Lightning Strikes

I’m really looking forward to my trip to the British Motorshow next week. It’s my bi-annual sojourn to the Excel centre in London with a friend and my eight-year-old son, where we can drool over exotic pieces of automotive pornography, raise incredulous eyebrows at the barking shape of Japanese Manga-style concept cars, tut wisely at the unimaginative design of Mazda’s next range of cars and secretly keep one eye on all the girls that adorn each manufacturer’s stand.

Of course, there’s always the entertainment too: the off-road centre, the general atmosphere, the worry that my boy will probably ask – really loudly – if the bus we use to get to the centre is the one that was blown up a few years back as he did the last time we visited, and the launch of new, weird and wacky cars to look forward to.

And one of the cars I’m curious to look at is the Lightning GT. Amidst a load of news stories announcing that Global Warming gives you kidney stones, the Lightning Car Company unveiled an electric supercar apparently capable of surpassing the performance of many leading players in the field. It will have a range of approximately two hundred miles after only ten minutes of recharging and uses Star Trek style nano-technology to make it all work.

The company is already taking orders for deliveries next year and promises that its Hi-Pa Drive and NanoSafe batteries do not compromise either the integrity or soul of a supercar, allowing both weight-distribution and performance to be equal to that of many petrol-powered rivals. They estimate that the car will produce the equivalent of more than 700bhp from its electric drive and that it will beat a Jaguar 4.2 XKR Convertible in the 0-60mph dash, whilst simultaneously being even cleaner and cheaper to run than Toyota’s much-heralded Prius.

Indeed, the car’s green credentials lend it to being exempt from London’s Congestion Charge scheme and any road tax whatsoever, whilst the simple construction of the Hi-Pa Drive and NanoSafe batteries mean that ongoing maintenance is minimal. The estimated cost per mile is just 2.2pence, which the Lightning Car Company estimated will save an owner over £17’000 per year compared to the direct competition.

Specification isn’t compromised, either. According to the company’s website, the Lightning GT will come equipped with every gizmo you could possibly want on a luxury car and even includes Air Conditioning, something that hybrid masters Toyota have struggled to make work successfully without starting a petrol engine. I just hope that it has a dashboard to rival Knight Rider.

But the big problem for me with this car is the noise that it will make. Supercars are supposed to be brash and loud. They are the epitome of decadence and, when you put your foot down, the noise they make is supposed to tell everybody around that you were brave enough to sleep with Satan’s whore.

If you have a Lamborghini in white or black you are deemed boring; it needs to be Lime Green and it shouts that you own Essex and three footballers. A Bugatti makes more noise than the moon crashing in to the sun and a Ferrari tells everybody that you’ve just finished shagging Abi Titmuss and her best mate on your yacht in the Mediterranean.

The silent wheeze of the Lightning GT as it whistles by you quieter than the wind will tell everybody that you are still a fan of Automan.

I’m not a lover of Global Warming theorists and don’t believe that all our trees are about to stop spewing oxygen into the atmosphere and I am a huge fan of cars, but equally I do think that if we can build nice friendly cars that don’t cause my kids to have asthma and won’t require the budget of Portugal to run them each week, then electric cars might just be the way forward.

So why are companies like LCC and Tesla building supercars? Only Leonardo DiCaprio will want one and they are utterly impractical to Kerry Katona and her brood when she’s doing the weekly trip to Iceland.

Supercars should be left to the rich, famous and Jeremy Clarkson. If somebody has got the technology that can make a car drive from Cambridge to Manchester for less than a fiver then put it in a nice family four-door saloon and price it reasonably.

As long as it doesn’t need a three-phase electricity supply to charge it, everyone will buy it. Even me.

Phil and Kirsty Couldn't Have Done It Better...

Have you ever wondered how they choose the people that are going to appear on Channel 4’s house-buying programme Location Location Location?

