higher levels he used professional racing engineers, but even when Hamilton started driving in Formula One at McLaren, his dad stayed on as his manager, Lewis Hamilton 2008 A couple of years ago, maybe four, Hamilton fired his dad and hired an outside agency. It tore the family apart and his dad eventually sued for back pay.

Shortly thereafter, Hamilton left McLaren, the racing team that had given him his first Formula One job and a Championship. He moved to Mercedes Benz. Now Hamilton is leading the Driver’s World Championship and I think a good part of that is because he has become his own person. As painful as it was, Hamilton had to leave home to grow up.As an adult, he has reconciled with his family, not only his dad but also his mom. Hamilton put it best and I’ll end with a quote from him:

I just feel relaxed, all my family are a real positive beam of light for me at the weekend. 

I spoke years ago, when my Dad was my manager, and said I couldn’t wait for the day when he was here just as my Dad. And that’s what you’re seeing. And that’s one of the greatest feelings, having him here. Since the first day I ever got in a kart – I remember the day of my first race – I created a handshake with him. I was eight years old and he was there. That’s one of the most special things. He said today it felt like I was eight years old again attending kart race, when he was watching me.

I don’t know what Dad thought when we started. I was good but I don’t know if he thought that in 20 years time we’d be winning the Singapore GP. I try to imagine his mentality, getting four jobs to get the money to get a crap kart together, to respray it or try to bend it back to shape because it was the oldest kart in world, trying to get some fuel because we had spent all the money on tyres. Going through all that to now be at the pinnacle of the sport, I’m hugely proud of my family, so it’s really cool for dad to be here. I’ve gotta stop there – I’m getting emotional!

 

1. As an aside, Formula One car steering wheels are complex and everything is controlled from by them,  as the accompanying picture shows. When the wheel has a problem, it is a major problem.

F1 Steering wheel

1 BOOST: F1 cars have an electric-hybrid system known as KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) that regenerates braking energy, then boosts acceleration—at the push of a button—via an 80-hp electric motor. Another feature that increases speed is the movable rear wing that flattens to reduce drag. The wing is controlled by a foot pedal. 2 LAP TIME  3 HARVEST : Regulates the amount of energy “harvested” during braking. The regen system can alter the feel of the brakes, and because these guys drive with exacting precision, they’re picky about tactile feedback. This knob lets them customize.  4 DOWNSHIFT PADDLE   5 MIX: Adjusts the engine’s air—fuel mixture to balance power and fuel economy. F1 cars don’t refuel during a race, but economy is still vital—fuel adds weight.  6 BITE POINT: The race start is critical because the cars begin from a stop and the initial sprint is a prime overtaking opportunity. The bite point adjusts how the clutch engages as the drivers release the paddle, so they can execute a perfect launch. 7 BPF During practice starts, the driver uses the “bite point find” to record the clutch behavior. Engineers use the data to instruct the driver where to set the bite point dial. 8 CLUTCH PADDLE. 9 BBAL Displays the front—rear brake balance, a critical adjustment that drivers make to fine-tune the braking performance. Most passes are done in the braking zones. 10 REVERSE GEAR. 11 SHIFT LIGHTS. 12 LIMITER Restricts the car’s speed to the pit-lane limit, 62 mph. 13 ENGINE PARAMETERS. 14 UPSHIFT PADDLE. 15 TORQUE The 2.4-liter V8 revs to 18,000 rpm and delivers north of 700 hp. That’s a handful in a 1400-pound car, so the drivers use this knob to adjust the engine’s torque curve, depending on track conditions. 16 TYRE Teams use roughly half a dozen different tires that vary in construction and diameter. This dial tells the computer which tires are fitted so it can calculate wheel speed. 17 CLUTCH PADDLE. 8 DIFFERENTIAL Thanks to electronic controls, the characteristics of the rear differential can be tailored for corner entry, midpoint and exit—each with 12 settings. Frankly, we’re amazed that the drivers can detect such minute rear-end differences during cornering events that last for maybe a few seconds. But that’s why they’re paid millions.

