Life - Raikkonen Wins

Earlier this year I wrote about my fan type status with regards to Lotus. Although I've been hoping for a win by Raikkonen in 2012 his car hasn't been the best. In Formula One that's an unfortunate thing - the best driver may not win if he's in an inferior car. Typically such drivers shine when the weather turns sour, like the legendary Aryton Senna in one of his early F1 races. Normally, though, the best cars win. The good cars (and teams) attract solid, proven drivers, the cars work well, they usually survive the race, and, simply put, they're faster.

Raikkonen, on the Lotus team (it's actually Renault, but that's okay by me), is a good driver that came back to F1 after (I think) pricing himself out of the market a couple years back. He's driven well but the car's pace has been just below the top teams' cars.

That said if things worked out just right he could win. It's not the best way to win, perhaps, but it's a deserved win if it's not a complete farce (like when just six cars started at Indianapolis). Raikkonen has taken advantage of weather, the strengths of his car, and such, but other drivers, arguably similar in skill, took the wins.

Today, though, he finally did it. Some of the top competitors had some bad luck, others pushed the rules a bit.

Sebastian Vettel, the probably champion for the season, tried to push qualifying with an illegal fuel load (less than one liter of fuel remaining after the qualifying lap). It's basically cheating, especially since the team knew it and told him to pull over before he got to the pits. That's kind of like being called to dope control after a race and sprinting away on the bike. I'm not sure what Vettel's team hoped to accomplish because the stewards (i.e. officials) checked his car and dutifully found just a few drops of fuel left in the tank. Even though he started at the back (albeit from pit lane, so they could work on his car before the start - a loophole in the rules, sort of), he really does have the best car at the moment, and he's a good solid driver. He dutifully set fastest lap on the way to a spectacular third place.

Fernando Alonso, probably the driver that wrung the best out of the car he had this season, did a great drive to finish second. I remember him more for being involved in cycling (forgive the horrible translation on the page). It seems, though, that he can drive a car very, very well, and he won a number of races in the 2012 season in a car that's acknowledged to be slightly behind the top cars like Vettel's.

But at the top of the podium, complete with the not-champagne-but-instead-rose-water-with-bubbles (the race took place in Abu Dhabi), stood Kimi Raikkonen. He inherited the lead in this race but that doesn't explain the difficulties of qualifying well, saving your tires, dealing with the stress of racing, etc etc etc. Nonetheless if an F1 driver inherits a lead the best he can do is keep it. Raikkonen did just that.

So what's that mean for me and cycling? Not much, actually. It's nice to see that a good driver won in a car that's been pretty controversy-free, that hasn't pushed the rulebook too far, and that earned its win through a season of hard work.

It does bring to mind a racer a while back that raced the Bethel Spring Series. He acknowledges he doesn't have a sprint so he goes for the late solo moves, or, if the race works out right, an earlier solo move.

At that year's Series I had a very strong team supporting me. We'd see the racer go, a friendly rival of ours, and we'd try and bring him back at the end of the race. We caught him at the bottom of the hill, halfway up the hill, and even at the line. Well technically I caught him but only because the team dragged me (and the field) across the gap.

One of my teammates, after I caught the poor racer at the line (I won, he got second), asked me why he kept trying.

"Because if you keep trying moves eventually you'll win. He got caught at the bottom of the hill, halfway up the hill, and at the line. He's getting closer and one week he may win."

The following week guess what happened?

Yep.

He took off a few laps from the finish, drilled it when it counted, and beat me to the line by about 10 or 20 feet.

I was probably the second happiest racer in the race because he won the race fair and square. He made the move, we all knew he'd have to make the move, and he still made it stick.

That racer upgraded that year so I rarely raced against him for a while. Now I see him all the time at the Tuesday Night Races at Rentschler Field and sometimes we even line up in a Masters race together.

When I see him I always, always, always think about the time that I watched him cross the line just a few lengths clear of me, absolutely astonished with himself that he'd pulled off the move.

So maybe Raikkonen's win does have something to do with cycling in that cycling has something to do with life. You can't help but admire those that earn their way forward. It may not be as far forward as a Tour win (or not), it may not be a multi-million dollar F1 contract, but it's real.

Kudos to Raikkonen.