I appreciate that they are going to choose those who will make a much more entertaining programme than somebody who’s happy with a three-bed semi on a council estate, but you do have to marvel sometimes at the lunacy and snobbery of some of those that appear on the show. From the wondrously entertaining who are hoping Phil and Kirsty will be able to get them a three bedroom apartment in central London on a budget of just £150’000 to the pernickety couple with a budget of £1’000’000 who still wouldn’t be satisfied if Posh & Becks gave them one of their houses and threw in an Aston Martin to clinch the deal, it can make for some whoppingly entertaining TV viewing on a subject that is unadulteratingly boring.

And then you get the couples who have a budget of several million pounds, have been searching for four years and have viewed eight thousand houses, yet haven’t managed to find one they like. Or the couples whose views on what their house should be like are so poles apart that one of them might just as well move to Australia; it’s a wonder their marriages have survived as long as some of them have.

On top of that, you’ve got the guys who like to boast to Phil that they’re not shy of doing a bit of work and then gulp in panic when he shows them a house with magnolia walls, and heaven forbid that Kirsty might suggest they could knock a wall down between the kitchen and the living room. Or you have the women who fall in love with the chocolate box thatched cottage with a little brook running through the garden, but their husbands are just not getting an emotional attachment to the house. They’re just not feeling it.

“I’ve tried everything,” the desperate women will wail. “I’ve tried pleading and crying and I’ve even told him he can have the widescreen television and a PlayStation 3.” I’m waiting for the day Kirsty turns round and asks if they’ve tried swallowing.

It’s amazing that Phil Spencer and Kirsty Allsop haven’t actually punched any of their clients in the face, very hard.

Honestly, my wife and I would make boring television for them. We’d give them our budget, tell them we’d like four bedrooms and space for two cars on the driveway and preferably it should be near a nice pub and the children’s school, and then we’d walk in to the first house they showed us and say “bugger me, offer them the asking price!”

But it wouldn’t work like that for me because I have been the unluckiest man on the planet when it comes to the property market. I bought my first flat for a measly £19’000 when I was 21 years old and sold it in 1997 for not very much more so that I could move to Cambridgeshire to start a new career in the Internet. Since then, I have been chasing the property market, never quite able to catch up with the rising demands of escalating house prices.

The last time I tried to buy a house was in 2005, when I found a three-bed semi-detached property on the outskirts of a nice little Cambridgeshire village. It stretched our budget but would have meant that we owned our own house – and then I discovered it had got a septic tank, which the vendor hadn’t cleaned out in over eight years because it was leaking.

Querying why the houses he owned on either side of it had been connected to mains sewerage but this one I was buying hadn’t seemed to ruffle his feathers further and, when I asked him to get the septic tank repaired before I finalised the purchase or, at least, discount the house enough for me to do it, he backed out of the sale.

And so, in a freak moment of frustration seeking solace in a pint in my local village pub, the then-landlord told me he was selling up. Kirsty and Phil couldn’t have had a better opportunity fall in their laps in the closing moments to make their show any more tense and exciting.

Within two weeks we’d signed and sealed the paperwork and today is three years to the day since we took over the pub.

It feels like a lifetime but, despite economic gloom, global warming, rising utility prices, the smoking ban and Alistair Darling, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

I'm On The Audience Waiting List For Top Gear

Some say it is the greatest show on television, others defile it as a bunion on the sole of the planet; all we know is that it’s called Top Gear.

And it’s brilliant.

Sunday nights on BBC2 are never the same when Clarkson and his merry band of Hammond, May and exotic cars so expensive you have to be an oil sheik to be able to afford them aren’t around. I’ve been a fan of the show since it first launched and have always cringed when I hear of people aiming to slate it for the tongue-in-cheek, brash approach to motoring journalism.

Why, the show’s detractors cry, can’t they show an ordinary car? Why don’t they review something I might actually want to buy? Where are the Ford Mondeos and Vauxhall Vectras?

I’ll tell you why they aren’t on the show: it’s because they’re boring. That might not be fair to say if you are a photocopier salesman and currently drive a Signum, but at the end of the day Clarkson did once review the Vectra, and Vauxhall got very upset with him for being a bit mean about it.

