A race in Belgium and a changed world for McLaren
Waking up and staring into the barrel of a Belgian policeman's pistol is not my idea of a pleasant state of affairs - unless of course you suffer from constipation. I once experienced such misfortune at one of Brussels' main line railway stations and do not care to repeat the experience. Matters were slightly complicated, you see. I was in the company of three chaps as dishevelled as myself, the air hung heavy with the smell of a just-consumed-joint, bits of orange and banana peel littered the floor beside us and there was a large offensive looking knife lying by my side.
I had made the acquaintance of fellow travellers - some English lads - in a smoky café in Amsterdam and we had agreed to carry on with the revelry by taking a train further south to Brussels. Arriving in Brussels in the evening, the four of us thought it wise to seek a reasonably priced place where we could shovel some warm food inside ourselves before braving the streets in charge of cheap accommodation. We hauled our bags into lockers at the station and stepped out into the Brussels night. It was not long before we found a little Greek restaurant offering a dish of moussaka and two Stella Artois for less than five Belgian francs. Having sunk the first two Stellas, the temptation to sink a couple more and then a further couple more became irresistible. By the time we knew where we were it was midnight and we had nowhere to go to sleep. Still, four resourceful young, streetwise chappies can never be at a loss for too long and it was pretty much the work of an instant to reach consensus that the railway station floor seemed most inviting for the night ahead.
The policeman fired off a volley of angry questions in French at me at a speed of knots.
"Er, bonjour officer," I said, "lovely summer's evening, wouldn't you say?"
More angry French words.
"Your attitude surprises me," I said, "you wouldn't care for an orange would you? I have some to spare, you see."
More French - the anger now notching up towards furious.
"Now look here," said one of my English friends, "what exactly is it that you want, sir?"
"Passports!" yelled the red-faced policeman.
I handed him a locker ticket. "Our passports are safely locked away in a locker on this station. If you will stand me five francs - the cost of the locker, you see - I will happily retrieve them for you," I said.
The policeman turned to his colleague and said something which clearly indicated that he thought we were just a bunch of chumps.
He turned to me again. "When do you leave Brussels?" he said in perfect, if a little accented Queen's English.
"First train out of here, mate," I said.
"Make sure you clean up this mess and take the knife away with you. Knives are illegal in Belgium," he said. The pair then turned on their heels and left us a little shaken by the experience but whole nonetheless.
That experience and reading about the misadventures in the Congo of a truly ghastly monarch called Leopold and his equally vile underlings put me off Belgium completely. I didn't see any reason to go there or indeed have anything to do with the place. But there was a problem: Spa-Francorchamps. For a Formula One fanatic, the Belgian Grand Prix in Spa cannot, nay, will not be ignored. It is quite simply the most magnificent, most challenging circuit on the calendar. Tucked away in the Ardennes mountains to the east of Belgium, Spa has a microclimate of its own. It can be raining on one end of the race track and dry on the other. Nobody knows what the ideal set-up is for Spa because there is none. It is a circuit which shows greatness like none other because doing well there depends upon raw talent and intelligence. Tactical racing is useless at Spa. This is why Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher did so well there. Schumacher won six times at Spa and only once did he do it from pole position (in 1995 he famously came from 16th on the grid to win the race in the rain). I am all of a twitter as I write this. Spa does that to me. You will hear the words “Eau Rouge” mentioned a lot this weekend. I will say no more.
If you are reading this you are probably asking yourself what the devil is going on. Has Gitau been on Mars? You are probably feeling like a bulldog twirling around and salivating while a cruel master waves a juicy pork chop over him. No, I am not refusing to write about the elephant in the room. I just thought I might focus on the things that matter to begin with. But we are in strange territory, friends.
In the world of McLaren, it must be said, things are pretty thick. To be slapped with a $100 million dollar fine (the largest ever in F1 history) and denied all constructors' championship points is about as harsh as anyone could have expected of the sorry Ferrari v McLaren affair. The bitterness on either side is not surprising. The two teams have been at daggers drawn for a very long time. In the 1976 Spanish Grand Prix, James Hunt beat Nikki Lauda in a McLaren which had been rebuilt after a mid race crash (things were done rather differently then). Ferrari then, as now, went to court and got Hunt disqualified. This one, though, takes the biscuit. The financial penalty could prove disastrous for McLaren. Worse, the reputational damage is unquantifiable. I cannot see how Ron Dennis can keep his job.
I must admit to being very troubled. If McLaren are indeed guilty of using Ferrari's intellectual property - and there is no denying that Mike Coughlan's stupid wife did attempt to photocopy 780 pages worth of the Ferrari manual in Woking - deeper questions arise. My view may seem to be an overly legalistic analysis but it holds weight, I think. How did McLaren earn constructors' championship points? By the combined total of the points achieved in races by Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton. But how did the two drivers earn those points? Well, driving McLaren cars, no less. I cannot, therefore, see how they can be permitted to retain their points and the team they drive for caused to lose the points it has earned. The two are inseparable. Further if the cars are loaded with unlawfully obtained proprietary information, they should not, in all fairness be permitted to be used. Putting it another way, it is the equivalent of saying that if a basketball player slam dunks balls using jet technology secreted within his shoes, his team should be denied the match win but the player should be allowed to continue playing in other matches using the same shoes. In other words, the whole thing is completely farcical. Whatever my feelings about Lewis Hamilton, in my view this is a disgrace.
