Renault baddies

Well there you go. What did I say? Renault got off very lightly indeed with a 2 year suspended ban, and no fine. Briatore deservedly got banned indefinitely from any involvement in an FIA sanctioned motorsport event (including driver management). The radio this morning was saying he was banned "for life", but that's not the same thing as "indefinitely". Indefinitely means: until the FIA changes its mind. I think if they'd wanted to permanently exclude him, they'd have said so directly. They'd never want to back themselves into a corner like that.

I still feel that if it had been McLaren in the same situation, they would have had a very heavy fine as well as the suspended ban, if not an actual one or two year ban. There are reasons for this approach though: Renault are an engine supplier, as well as one of the few manufacturers still in F1, so banning them wasn't an option; banning the likes of McLaren, on the other hand, as an engine customer, would have caused less upheaval. File under 'Conspiracy theory' ;-)

Vandals in the neighbourhood

I can now reveal, since he's owned up, that it was one of my Wednesday night drinking buddies that knocked over the bit of the neighbours' wall! I've said nothing so far, but it was funny, so I'm glad to be able to tell the story.

This bit of wall has been unstable for a while, but last Wednesday, as we were parting company outside our house, a Certain Someone started poking it with his toe, and down it came. It was originally the square bit by the gap in the wall for the gate, and this and the gatepost had broken away a little, as the old mortar crumbled. It was one of those fairly simple jobs that had been put off for a while, because it wasn't worth getting someone in for. So .... it stayed like that ;-)

John's (oops, give-away) toe poking knocked out the last bit of mortar, and the wall came tumbling down. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a huge collapse, but it was quite a few kilos of stone. My god, was he embarrassed! Oh, but it was SO funny at the time, and his face was a real picture: guiltily looking around like a school-kid caught in the act of causing trouble. Honestly, as the man gets older (he's happily retired) the younger he behaves!!

Reality

I've been saying recently that I think I am about ready to attempt walking up a hill, on the basis of being fitter due to my energetic walk to and from work. Hmm. Let's get real here. As Denise pointed out to me the other night, any walk up a hill is realistically going to involve an 8 mile walk over terrain that will be uneven at best. This rocked me back on my heels a bit. I'd been thinking in terms of 4 or 5 miles, to be honest, and 8 seems a bit of a ... well, a hill to climb.

We dog-sat Hyper for Malky & Fiona the other day, and took her out on our usual one and a bit mile loop. This is on broken footpaths with a cinder surface, and I was shattered by the end of it.

Denise is right. I'll have to prove I can walk eight miles on the flat before I can attempt any hill.
Very, very depressing.

Denise the hero

Coming into transission after huge hills on which her chain came off: and she still did a great time considering what a beast the course was!

F1 better off without Briatore?

Never liked Briatore, and maybe F1 is better off without him in the paddock sowing discord. He comes across as a bully, and as someone with ideas above his station. He spent half his effort trying to take control of F1 from that wee barrow boy and his "nazi" pal. Hmm ... maybe there was a place for him after all.

Renault will get a nominal fine, so as not to frighten them away. That would be another manufacturer team out, which is to be avoided at all costs ... apparently. We know the manufactures have wrung all they can out of F1 and are leaving, but Renault are one manufacturer that seems committed to F1 (even though the teams 'benefiting' from the use of their engines are not all that impressed). What was said when BMW, Toyota and Renault joined Ferrari as manufacturer teams in our sport, taking over the Garagistas (as Enzo Ferrari disparagingly referred to the private - mostly British - teams), was that they weren't there for the sport, and would only stay for as long as it benefited them. And now BMW and Toyota are going (Toyota will keep denying it until the last second), so the last thing Big Bad Bernie and FOM want is to scare Renault out of the championship by having FIM level a fine at them that's commensurate with their wrongdoings. Nicking designs, bumping into a wall to block the circuit at a hairpin, and team orders are one thing, but Briatore and Symonds could have killed somone. Realistically the punishment should be draconian, in proportion to the offence, and Renault should be excluded from the sport for a year - even if those responsible have left the team. But we know it won't happen.