The Vectra is a brilliant car – it’s spacious and comfortable and, these days, has a list of standard equipment that makes the accountants weep at the thought of lost optional extras and, despite the fact that it has a stupid indicator stalk, it’s quite good at doing what it’s built to do. But, to quote Jeremy Clarkson, it doesn’t stick its hands down my trousers and give me a good hard squeeze. I don’t sit here browsing Google Images, masturbating over pictures of the Vauxhall range, and the Mondeo – with its Jaguar XF pretensions – is pretty much the same.

The fact of the matter is this: if I want to know what something such as a Mondeo, or a Vectra, or a Skoda Roomster is like to drive, I’m part of the mainstream gentry that can simply wander in to a dealership and ask to test-drive one of their average cars. I can get to touch and feel the fabric and play with the plastic buttons and the dealer will let me borrow the car for ten minutes or a whole weekend to find out all about it.

I can’t do that with a Pagani Zonda.

There are a million programmes on the back-end of your digital television box hosted by botox-riddled presenters that can tell you, in their monotone voices, all about the poor build quality of a Citroën C1 and it doesn’t matter how much they dress their programmes up with Formula One pit-lane style girls, a motoring journalist from the Harrow Weald Evening Gazette attempting to power slide a Hyundai Sonata is not as exciting as watching The Stig put down a lap time in a Koenigsegg CCX.

I can’t afford to even touch a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti or a Lamborghini Murciélago LP640 and I doubt, aside from visits to the British Motorshow, that I’ll ever actually see a Bugatti Veyron in real life – and that’s what some people seem to forget that Top Gear is really about.

The show, put together brilliantly by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, brings these exotic cars to you – and the presenters make it fun. Rather than focusing on how much it costs to run or whether you’ll be able to park it in the garage of your three-bed semi, they’ll get their hands on a Nissan GTR and then see if it can beat a Bullet Train across Japan.

Your children will laugh at Clarkson’s cry for help when he can’t understand a word the Nissan’s satellite navigation is saying because it’s speaking in Japanese, your wife will laugh at Richard Hammond wandering along a train to find a drinks machine – and finding instead that he’s walked on to a carriage that isn’t actually attached to the train James May is on... And you will laugh when Jeremy Clarkson holds up a face mask of Bill Oddie to a pretty Japanese fuel attendant and tell her that this man could spot her beaver from a great distance.

So the show’s loyal fans – and there are a few million of them – don’t really care about the fact that James May poured a Gin and Tonic for Clarkson as he drove a specially adapted Toyota Hilux across a frozen wasteland, four hundred miles from the nearest road, in search of the North Pole. We weren’t insulted when Jezza boasted to a roomful of eight year olds that he’d done 186mph in a Bugatti along the Limehouse Link in London. We knew he was just trying to make young children and their bored dads laugh – after all, it’s almost impossible to reach the maximum speed of a G-Wizz on most roads in the capital.

Sadly, however, there are a few people who do complain, and they are the same type of people who complained to Ofcom a couple of weeks ago that the Doctor didn’t answer his mobile telephone number when they called it after seeing it flashed up on the screen of the TARDIS in the final episode of Doctor Who.

Consequently, because Top Gear has such a loyal following, everybody wants to be part of the audience. I have a huge advantage here, because my sister-in-law works for the BBC and is apparently in the office right below the Top Gear one. Therefore I have badgered her relentlessly to get me tickets, and she’s gone very quiet on the matter.

I thought it was because I was becoming a bit of a pain in the arse and that maybe I should cool it for a bit, but today it turns out that in reality it is because there are already 336’000 names on the list for tickets to see the show, and that means a waiting list of twenty one years.

I think I’ll stick with watching it on a Sunday evening and visiting the Motorshow the week after next for my fix of automotive pornography.

Scrubs - Guy Love

I'm a bit of a fan of the TV sitcom Scrubs, and one of my favourite episodes of theirs has always been the 'Musical'. Now, admittedly, you have to have seen the whole episode to get the full gist of what you're about to see here, but this is one of the funnier scenes from the Musical episode:

Cocaine Just Doesn't Cut It

On holiday last month, my wife found an excuse to drag us all into a shopping centre to have a browse around the local superstores. This is something she is very good at.

From our pub we have easy access to both Cambridge and Bury St. Edmunds; if we want to travel an hour or so we can be in Ipswich or, worse, that shopping centre metropolis that is Milton Keynes.