Age, Ferrari, Brooks Camera, General Motors, and the problem with Capitalism

Art, Cars, Psychological Musings

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A couple of weeks ago, maybe a month now, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the President of Ferrari, was fired. My first reaction is that it was a good move because the Ferrari Formula One Team is doing miserably and Montezemolo is part of the problem. They need fresh blood. Formula One is a constantly evolving sport and Montezemolo who is 67 doesn’t have any new answers.

Rather than taking a chance with young drivers – and engineers – who are on their way up, like Red Bull, which has won four Championships in a row, Ferrari has hired great drivers and engineers on the way down. When a company is not gambling on the future but trying to safely replicate the past with the people of the past, is can only be mediocre and that is a great description of Ferrari’s Formula One program under Montezemolo. But, according to the F1 gossip, that is not why he was fired.  The FIAT Board fired Montezemolo because they want to increase production to increase profits and Montezemolo wants to keep Ferrari exclusive.

In the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s, there was a camera store on the corner of Maiden lane and Kearny, Brooks Camera. Brooks Camera which was started by Julius Bloch – who escaped Nazi Germany in 1936 – was the best camera store on the West Coast, maybe the nation. It was always packed, always! Like 10:00 Tuesday morning packed. It was the kind of place where one could buy a Kodak Brownie, a brand new Nikon, or an obscure camera part (I once stood in line behind a guy who bought, not one, but two  Pierre Angenieux lenses for his Bolex movie camera, saying I am on my way to Vietnam here is my NBC account number).

In different ways and at different levels, both Enzo Ferrari and Julius Block had a vision to create a company that was the best at what it did. That is what Capitalism or Entrepreneurship does best, create the money and arena to create new products and better services out of a visionary’s dream. Ferrari or Brooks would not have existed in a  Command Economy. However, the new products and better services only continue to be created when there is still a Vision. When Bloch retired, he left Brooks Camera to the employees, but they didn’t care about the vision, all they cared about was making money.

I have no idea what will happen to Ferrari, but Brooks Camera is gone. The employees turned the operation into a series of discount camera stores to increase earnings and the world, apparently, doesn’t need another discount camera store. Still, that is often not the case and that is the problem with Capitalism. Usually, after the founder/visionary leaves the company he or she founded, making money becomes the company’s reason for being. Often, when the company has a large market share, is rich enough, or has a deserved sterling reputation, it can lever that into making lots of money. For years, after Alfred Sloan left General Motors, they made more money with GMAC – General Motors Acceptance Corporation which loaned money for people to buy cars (and, eventually, houses) – than they did in actually building and selling cars.

For General Motors, making money became the goal – the overriding goal –  and, in that environment, weighing the cost of replacing millions of ignition switches against the cost of potential lawsuits from criminal negligence, made good sense. When making money becomes the goal, making good products, innovation, or providing good jobs – among other socially desirable goals – becomes secondary, although the companies often do make lots of money. However, they no longer make the world, our world, richer, they only make the shareholders richer.

As an aside, Ferrari still makes wonderful cars – great cars – but they are no longer the reflection of Enzo Ferrari, il Commendatore. If you want a car that is the reflection of one man’s vision, you would have to buy something like a Pagani Huayra, the creation of Horacio Pagani, with its stunning exterior and spectacular steampunk interior. End aside. Pagani Huayra 1

Pagani Huayra

Pagani

Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg, random numbers, the A’s, and 9-11

Americana, Cars, Sports

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I want to talk about how random life is, but first a story about two childhood friends that have become enemies, Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton.

Rosberg and Hamilton became friends racing go-karts in Europe as young teenagers. Although they came from very different backgrounds and didn’t meet until they started racing go-karts, Rosberg was born into European racing royalty and Hamilton is a Brit who grew up in a lower-middle-class suburb of London, they were both very good at racing and met when they started racing at the inter-European level. They are about the same age and they became friends even though they were so different.

