Motor Racing

This morning I joined millions of other Australians in accelerating, braking, swearing and spilling coffee on myself all the way down the freeway.

As nice as it would have been, there was no gigantic novelty cheque, no bikini-clad girls or Moet as I rounded the straight and sped past the chequered boom gate into the parking lot.

Hell, there wasn’t even a parking spot. This was an everyday chore, undertaken with great haste but no significant amount of skill.  Mark Webber’s overnight victory in the Monaco Grand Prix should be treated with the same level of fanfare, because motor racing is not a sport. Never has been, never will be.

Continue reading "A great win by Webber, but it sure as hell wasn’t sport" »

Back in 1989, I was a brash seven-year-old who drove my parents insane by always going a million miles per hour. I would never do anything slowly. Should my parents look away for a second, I would be gone in a flash.

It was with this in mind that, on my 8th birthday, I got a present they thought symbolised my approach to life.  The book: a pictorial review of the 1988 Formula 1 season. What was Formula 1? I had no idea. All I knew is that the book was full of great pictures of the fastest cars on the planet and that got little eight-year-old me pretty excited.

That season was a watershed year in car racing.  On one hand it was the most lop-sided competition in sports history (two cars won everything and no one else had a chance). Yet, it was also one of the closest sporting events in history as the two drivers in the cockpits of these cars were the fastest drivers on the planet. The drivers: Alain Prost from France, and Ayrton Senna from Brazil.

Continue reading "That mad Brazilian bastard sure could drive" »

Bathurst has become a bland, vanilla, tedious waste of petrol. Let me explain by way of an anecdote.

In the mid 2000s, I wrote an in-depth Alpha magazine feature on The Super Cheap-Ass 1000, or whatever the Bathurst Race was called back then.

I was embedded, if you will, with one of the major teams. After practise one day, I rode back to town with the driver of the “B Car” (most big Bathurst teams have two cars. Officially, they’re both the same, but everyone knows the good drivers get the “A” car and the lesser drivers the “B” car).

Continue reading "Donutless: The pointless dehoonification of V8 culture" »

APRIL is the cruelest month, old T.S Eliot used to say, but where does that leave October?

No league, no AFL, nothing really to live for. Hell, not even club rugby on the ABC on a Saturday. There’s something called the A-League, but as far as I can make out it’s largely populated by volatile blokes with blonde highlights, either too old or mentally unstable to cut it in Europe.

As the weather warms up and the sport winds down, you begin to rediscover weekends. This is by no means a good thing. Your better half declares Friday and Saturday nights the time for “catching up with people,” time you would happily have spent watching NRL games back-to-back in the winter months.

Continue reading "October, it’s Hell on earth for sports lovers" »