I have been lucky – in my life prior to the pub I have been fortunate enough to travel around the world and one thing has always struck me: wherever I go, the shopping centres (or malls, if you’re American) look the same. From Chicago to Paris and London to Tokyo, shopping centres all share a similar theme. Once, in Hong Kong, my wife dragged me in to a Marks & Spencers, because she wanted to have a look around.

It’s the same with La Cañada, a sprawling shopping centre in Marbella. Brimming with clothes shops and record stores and gadget outlets, the only real difference between it and The Bullring are the shop names. As we get dragged from one lingerie store to another, I find the only way to keep myself entertained is to look for anything that might remotely stand out in this shopping centre from any other I’ve had the misfortune of visiting.

So as we wandered around, I was a little shocked when I saw a boutique in the centre of the complex with a name that could have been misinterpreted. From the distance I’d spotted it, if its windows had been laden with magazines, I might truly have been outraged. Then I got closer and saw that the name of the outlet was actually Kittie Pon – but, from a distance (and with my eyesight) you can see why I might have been concerned. Rather than dodgy magazines, however, it sold cheap jewellery and so I steered my wife in the other direction.

We’ve all come across euphemistically titled products in the past, or items named to create mirth. Indeed, the television in our bedroom is made by a budget manufacturer that, in times of drunken merriment, often causes me to invite guests to our bedroom to admire my wife’s new Bush. It wouldn’t be the same if we all translated the words and names we see the same way and it is funny when you look around this fine globe of ours and find that in Jamaica you can buy Cock Soup, that there is apparently a place in Arkansas called Dick Lick Springs, in Nova Scotia you can dine at the Lick-a-Chick restaurant and that in Cowley (yes, Middlesex, UK) you can get air conditioning services from a company called Stiff Nipples.

I’ve even had a drink of something called Pschitt.

These are all names designed – either by accident or intent – to muddy the water slightly, to be elaborately translated in to something they aren’t, and to cause a little humour. They’re the sort of names that make your mother go “Oh, Mark, you’re naughty!” They’ll make your grandmother slap her hand over her mouth in mock horror and your new girlfriend will blush demurely when you mention to your friends in the pub that for breakfast tomorrow you’ve got something called JussiPussi.

But to try and use these muddied waters to launch a drink that can be sold to impressionable teenagers that glamorises the name of a Class A narcotic – even if you’re not launching the one that simulates the effects of the drug it’s so clearly named after – well, that’s just plain dumb.

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This post relates to the recent news relating to an importer attempting to launch a controversial new drink onto the public market: click here to read more

Doctor Who - Suspending Your Beliefs

I was a huge fan of Doctor Who as a child, spending many a Saturday afternoon watching from behind the sofa, a cushion or, when he wasn’t away working, my father’s hand, which I’d pull across my face every time a Cyberman or Dalek appeared on the screen.

I’ve often classed myself as a closet Trekkie, but I’ve never been afraid to admit I am something of a Whovian. After all, being a fan of Doctor Who isn’t quite as frowned upon as being a fan of Star Trek seems to be.

It’s also difficult to decide who I’d choose as my favourite Doctor. Many would argue Tom Baker; I was always quite a fan of Peter Davidson. Sylvester McCoy was quite bizarre, but even he and Colin Baker had their place in the regeneration game. We’ve all got a favourite, whether it’s the one who was most prominent when we were children, or the one that just happened to play a particular episode very well indeed. Some Doctors stand out more than others because of the companions they had.

Davidson stands out to me mainly because, by some quirk of Sci-Fi nature, I ended up with all the Target books of the episodes that contained him as the Doctor, including Time-Flight, which – for some reason – I read repeatedly and is all about a Concorde flight that disappears. Great stuff.

But it has to be said that, twenty six years down the line from that episode, Doctor Who is still going great guns and David Tennant will take some beating. Certainly, it’s amusing to see my own two children cowering behind the sofa as they watch the programme, having spent half an hour beforehand desperately trying to convince me not to put it on.