Nico Rosberg is the son of Keke Rosberg, a Formula One Championship winning driver and Gesine Gleitsmann-Dengel, a German interpreter. He considers himself German – speaks fluent German, English, French and Italian – and grew up in Monaco.  Lewis Hamilton is from a mixed race family that dissolved when he was two. He grew up with his mother and sisters and became very good at racing radio controlled model cars. Because of that, his father gave him a go-kart when he was six. When he was twelve, he moved in with his father to race. Nico looks like a Ralph Lauren ad and so does his wife, the daughter of a family friend he has known since childhood. Lewis favors a gangsta look, drives a purple Pagani Zonda,  and has dated – seriously, off and on – an American, Nicole Scherzinger who Wikipedia identifies as the lead singer of The Pussycat Dolls, a burlesque troupe turned-recording act.

In the words of their boss, Toto Wolff, These boys have calibrated their whole life…to win the Drivers’ Championship in F1. And here they go – they are in the same car, competing against each other for that trophy and one is going to win and one is going to fail. This is a new experience for them – a difficult experience maybe.

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I think – and I am far from the only one – that Lewis Hamilton is the best pure racecar driver in the world, but right now, Rosberg is leading in the championship even though Hamilton has won more races. That is because Hamilton has had an extraordinary string of bad luck. His Mercedes has had two race-ending mechanical problem and he had additional electrical problems in qualifying that forced him to start 16th and last for two races. He was forced out of the Belgium Grand Prix in an accident caused by Rosberg, and last week, in Italy, he had an electrical problem on the start. Out of the 12 races run so far, Hamilton has had problems beyond his control in seven of them and Rosberg has had problems in one.

It is easy to see a pattern here, but there isn’t any. It is easy to see a conspiracy of a German Team trying to help the German get the Championship, but I find it hard to believe they would pay Hamilton 32 million dollars a year not to finish races (and, when Hamilton doesn’t finish, his car doesn’t finish and Mercedes is also trying to win the Manufacturers Championship). Even people who don’t normally believe in conspiracy theories have a tendency to systematize random events.

When I was in college, I worked on several experiments with students watching Flat Worm Behavior. In an effort to get truly unbiased results, we assigned participants to different areas of the experiment on a random basis. Now, we can go on the web and get a random number generator, but then, in the olden days, we would use charts – for lack of a better descriptor – filled with lines of random numbers. Looking at the numbers, they often didn’t seem random. Often they would seem to have too many numbers that formed patterns or a chain of the same number that was too long to seem natural. That is the problem, true randomness has pseudo-patterns and we think of random as being patternless. True randomness often feels fake.

In the 2002 season, the Oakland A’s won the American League pennant with a season record of 103-59. That is a 64% winning average. but from August 14th to September 4th, the A’s won every game they played. They had a 20 game winning streak. No other team has done that since 1935 and before that 1916. If the A’s had their seasonal average during that period, they would have lost 7 games instead of having their streak. If somebody had been told to randomly list wins and losses so that the average was a 64% winning average, it is doubtful that they would have put a twenty game winning streak in the middle.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me some information on 9-11 being a conspiracy. I am not much of a conspiracy buff because I think that life is much more random than people want to believe (although it has always amazed me that one of the most likely conspiracies – that of William J. Casey, then head of the CIA  who was rendered incapable of speech and then died just hours before he was going to be questioned about Iran-Contra – has never gotten traction; if the head of the CIA can’t fake their own death, who can?).

We are pattern recognizing creatures, all animals are, and in the case of a huge catastrophe like The World Trade Center coming down, there are lots of random parts. We try to make all the random parts fit into a pattern and that often results in fantastical explanations but I am convinced that the only conspiracy was between al-Qaeda and the sorry, mislead souls, who flew those planes.