Life - Dreaming

It's not bike racing, and Lotus isn't Lotus, but I grew up with some staring at pictures of the John Player Special F1 cars, literally hours of staring, trying to absorb all the details of the car. It's been a while and I realized much later that I didn't understand the significance of some of the car's features - aerodynamics hadn't really entered my world yet (except things that were low and pointy were fast), and, more specifically, I didn't understand that fast moving air had less pressure the slow moving air. My understanding of aerodynamics was limited to "if the wing points down, it tries to push down, and if it points up, it tries to go up".

With its massive rear wheels (at the time),  wings front and back, but otherwise a pretty standard body (the aero stuff was underneath), I didn't realize just how significant the JPS cars were - ground effects, carbon fiber, twin chassis.

Primitive compared to current cars.

From here.

When I was a bit older and looking around for my first real car, one that wasn't just "barely running", I took a serious look at the street Lotus that caught my eye since I was a kid, the Lotus Esprit. My dad let me watch "The Spy Who Loved Me" which featured the coolest white Esprit. I later read that the cars were so tough that it took several takes (and a lot of preparatory sawing) to make one break up appropriately when they tossed it off a cliff.

The "submarine" car from the Bond movie.

From here.

Yes, they had a JPS version of the Esprit. The bestest of the best, at least to me.

From here.

I used to point and shout whenever I saw one on the street. I remember one day on a group ride, rolling through Redding, feeling strong, and getting behind an Esprit. It was so low even I could look down at the roof.

Those of you that follow me on Strava know I tend to stick to the same routes when I train near my home. Well, when I was a Junior and training around town, I'd head over to a certain road (even though it had some really draggy hills) simply because one house had a separate barn-type garage that housed not one but two Lotus Esprits, one blue and one red. Like truck draft hunting, I'd usually miss out, but on lucky rides I'd see one car parked in the garage, and a few times I saw both cars in the driveway, the happy owner lavishing attention on them.

Tellingly my school notebooks (yes, I've saved some of them) have sketches of cyclists (in super aero positions no less) and Esprits. I think I have one of a rider trying to draft an Esprit.

I'd actually become somewhat familiar with the first version's quirks (when I say first version, I really mean the few versions using the original body configuration, the S1 through S3). Solid lifter 4 cylinder engines, requiring machining little spacer things every so many thousand miles. Most regular cars have automatically adjusting versions that use oil pressure to adjust all that stuff, so to literally dismantle the top of the engine every other oil change is a bit much to ask of a normal car driver. Fuel lines disintegrated, running in UV-exposed areas, leaving the cabin smelling like fuel. Poor fuel management, with carburetors initially, and poor rust management. The body was fiberglass but the chassis was steel - the cars looked great but you had to watch out underneath. The car had peaky performance from a surprisingly primitive looking engine, so you were either below the power band or, once you got the engine going, you found yourself suddenly propelled forward.

A good friend let me work on the lifters (I machined a few, measured many, and helped select the proper lifter cups for the various cylinders), and I went along on a test drive with him. There I learned that the driver's side mat can jam the throttle pedal, not a convenient thing when whipping along at high speeds.

The second version of the car was much better (eventually named the S4). It had I never got to drive in one, not that I remember, but I studied a few up close, talked to one owner at length, and seriously contemplated buying an S4s. It could hit 60 mph in 4.6 seconds and handled like a go-kart.

Virtually identical car to the one I saw at my friend's garage. I really wanted one.

From here.

I started thinking of budgets and such for a car like that. The Missus, when we first met, even got me a hand painted piggy bank that said "Lotus Esprit Fund" on it.

I couldn't justify buying a car whose engine I'd have to take apart every 8k-10k miles (well work on the head anyway). I ended up buying a more practical (and slower and heavier) Nissan 350Z, which, as you all know, I traded in once we learned that the Missus was pregnant.

The Lotus F1 team returned to the scene recently, but, oddly enough, it's no longer associated with anything Lotus (it's actually more a Renault). It retained its name though, and the cars are still black with gold in tribute to the JPS cars of past. This year Kimi Raikonnen, a driver I admire, returned to F1 to drive for this team, and in a very tight season, has managed to win a race already.

From here.

Now the Lotus F1 team has teamed up with Linkin Park (who I originally thought was "Lincoln Park", maybe from Chicagoland area where there's a park by that name) to release the following:

As it's not out yet at the time of me writing this I'm not sure what it is, but, okay, I like the combination of music and video, and if it's not going to be cycling, it's good that it's F1, and if it's F1, it's great that it's Lotus.

Even if it's only in name.