And Doctor Who has always been about suspending some of your beliefs and just letting fantasy take over. Which is why I was extremely disappointed with the closing episodes of this last series, which took suspending belief to a whole new level.

All series, we’ve had to put up with Catherine Tate as the irksome Donna Noble, touted throughout the series as the most important companion the Doctor has ever had, yet – and I’m not exaggerating here – was possibly an even more annoying sidekick than Tegan Jovanka. Tate’s acting ability stretched my beliefs a little too far and I spent most of the last series waiting for her to either blurt out “am I bovvered” or for David Tennant to punch her in the face.

Then we reached the penultimate episode for 2008 – The Stolen Earth – where planet Earth was simply popped out of its spot in the Solar System, leaving everything in its geocentric orbit wondering just where the hell it had gone, and reappearing in another spot in space, surrounded by twenty six other planets, all circling a fairly big Dalek space station, the design of which seems to have borrowed rather heavily on George Lucas’s Death Star.

Allowing for the fact that we’ll just have to believe the Daleks do, indeed, have the power to simply pull large planets instantaneously from anywhere they like in the universe, I have to say it did take a stretch of imagination to believe that very little structural damage seemed to have happened anywhere around the globe, nor did the sudden presence of twenty six other rather large planets seem to have any effect on the Earth’s gravitation pull, thus allowing humans to still walk around on the ground, and the lack of natural sunlight or the sudden change in atmospheric pressure didn’t seem to have any effect on the oxygen supply, meaning all us lucky humans didn’t start rolling around on the floor with our eyes bulging out like Arnie did in Total Recall.

And lo, even the power supply managed to stay on – and they could even still watch BBC News 24.

Then, of course, we had the cliff-hanger ending, with the Doctor getting shot by a Dalek and starting his regeneration process.

This was probably the biggest coup the BBC and Russell T. Davies had managed to pull off: was the doctor actually going to regenerate, had the BBC managed to keep a really big secret without The Sun finding out, and who was going to be the next Doctor?

The final episode – Journey’s End – answered those questions for us. Sort of. We all know that the Doctor regenerates when it’s time for him to die. Except David Tenant isn’t quite ready to quit yet, so he simply shot his load into the palm of his own amputated hand, which just happens to have been kept handily under the TARDIS’s console for pretty much the past couple of seasons, and suddenly he managed to repair himself. And it was time to get on with a party, because his old mate Davros was back and all his pals from past and present series, plus spin-off money-makers, had turned up to help him defeat the greatest foe the human race has ever encountered: Daleks who want to destroy everything that’s ever existed so that they can be the most powerful rulers of absolutely nothing ever created.

And this is where we really did have to suspend belief because, just as all was looking lost with the Doctor and Rose locked in Davros’s dungeon and the TARDIS about to be destroyed in the centre of the Dalek Crucible, Donna Noble touched the hand under the console and triggered a regeneration process all of her own, which resulted in her suddenly becoming just as clever as the Doctor himself and another Doctor turning up in the TARDIS, stark bollock naked.

Mum’s, uncover your children’s eyes, it was tastefully done and the nakedness was just intimated, but it was all, well, a bit rubbish anyway. The second Doctor and the foretold-by-the-Ood cleverness of Donna suddenly figure out how to fix everything and head off to commit genocide on the Daleks. Once that was done, they set about sending all the stolen planets back to their rightful spots in the universe, until there was only the Earth left and, for some reason, they couldn’t send that one back, so they decided to tow it back to its spot with the TARDIS.

To create a great big virtual tow rope they had to do simply the most unbelievable thing in the whole wide world. Trust me, you really do need to suspend belief, because what they had to do was get all their friends and a great big transmitter and use all the mobile phones they could muster to call the Doctor’s mobile phone, which would then create some sort of digital tow rope that meant the TARDIS could drag Earth all the way back to its rightful spot between Mars and Venus.