 

 

I

The allure of the 50s race car

Cars
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1959 Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage

I have a whole slug of pictures of the 2014 Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion – 488 to be embarrassingly precise  –  enough so that I feel obligated to come up with a way to use some of them. To say something or show something about the day I haven’t said five or six times already. Something that doesn’t bore even me. That got me pondering as to why Malcolm and I go back every couple three years, after all the cars are pretty much the same year after year. Malcolm keeps saying that it is like going to a museum and it is, but a museum that we have been to many times before.

It must be similar to someone going to a concert, expecting their favorite group to sing their favorite songs. This mythical someone is going for the familiar with, maybe, one or two new songs added in. These races are the same. There are all the old favorites and, every year, there are a couple of cars that neither one of us had ever seen in real life. The old familiars, my favorites, would be the late 50s sports-racing cars that I lusted over as a high-hormone teenager when I was old enough to go to races on my own.

I want to think that these cars really are the most beautiful cars ever made. Their lines flowed so smoothly and they looked so aerodynamic. That was before aerodynamics became a science, so looking good counted alot. It was also a time when the fiction that these were regular cars anybody could drive was still practiced – much like the Olympics were pretending everybody was an amateur – so they have headlights, doors, a windshield, and two seats. I first took Michele to these races in the early nineties partially because I wanted to introduce her to two old friends in particular, the Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa and the Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage. Now I think I may have over sold them, driving down to the races, and I may have given Michele the impression that the Ferrari and Maserati were real street cars not pretend street cars because Michele’s first reaction was something along the line of Are you kidding me? You think that is a great look car? It doesn’t even look like you could comfortably drive it. 

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1958 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa Scaglietti Spider
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1960 Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage

Now I realize that these sports-racing cars are probably an acquired taste. That attitude doesn’t dampen my adoration, however. Maybe it is really about the time, the late 50s, my late teens, when everything was possible. Maybe late 50s sports-racing cars actually are more beautiful than newer racecars, more sensual. Probably both.

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1954 Maserati A6GCS Spyder
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1963 Ferrari 250 GTO Berlinetta
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1955 Aston Martin DBR2 & 1957 Maserati 450S
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1959 Lotus 17 in front of a 1958 Scarab (1972 McLaren M8F across the street)

In the late 50s, and probably even now, Southern California was the epicenter of American cardom and I had just moved down there to go to college. I used the opportunity to go my first big time race, the Los Angeles Times Grand Prix. It was a National Championship Race, at Riverside Raceway, on October 12, 1958 and it drew the crème de la crème. The Aston Martin Team would be there with their top driver, Roy Salvadori; Jean Behra would be there, driving a Porsche factory 718 RSK; Jo Bonnier from Sweden would be driving a factory Ferrari; and lots of famous Americans would be there. Phil Hill, the first American to win a Formula One Driver’s Championship would be there in a Ferrari Team car along with Carroll Shelby, later of Cobra fame, driving a Maserati, and famous Indy drivers like Bobby Unser, Ak Miller, Roger Ward, and A.J. Foyt. I had been to some local races at Vacaville and Stockton and, even, Laguna Seca, but Riverside was in a different league (so to speak).

Southern California was also where hotrods were invented and some hotrodders turned to making real road racing cars. There were lots of local hotrod guys at Southern California races and the 1958 Riverside races would not be an exception. One car that I didn’t show Michele when we went to the Monterey Historics was the Mark 1 Scarab, because they are as rare as unicorns. The first time I saw a Scarab was that day at Riverside.

The Scarab was the love child of Lance Reventlow, on paper, the quintessential playboy ( his mother, Barbara Hutton, was one of the richest women in the world and his father was a Danish Count, Kurt von Haugwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow, Lance was beautiful, rich, famous, and married Jill St. John). But he was very serious, especially about racing. Reventlow spent a year racing in Europe and then came back to Southern California to build his own race car. He hired Troutman and Barnes, local hotrodders par excellence, to design and build the new car.

I remember it was hot, in the 90s, and by the end of the day I remember being sweaty and grungy and tired but my strongest memory – even though I had come to Riverside to see the Europeans – is of Chuck Daigh driving that Scarab away from the European factory teams and everybody else. The car was stunning, even more beautiful than the Europeans, and clearly an American hotrod with its Chevy engine’s booming V8 sound. As rare as it is, as American as it is, it is – for me – the quintessential 50s Sports-racing Car.

