Easy Music for Difficult Ears

Apologies for the lateness of the post, but I’ve been rather busy this week with work (etc…) so I’m just going to stick up my Formula 1 bit now quickly. This is my third main love in life (behind music and Doctor Who).
I quite enjoyed the first two races of the season with some wonderful drives and performances, mainly from Honda and BMW – nobody quite thought they’d be that fast. For the two teams to gain over a second in late developments is astonishing by Formula 1 standards and it is fantastic to see Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello further up the running order, especially Button who has really put his career on the line with the Honda group.

Heikki Kovalainen looks like he could seriously challenge Lewis Hamilton later on in the year, but as with Renault last season he seems to be taking a few races to really get settled in the car and this may give Hamilton the edge for the season. However, Kovalainen was excellent in Malaysia and thoroughly deserved his third place at the end of the race.
Hamilton, however, had problems in the Malaysian race following an excellent win in Australia. After being correctly penalised in qualifying (along with Kovalainen for impeding Heidfeld on his final run), he got stuck behind the Red Bull of Mark Webber and when the McLaren finally pitted, his front right wheel got jammed thanks to those new aerodynamic frisbee’s and as a result lost approximately twenty seconds.
Webber to his credit drove brilliantly with his own reliability problems (his fuel-pump was faulty) to keep the faster car behind him.

I was especially pleased with Kimi Raikkonen’s performance in Malaysia after a couple of slip-ups in Australia, although people talking about the championship now is pure silly – we all knew the basis of this years championship would be between Raikkonen and Hamilton, I do not need ITV to tell me this every twenty seconds!! Two races and two non-finishes from Felipe Massa though tells a different story, he really needs to up his game and stop making the kind of mistakes he made at Sepang.

Pass of the year so far must go to Nick Heidfeld with his move on both Davis Coulthard and Fernando Alonso (turn 15, lap 4 of the Malaysian Grand Prix) – Heidfeld took advantage of Alonso attempting a pass the Red Bull and managed to get around both of them.

There are a number of concerns regarding the 2008 Red Bull with regards to its structure in light of it’s failure’s over the Malaysian Grand Prix weekend, and also let us not forget Mark Webber’s brake failure in qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix. Apparently the car only passed its first crash test four days before arriving at Melbourne, so it’s conceivable that there still problems with the machine.

I used to be an occasional visitor to the ITV-F1 forum on the broadcaster’s website, but I just cannot do it anymore. So many Lewis Hamilton fans attacking anything remotely negative about the driver and constant conspiracy theories surrounding Ferrari and McLaren are just too much – so goodbye ITV literally…
As news filtered through last week that the station has lost the rights to show the sport on terrestrial television and that the BBC have regained them. No figures have been released yet as to how much the sale was, but all I care about is the fact that there will be no more ad breaks. I do hope they lay off the Lewis Hamilton love-fest (I’m looking at you James Allen) which has gotten very, very irritating in the last year – don’t get me wrong, the young Englishman is an excellent driver, but other shit is going down.

So in seven days the championship moves to Bahrain to the circuit of swirling sands where the Ferrari’s are destined to be strong and both the BMW’s and Williams are expecting stronger performances.
In the meantime, I’ve discovered a motor-racing archive site that will keep me busy for a long time yet. Imagine my thrill at being able to watch the 1963 Australian Grand Prix. Fantastic stuff!!

Current listening:
Suicide “Suicide”

Grand job,
Leigh

Story folks,
A mate of mind pointed me in this chaps direction a few months back and I must say he is seriously good stuff and probably one of the funniest guys I’ve ever come across. The chap, is Steve Hughes, is a stand-up comedian type from Australia and is currently based in Manchester, however, he was best known as a drummer in a good few Aussie death metal bands over the years (although to be honest death metal is not my forte, so I don’t actually know how good or well known they were).

Anyhoo, he’s playing Camden tomorrow night for the Comedy Store, but unfortunately I’m up to my eyes with work right now so I’ll be missing it. However, I’ll most likely catch him when he’s back in London in May, so all’s not lost.
His MySpace is here and with a couple of clicks, you can find some of his stuff on YouTube as well, but for more info have a look see below…