Wednesday night is pub night

Peter Higgins came out with a good one on Wednesday (16th). Martin F and I were still laughing about it yesterday evening when we met for a quick pint before catching the train home.
We were talking about Patrick Swayze and Keith Floyd dying, and all the recent celebrit deaths, and Peter says, "there's people dying now, that never have before".
It took us a while to work out that he'd left a whole clause out from what he meant to say; that there are now more people dying that we grew up with and are familiar with, than ever have before.
Good point, badly made.
You might guess he had the rip taken out of him, and he stumped off to the toilet saying "you're all a bunch of bastards!"

The RX ("Rex"?, "Rexxie"?)

Denise took me out in the RX-8 on Saturday. Under hard acceleration it sounds like Col. Straker's car from the Gerry Anderson TV series UFO: a mix of the exhaust note and a turbine noise from the engine itself. Very strange. It's quite a bit more comfortable than the Lotus was ( a bit?! ), and is nice and quick, as it should be with 230 PS / 235 bhp on tap. The styling's a bit Thunderbirds too, I think. As we noticed when we looked at one when they first came out, there are nice styling cues throughout the car, using the cross-section shape of the rotor as a motif: it's seen in the seat head-rests, in the rear central reflector, and elsewhere. Circles are also used.

I was surprised to see that although the display looked very similar to the one on my Mazda 6, there is no trip computer. Maybe Mazda didn't want to terrify owners by displaying the dismal fuel consumption. Not an issue for Denise, with her 3 mile journey to work and the occasional trip to the airport; it really shouldn't be a buying decision issue for someone buying a powerful sports car anyway. If you want fuel economy buy a small diesel ...

Birthday (old) boy

My birthday was a quiet affair. Denise had been away all week, and I had dropped her in it regarding my birthday present. She'd offered that I could do up the top room so I could have get an large extra monitor and table for my PC setup, so I could have one position with my flight sim chair for playing games, and a separate work area for doing my e-mails and business stuff. The keyboard and mouse are wireless anyway, so it would be just a case of buying and connecting up a nice big gaming monitor, and finding a suitable table to put it on. My PC has four monitor outputs, so all I needed to do was find a way of setting it up so the cables would reach. And that's where I hit the problem: the best way to set it up so everything could be connected up would be for the work and play areas to face more or less 45 to 90 degrees from each other, and I could not work out how to do it in that room. So I told D, just a couple of days before she went away for the week, that I didn't want to do it just now, and that I needed to think about how to make it all work. That really dropped her in it. I wasn't really bothered about a present, so I didn't think too much about it; but she'd seen how much I liked the Tiger Woods Golf game on the Wii, so she bought me some golf lessons so I could have a go ath the real thing. I'll be having my introductory lesson on 26th

So anyway, on the Friday (11th), Denise got back, and presented me with a certificate she's made up for the golf lesson, and we went up the village to the Italian restaurant we always go to. It was a very nice evening, and it was nice to have Denise back. D had cut down how much she was spending away, but now she's going to have to start doing it again, and that week she was away seemed like a long time.

Denise's new Mazda RX-8

Well new to her anyway (it was Sharon's - sorry Shaz). I haven't had a ride in it yet, but it looks nice

Busy week!

Denise has finally sold the Lotus, which was sad. It was wierd seeing someone else climbing in and driving it away. It was really very much Denise's car. It suited her personality ... and her size! On the positive front, her brother Dave, who's birthday it was this week, gave up his Saturday to drive his and Sharon's Mazda RX-8 from down in Surrey to Manchester, and Denise flew down to meet him and drive it back. It's the full-power 231 model, with the sport pack and leather seats added, and is a shade of green so dark it's almost black. Brilliant. She's running the Glasgow half-marathon today, so she's taken the RX-8: at least she can give more than one person a lift in the new car.

We also booked our winter holiday on Friday. This is the replacement for our China trip, which we cancelled because it was going to be too much walking for me. Instead, we're hiring a camper van for a month in New Zealand. We're hiring a bigger van this time, because we're going to be in the van for longer than on our previous holidays, and will probably appreciate the extra room and storage space. On our Australian holidays, we'd had a long-wheelbase Merc. Sprinter, which wasn't bad at all: it had a nice strong motor, but we had to assemble the bed every night, and pack it away each day if we wanted anywhere to sit in the evenings. We'll be visiting both the North and South islands, crossing from North to South on Christmas eve, and staying in a nice hotel that night and the next.

But the BIG news is that I got a double-drop from the chocolage vending machine at work!