My Belgian Grand Prix has been ruined by all of this. I am uncertain how to take it all in. I will do my best to enjoy it - perhaps in the company of a Leffe or one other of the million or so beers they brew in Belgium. I hope you will at least try to,
Enjoy Spa!
Gitau
14 September 2007
I had made the acquaintance of fellow travellers - some English lads - in a smoky café in Amsterdam and we had agreed to carry on with the revelry by taking a train further south to Brussels. Arriving in Brussels in the evening, the four of us thought it wise to seek a reasonably priced place where we could shovel some warm food inside ourselves before braving the streets in charge of cheap accommodation. We hauled our bags into lockers at the station and stepped out into the Brussels night. It was not long before we found a little Greek restaurant offering a dish of moussaka and two Stella Artois for less than five Belgian francs. Having sunk the first two Stellas, the temptation to sink a couple more and then a further couple more became irresistible. By the time we knew where we were it was midnight and we had nowhere to go to sleep. Still, four resourceful young, streetwise chappies can never be at a loss for too long and it was pretty much the work of an instant to reach consensus that the railway station floor seemed most inviting for the night ahead.
The policeman fired off a volley of angry questions in French at me at a speed of knots.
"Er, bonjour officer," I said, "lovely summer's evening, wouldn't you say?"
More angry French words.
"Your attitude surprises me," I said, "you wouldn't care for an orange would you? I have some to spare, you see."
More French - the anger now notching up towards furious.
"Now look here," said one of my English friends, "what exactly is it that you want, sir?"
"Passports!" yelled the red-faced policeman.
I handed him a locker ticket. "Our passports are safely locked away in a locker on this station. If you will stand me five francs - the cost of the locker, you see - I will happily retrieve them for you," I said.
The policeman turned to his colleague and said something which clearly indicated that he thought we were just a bunch of chumps.
He turned to me again. "When do you leave Brussels?" he said in perfect, if a little accented Queen's English.
"First train out of here, mate," I said.
"Make sure you clean up this mess and take the knife away with you. Knives are illegal in Belgium," he said. The pair then turned on their heels and left us a little shaken by the experience but whole nonetheless.
That experience and reading about the misadventures in the Congo of a truly ghastly monarch called Leopold and his equally vile underlings put me off Belgium completely. I didn't see any reason to go there or indeed have anything to do with the place. But there was a problem: Spa-Francorchamps. For a Formula One fanatic, the Belgian Grand Prix in Spa cannot, nay, will not be ignored. It is quite simply the most magnificent, most challenging circuit on the calendar. Tucked away in the Ardennes mountains to the east of Belgium, Spa has a microclimate of its own. It can be raining on one end of the race track and dry on the other. Nobody knows what the ideal set-up is for Spa because there is none. It is a circuit which shows greatness like none other because doing well there depends upon raw talent and intelligence. Tactical racing is useless at Spa. This is why Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher did so well there. Schumacher won six times at Spa and only once did he do it from pole position (in 1995 he famously came from 16th on the grid to win the race in the rain). I am all of a twitter as I write this. Spa does that to me. You will hear the words “Eau Rouge” mentioned a lot this weekend. I will say no more.
If you are reading this you are probably asking yourself what the devil is going on. Has Gitau been on Mars? You are probably feeling like a bulldog twirling around and salivating while a cruel master waves a juicy pork chop over him. No, I am not refusing to write about the elephant in the room. I just thought I might focus on the things that matter to begin with. But we are in strange territory, friends.
In the world of McLaren, it must be said, things are pretty thick. To be slapped with a $100 million dollar fine (the largest ever in F1 history) and denied all constructors' championship points is about as harsh as anyone could have expected of the sorry Ferrari v McLaren affair. The bitterness on either side is not surprising. The two teams have been at daggers drawn for a very long time. In the 1976 Spanish Grand Prix, James Hunt beat Nikki Lauda in a McLaren which had been rebuilt after a mid race crash (things were done rather differently then). Ferrari then, as now, went to court and got Hunt disqualified. This one, though, takes the biscuit. The financial penalty could prove disastrous for McLaren. Worse, the reputational damage is unquantifiable. I cannot see how Ron Dennis can keep his job.
I must admit to being very troubled. If McLaren are indeed guilty of using Ferrari's intellectual property - and there is no denying that Mike Coughlan's stupid wife did attempt to photocopy 780 pages worth of the Ferrari manual in Woking - deeper questions arise. My view may seem to be an overly legalistic analysis but it holds weight, I think. How did McLaren earn constructors' championship points? By the combined total of the points achieved in races by Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton. But how did the two drivers earn those points? Well, driving McLaren cars, no less. I cannot, therefore, see how they can be permitted to retain their points and the team they drive for caused to lose the points it has earned. The two are inseparable. Further if the cars are loaded with unlawfully obtained proprietary information, they should not, in all fairness be permitted to be used. Putting it another way, it is the equivalent of saying that if a basketball player slam dunks balls using jet technology secreted within his shoes, his team should be denied the match win but the player should be allowed to continue playing in other matches using the same shoes. In other words, the whole thing is completely farcical. Whatever my feelings about Lewis Hamilton, in my view this is a disgrace.
My Belgian Grand Prix has been ruined by all of this. I am uncertain how to take it all in. I will do my best to enjoy it - perhaps in the company of a Leffe or one other of the million or so beers they brew in Belgium. I hope you will at least try to,
Enjoy Spa!
Gitau
14 September 2007
posted by Gitau at 1:24 pm
<< Home