Today we’re having a car racing colonoscopy into F1 where, as usual, there’s more action off the track than there will be at next week’s 2023 Hungarian Grand Prix (70 laps of the 4.381km Hungaroring in Budapest) where the Honey Badger (aka Danny Ricciardo) has his first outing since coming back from a spell post-McLaren, and where Clogland’s Nyck de Vries won’t be because he’s spelling (for the rest of his life).
Of course, you all get the irony here. Last year McLaren and Ricciardo agreed to divorce. Danny wasn’t performing. Teammate Lando Norris was. Danny scored 37 championship points. Lando 122. McLaren thought Danny was holding the team back.
On Sunday week, Danny will be driving for the Red Bull number two team (Alpha Tauri), which is running 10th (aka last) in the World Constructors’ Championship standings. McLaren on the other hand is running fifth with a bullet.
Why? Put simply, McLaren has made its cars look very much like Red Bulls. Yes, they have changed side pods, noses and similar stuff but the biggest factor is underneath.
Now, maybe they saw Sergio Perez’s car’s nether regions when it was hoisted high on a crane in Monte Carlo, but who cares. The McLaren company, owned by the Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Co (aka Bahrain royal family) has played around with their cars’ bottoms and that gives you more downforce and makes the drivers, soap dodger Norris and our own Oscar Piastri, more confident going around the twisty bits of the track.
From 17th and 20th (aka last) in the first race of the season to second and fourth last week ain’t a bad improvement.
No sex for you
As you know no one had sex until 1965. No one. Not ever. Then we had the sexual revolution, helped by the contraceptive tablet (we call one of the Weekend Australian Racing Team the pill because he/she/other has no conception)
AI revolution
Talking of the old bloke, he rang me this week to tell me that he’s on social media. I thought “that’s a bit rich since he only got a mobile phone in November last year (he still has his landline and Panasonic answering machine with a dual compact cassette tape drive to record and replay messages at the Global HQ of Michael McMichael Motors) and he only hooked up his fax machine to the internet last month”. “Yes, I’m running a sophisticated search engine-dominated campaign using the (sic) Google, the Facebook and the new sticker pinning option in videos on TikTok,” he yelled at me, not being used to where you talk into a mobile phone.
My first thought was that after being the human face of the Kensi, Coopers and Jim Barry Wines for all these years, the three had ganged up and given him a lifetime of free drinking. But no, he’s there on Facebook with a visage that would scare brain-eating amoeba and male baboons on their way to vasectomies.
And hasn’t his creative streak come out: “Not one to toot my own horn but we are the recognised specialist for a reason.” God give me strength.