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Scarab Mk. I Sports Roadster

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Fun in the fog

Americana, Around home, Cars, Local events

2014 Historics -0009Thursday, Malcolm Pearson and I went down to Laguna Seca to watch some old cars drive around in a fog heavy enough to be called drizzle. I can’t imagine doing anything more fun!

It was all part of the Cargasm that, according to Sports Car Digest, is now known as Monterey Classic Car Week, Pebble Beach Automotive Week, Concours Week, Holy Car Week or just Car Heaven. Car Heaven started out innocently enough, in 1950, when owners of what were then called Sports Cars, wanted a place to race those cars just like in Europe. The Sports Car Club of America put on several races, including the Del Monte Trophy which was run on part of the private Seventeen Mile Drive. The Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance was put on to compliment the nearby race. In 1956, Ernie McAfee was killed while racing a Ferrari in the feature race, making it obvious that racing through a forest on narrow roads was too dangerous, and the race was cancelled after 1956, but the Concours lived on, thriving.

In 1974, Steve Earle organized the Monterey Historic Automobile Races to show off his and his friend’s old sports and racing cars. In a sort of turnaround is fair play and, I suspect, hoping for synergy, they chose the same weekend as the Concours. They got synergy in spades, first an auto related Art Show and then a get together of Italian Cars; over the years, some car auctions were added, a get together for German Cars, another car show called  Carmel-by-the-Sea Concours on the Avenue. Sometime in the last thirty or so years, The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering, a very high-end car show started and became so exclusive that the $450 tickets are controlled by lottery. Now there is something happening every day of the week. Usually something very expensive.

This is the kind of Automotive Event that every car company wants to be part of:  it is where you can sign up for the Aston Martin experience – a week of luxury for you with your Aston Martin – for only $18,000 per person, where – on the same Thursday that Malcolm and I were at the racetrack – a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO sold for $38,115,000 at the Bonhams’ Monterey Auction, a place so important that Toyota repainted and reupholstered their FT1 concept car in order to tone it up for display.

Still, there are ways to mitigate the expense, the Concours on Sunday costs $300 a ticket but most of the cars take part in the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance, which is on public streets, visible to anyone, and the Monterey Historic Automobile Races – now called the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion – has a sparsely attended practice day on Thursday that is cheaper than the usual Friday Practice. Malcolm and I chose Thursday and we got two bonuses.

The first was not a surprise, the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance now takes a lap around the racetrack before heading out on the city streets, the second is that almost nobody goes to the Thursday Practice. Standing in the grandstands because the seats were too wet to sit on – and why don’t they call them grandseats? if you aren’t supposed to stand? – The Tour passed by in no discernible order.

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2014 Historics -0057It was like going back to the beginning of the Historics, when we could park close to the track, the stands were almost empty, and we could leisurely walk through the paddock talking to car owners and their mechanics. OK, the mechanic part is new, in the olden days, most cars were owned by people who did their own work, now it is a much bigger deal, even on Thursday. Unexpectedly – although, I guess it shouldn’t have been – the everyday street cars of some of the owners were absurdly spectacular. Absurd as a Ferrari, but not the kind of everyday Ferrari that anybody with a two or three million dollars yearly income could buy, no – this one had a special body by Zagato – or a McLaren P1 which is not to be confused with the standard, pedestrian, McLaren you or I might own, or two – count them, two! – 1955 Bentley S1 Continental, Mulliner Fastback Saloons.

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As we wandered around, I mentioned to Malcolm that I was having a hard time coming up with a theme on which to blog about this. Malcolm said I don’t know, but don’t make it about the money. He is right, in this case, it really isn’t about the money. Michele and I are going to Squaw Valley for the weekend, but after that, a bit – maybe a bigger bit than some people might want –  on several of the special race cars at the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion.