What odds Mrs Schumacher’s big boy for the French
Grand Prix this weekend? McLaren’s Ron Dennis must be working overtime
to try and work out just what they have to do. The Canadian GP was the
500th for the Woking based UK team, and there was no cause for
celebrations afterwards. Coulthard must have driven over several Chinamen
in a past life, for he certainly has no luck on the race track (despite
his incredible luck away from the circuits). The 10 second stop-go penalty
handed out in Canada stopped the only chance of someone having a go at
Schumi. In fact, Coulthard is the only driver who has actually passed
Schumacher under equal racing conditions in the last two seasons.
Jean
Alesi in the Prost Peugeot
There is no doubt about Schumacher, however. Like him
or loathe him, he is the best driver around at present. Ice cool and
totally professional. I just wish he were a “nicer” person!
This GP is of course the Professor Alain Prost’s home
race. Unfortunately, the Prost racing team seems totally disorganised,
with cars that have a reliability even worse than the Jaguars. Jean Alesi
must be so frustrated, and I can imagine that with all the French eyes
upon them this weekend that the Gallic tempers will be well frayed by 2
p.m. Sunday.
Jaguar? What can you say? With all of FoMoCo’s
fistsful of good ol’ Yankee dollars and they still can’t get them
truly competitive. You have to start asking some questions. It ain’t
just the drivers, even though Johnny Herbert is obviously passed his
use-by date and even Eddie is having trouble believing his own Press
Releases.
The “find” of this season has to be the Arrows.
Running the much reviled Supertec engines, these cars in the hands of de
la Rosa and Verstappen have been veritable jet planes in a straight line,
regularly topping the outright speed charts. What would they be like with
a “real” engine?
The biggest disappointment this year has to be Eddie
Jordan’s outfit. Everyone thought that it would be Trulli and Frentzen
who took the fight to Mclaren, but constant reliability problems seem to
have actually de-tuned Frentzen dramatically. He is not driving as well as
he did last year.
Another driver who is having a bad run right now is the
wonderkid Jenson Button. He seemed totally out of his depth in Canada, and
perhaps all the hype about whether he will keep his seat is getting to
him. After all, he’s only 20 years old.
Modern Police Methods
In Oz, the coppers (sorry, Constable) are very much up
to date with all the electronic whizzbangery to catch those felons who are
the main threat to law and order in that sun-burned land. That main threat
is, of course, none other than you and me, the road users.
At first it was just the Radar Speed Guns that they
imported from America, so we motorists, in self defence, bought Radar
Detectors. The early ones were very bulky, and I remember hiding mine
inside a large box of Kleenex tissues, glued to the dashboard of the
Porsche. Those early detectors were not very sensitive and to get the
police band, you got everything else. Mine used to go off every time I
passed the electronic door openers in McDonalds! False alarms became the
name of the game.
As the coppers got better radar (X and K bands and all
that) we, in turn, got better detectors. These were smaller and more easy
to hide, and in my Celica, the detector was actually built in to the
sunvisor, with the wires hidden behind the A pillar moulding. As they
became more devious - so did we!
The next device the police brought out was the Radar
Detector Detector. This little pile of diodes detected if you had a
detector in your car and so they outlawed ‘em and they pinched you
again! Of course, their detector only worked when you had your detector
on, so us smart people would turn off the detector as soon as it warned
you that Johnny Hop was waiting down the road.
Next was the legislation they brought in that allowed
them to search your car if they even suspected you had a detector on
board. This suspicion, I must add, was generally because all of a sudden
on a dead straight bit of road your car had all four wheels locked up as
you approached their visually hidden radar gun! So again, in that true
spirit of scientific pioneering, we brought in the micro thin detectors
that fitted in your top pocket and you slipped it in with your business
cards before you were pulled over for inspection!
With the constabulary then complaining that they were
spending all their time out in the open and getting sun-burned hidden
behind trees and bushes, the police next brought in the speed cameras. The
beauty of this device was that it did its own thing and the coppers could
go back to their main business of sitting in air-conditioned police
stations and shuffling papers. End of the day they developed the film and
sent you an envelope containing a photograph of your car and a statutory
fine with a picture of the Queen on it.
The smart money is now buying number plate protectors
that become opaque with flash photography! Isn’t it good to see how the
new technology is benefiting us all!
However, I believe that in the UK it is even worse than
Down-under. A report sent to me this week reads that a village police
station had erected a sign stating “754 speeding motorists caught last
month” to which a graffiti artist had added “Motorists 754, Burglars
0”. How true! It is for the so many reasons like those that so many of
us have chosen to live here in Thailand!
Autotrivia Quiz
Last week’s question revolved around Jack Brabham
(Sir Jack, to you). All the Brabham racers had the prefix BT in front of
the number. What did BT stand for?
It stood for the two people most involved in the design
and production of the cars - they were Brabham and Taurenac. Ron Taurenac
was a brilliant engineer and Black Jack’s right hand man in those days.
So to this week, and this is easy - what other race
cars did Ron Taurenac go on to make famous after his time with Brabham?
For the Automania FREE beer this week, be the first
correct answer to fax 427 596 or email [email protected].
