Al's Blog from the Bog

The F1 Grand Prix season started yesterday in Australia, and what a great start! Traction control has been banned this year so we are back to drivers being fully in control rather than software engineers, and what a difference it made. The joy of seeing the cars wriggle and slide instead of running on rails!

Lewis Hamilton took poll position on the grid in his McLaren and then lead from start to finish, never really being challenged. Not terribly exciting, but good for him. The real fun was behind him, with lots of drivers and teams in contention, plenty of overtaking and some really daft lunges to get the adrenalin pumping. Driver errors were punished and skill was rewarded.
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F1 F1

This will only be relevant to those of you in England so my apologies in advance to the rest of you!

I can’t describe how fed up I am with all the media reports describing England’s “heartbreaking” (or similar) sporting weekend. My favourite sports are rugby union and formula 1 so I have as much of an interest as anyone, but I’m not disappointed. I don’t subscribe to the “first loser” school of thought, although I’d be the first to admit that I like to win, but let’s just have a reality check here. England’s rugby union team from 2004 until about 4 weeks ago was really very poor. Reigning world champions they may have been, but they seemed to have lost the desire to play. Slow, ponderous, dim-witted and unimaginative in the forwards and, frankly, the backs may as well not have been there at all.
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F1, rugby