Here’s where you have to suspend your belief completely. First: it seems just a tad convenient that when the Daleks pinched Earth from its friendly chat with the Moon they also managed to bring all the communication satellites with it, so that all telecommunications could still happen. Then, while the good ol’ Doc and his friends all smiled insanely for the camera as they dragged the planet home, nobody on Earth seemed to suffer anything so much as a broken tea cup. Honestly, my Dad can do more damage to his crockery towing a caravan to Skegness. And finally, once everybody was home, they all just shook hands and went off to do their own thing as if nothing any more dramatic had happened than hearing that Jeremy Clarkson has been boasting about doing 186mph in a Bugatti Veyron. Again.

The only real thing in this whole episode that didn’t defy belief was the fact that the Doctor figured out Donna Noble really isn’t supposed to be that intelligent after all, so he wiped her mind by tapping her on the temples then sent her home to her granddad, who had to promise never to ever ever ever mention to her about the Doctor because one word about him could jog a memory and kill her instantly. Which was amazing, because then the Doctor walked up to Donna and said goodbye and she didn’t keel over dead at the sight of him.

All of this suspending belief to get to the end of what is usually a very good series has been quite tiresome and I’m glad that a two year break in the making of the show is taking place. It’s to allow Tennant to take some time out to do some Shakespeare, although there will be a handful of Dr. Who specials in the meantime, but the break will also allow the rest of us to get a grip on reality, because I really think we need it.

After all, it took all of my willpower to actually not suspend belief when I heard that, after the Doctor’s mobile phone number was shown on screen during the airing of what is, after all, a science fiction programme, 2’500 people in this country who had just watched the most unbelievable thing ever to happen with a mobile telephone picked up their own phones and rang the number.

And then they rang Ofcom and complained that the Doctor didn’t actually answer their call, nor did he arrive at their house in his TARDIS to ask them to be his next companion.

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· Read about the complaints here: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/07/dr-fans-complain-ofcom

Solar-Powered Toyota Prius

When it comes to global warming, climate change and environmentally friendly cars, you could always do your bit by buying the Toyota Prius.

Despite the fact that I like to saunter around the country in my four litre Jeep and tend to subscribe – somewhat stubbornly and perhaps a little ignorantly – to the theory that the planet has been warming up for the best part of two and a half million years and therefore there’s not an awful lot we can do to stop it, I have to admit that I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for Toyota’s green car.

This isn’t because it can single-handedly reverse rising sea levels and stop the moon from crashing in to us - because it can't - but because it’s probably the greatest loop hole in automotive history. You can buy a Prius from just £17’932 and then reap back the savings in tax, better fuel economy and – if you live, work or socialise in London – save a small fortune on the Congestion Charge. You can sit at dinner parties and extol the green credentials of your little car and Jennifer Aniston will strip naked and offer to sleep with you because you’re saving the lives of countless penguins. Probably.

The Prius has become synonymous around the globe for its environmental credentials, but just because Leonardo DiCaprio drives one doesn’t mean it actually works. I love the Prius because it flies in the face of Climate Change convention. It is sold to the masses on its ability to drive around on batteries for a week (as long as you don’t accelerate hard or drive above 27mph) and it’s full of clever gizmos like a Kinetic Energy Recovery System, which performs weird acts of voodoo such as using the heat energy produced under braking to recharge the batteries that allow you to travel around silently, scaring old grannies who think it’s safe to cross the road.

It’s quite a spacious little car, too and, if you opt for the top of the range T-Spirit model you’ll get leather seats and satellite navigation and funky climate control and all sorts of other mod-cons that were once the preserve of the £80’000 Mercedes S-Class.

The 1.5 litre petrol engine, which comes to life when you exceed 27mph or accelerate hard, will get you to sixty in a modest 10.9 seconds but will break a sweat if you try to push it past its top speed of 105mph. The tiny 104 g/km of CO2 that its combined petrol-electric engine produces place it in the lowest tax band, meaning just £15 a year road tax and make it completely free to drive in to London, saving a potential £2’080 a year in Congestion Charge fees. It reportedly returns 66mpg too – although I did recently get 64mpg out of a 1.6 diesel Citroen Picasso, so there are economical competitors out there.

But what really makes me laugh with this car isn’t the fact that the batteries only last 100’000 miles before they need chucking in the sea, or that the land around the Arizona factory that builds them is desecrated by acid, both facts of which aren’t really that great for people trying to get pretty ladies to sleep with them based on the fact that they’ve saved a polar bear. It’s the fact that when you drive in to London, without paying Congestion Charge, and sit in gridlocked traffic on a really hot day, you’re going to want the air conditioning on.

And to make the air conditioning work, the little Prius has to do the one thing it tries its hardest not to do. It starts the engine.

So I did smile this morning when I read the news that, for the third incarnation of their environmentally friendly motor, Toyota have announced a solar-powered solution* for the top-of-the-range models that will generate the power to run the vehicle’s air conditioning system.

Using Kyocera solar panels, presumably built in to the roof, Toyota estimate they can generate between two and five kilowatts of electricity, which will then allow their drivers to run the air conditioning whilst sitting in traffic in Stealth Mode.

It doesn’t sound like a lot to me, so I’m guessing that there will probably still have to be some form of mechanical back-up that will run the a/c generator for times when it’s a little bit dark.

Like the engine. At night time.

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* the original news article, as reported by the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7492647.stm

A Sad Waste Of Northamptonshire's Money

I was saddened – but not overly shocked – to hear the news today that Silverstone has lost the right to host the British Grand Prix from 2010 onwards. So much so, in fact, that I can’t actually be arsed to try and think up some comical spin to put here.

Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley issued a joint statement announcing that Donington Park will get the event from 2010. The timing of their announcement couldn’t have been worse, given that thousands of people are due to descend on Silverstone this weekend to cheer on the British drivers competing in the event.

David Coulthard will be lining up on the British grid for the last time in a F1 car; Jenson Button will be hoping that Ross Brawn and his motley crew at the locally-based Honda team will be able to give him something to go for glory in front of the home crowd with; Lewis Hamilton will be lining up to start his second British Grand Prix with a good chance of winning in front of British fans.

And all of them have got to do it with the knowledge that the Silverstone circuit – a track that hosted the first ever Formula One grand prix, a track that is synonymous with motorsport, and a track that plays home to many of the teams and personnel – is about to start its penultimate Formula One race.

It strikes me that the decision has been made simply because Bernie Ecclestone doesn’t like the British Racing Drivers’ Club, who own Silverstone, and has been embroiled in bitter wrangling with them for several years. The BRDC, along with the local council, have literally spent millions turning Silverstone in to a world class race circuit, yet Ecclestone seems to have thrown it all back in their faces and chosen a circuit nowhere near capable of hosting a Formula One event.

As a kid, I used to live in the village of Water Stratford, just a few miles from Silverstone. In those days, reams of cars would crawl through the village on race day morning from six o’clock in an effort to wend their way towards the old wartime airbase. My friends and I would make a fortune selling Sunday newspapers and home-made fizzy-pop to Lamborghini and Mini Metro drivers alike, but it was never the best way to get the volume of spectators to the circuit.

To answer these criticisms, Northamptonshire spent millions redeveloping the road network and now a massive purpose-built carriageway can be used to get all the traffic to the circuit.
Last year I visited Silverstone with my wife for the race weekend and had a thoroughly wonderful time. The crowds roared with delight as Hamilton put his McLaren on Pole on the Saturday and everybody thrilled to the race cars as they roared by on the Sunday. And the only complaint I could come up with for the whole weekend was that the only lager I could buy was Fosters, and I hate that stuff.

After all the money that has been spent on Silverstone over the past few years to try and meet Ecclestone’s demands, it is such a shame that he has gone and signed a contract with Donington Park – and that he’s been spiteful enough to announce it at Silverstone during their flagship weekend.

Donington Park has a big task ahead of it. It’s many years since I visited, but as far as I’m aware it can barely stand up to the modern tracks, let alone the facilities of Silverstone. The circuit is too narrow, the run-offs sparse, and the facilities mediocre in comparison. And if you thought getting to Silverstone was bad, expect long delays on the M1 when Formula One arrives at Donington.

Bernie and Max ought to remember that while they might be the supremoes of Formula One, it’s the fans – television and attending spectators – that ultimately pave the way for them to get the sponsors to pay the big money that allows them to be very rich men.

This will not have gone down well with them.