So Button couldn't hold on, and Alonso overtook for the lead via the pits. A shame for fans of Button, but crucially, the championship is still wide open, with the points now standing at:
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| The green highlights those still able to win the championship, with 25 points for a win, and therefore a maximum of 125 points left, with 5 races left |
Its the big one - the NASCAR race I look forward to the most. And I don't even live in the country, I may not even watch all of it live!
For the uninitiated, the race I'm talking about is the Irwin Tools Night Race, previously known as the Sharpie 500. As the title suggests, its a night race of 500 laps, which comes to around a 266.5 mile race length. The compact and close nature of Bristol Speedway means that the action here is close, fast and verging on dangerous. In the Nationwide race recently, Kahne ended up driving on the concrete wall after being forced up due to the narrow nature of Bristol.
See y'all at the race!
Today I have decided to do something extraordinary - a post that is actually motor sport-related. I also write out of growing anger for those who attack all forms of touring cars in motor-sports, accusing them of being slow (an average of 100mph is slow?), outdated (again, how?), and even out of touch with the modern world, something which I vehemently disagree with.
Firstly, entertainment value. I struggle, really I do, to think of a single other form of motor-sport that is as fun to watch as Touring Cars. Drifting is pretty cool to watch, NASCAR is good to watch for close finishes, and F1...well, F1 isn't really watched for entertainment purposes.
Touring Cars have everything - they have overtaking. They have bold and bright liveries, and they even have crashes for those who like to watch crashes in motor-sports, and lets be honest here, although most of use wince and grimace at horrific crashes such as Mark Webber's "Gives You Wings" accident, crashes do add interest to what we're watching.
Secondly, speed. Lets compare average speeds between F1 and the BTCC, my personal favourite touring car series, both at high speed venues. Silverstone is regarded as being a reasonably fast circuit. The new Arena layout measure 5.891 km, with the new laptime record for 2010 being a 1:30.874. Doing the maths means that this comes out to give an average lap speed of 144 mph. Looking at Thruxton, a high-speed BTCC circuit, this circuit measures 3.793km, with the BTCC lap record being 1:16.369. This works out at an average speed of about 111mph.
So the speed difference between the multi-million dollar-sucking F1, and the so-called cheap and "pathetic" BTCC, on similar circuits in terms of how quick they are compared to other circuits on their respective calendars, is 33mph. Slow? Right...
And then when we look at the slowest circuits on the two calendars, the difference really does get rather sparse. In F1, the slowest circuit is arguably Monaco, with a length of 3.41 km, and a laptime of 1:14.439, which is a record nigh-on 6 years old. Laptimes now are now a little slower. This means an average speed of 100mph. Comparing this to the BTCC's slowest circuit, Brands Hatch Indy, the length is 1.22 miles, with a lap record of 48.857 seconds. This is an average speed of 91.5 mph. The difference is under 10mph. That's a bicycles-worth in speed.
So, they're arguably not that slow, and we now come on to the last point, which is how relevant they are to the modern world. To be fair, this isn't a comment that is made often, but I have seen it posted on the internet when people refer to its entertainment value, and label it "Boy-racerish".
Again, lets compare the two. F1 is a multi-million dollar business, with tickets costing a ridiculous amount, to see cars that have as much resemblance to your street car as a detached house. By comparison, the BTCC is all about racing cars that you can see and recognise on the street today. In terms of relevance, F1 doesn't even come close.
And I haven't even started on other forms of motorsport...
(Of course, the best way to compare would be to put both on the same track, but unfortunately the only way we can do that is in a video game like rFactor. This is something which I'll do in a later post)
Without question, these are two of the best touring car series on the planet - nothing else even comes close. So how do you choose between the two?
I am fortunate enough to watch both of these series, and must say it is very close. There is plenty of action to be had in both series, lots of good old-fashioned proper racing, very unlike anything you see in the likes of F1 and so forth.
Even the cars are similar, with cars such as the BMW 320si E90, Chevrolet Cruze, Chevrolet Lacetti and SEAT Leon featuring in both series. There is the Ford Focus which doesn't feature in the WTCC, and the Vauxhall's, but apart from these odd examples, most of the machinery is very similar. The laptimes set are very similar - something which can be easily seen with Brands Hatch.
The drivers then must be the deciding factor. Yet even these come in similar shapes and sizes. Drivers from both series are no-nonsense, hard touring-car drivers.
The BTCC may have less in terms of bureaucracy, but the WTCC has the variety of circuits.
Have you tried deciding? Perhaps the ultimate answer is not to decide, but actually to watch both. Which is probably most people do anyway, so apologies for wasting your time.
Finally, the greatest of the great roll back to Britain for one of the nation's highhlights of the summer - the British Grand Prix.
It looks set to be a fantastic weekend, with the newly revamped Silverstone acting as host, as it has for a long time now. And indeed the crowd certainly seems to be behind the race too, with a record number of people of around 85,000 coming just to watch Friday practice.
Yes, you read that right - 85,000. Eighty-five thousand. For Friday practice.
That's dramatic in itself, and will hopefully set us up for the rest of the weekend.
This is starting to peeve me off so much that I've decided to write about it, so apologies in advance if this sounds like a rant.
Common sense no longer appears to exist in today's society (certainly in Britain anyway). All we ever get are rules, rules, rules, which must be followed to the letter! Its beginning to drive me mad. Things like small speeding offences take on the significance of genocidal proportions, whilst boy-racers screaming through at 100mph along narrow country roads get away with it.
Don't get me wrong here - I love motor-racing, and I love speed. But it has no place on the public road. Driving there is about comfort, smoothness and to an extent safety. Yet the common sense which used to rule this country just doesn't exist any more, in any shape or form. We are told to obey the rules or else - common sense is just assumed, and unfortunately stupidity or blindness is in its place instead.
I honestly blame this on the information age. We have gone completely overboard - computers have shoved us into the form of unthinking robots with none of that vital human thing - the sixth sense, heart, emotion - common sense.
And this needs to change soon. Or we'll have 30mph speed limits on motorways soon enough, I'm telling you now.
With the Football World Cup soon coming to a close, I thought this would perhaps be a relevant question to ask. I have always thought it a shame that the A1GP never really reached its full potential, and sometimes I do think more people would be interested in a sport that they could relate to more, and a World Cup in Motorsports would be a perfect solution to this.
Think about it - how many people do you know who gain a sudden interest in football come the World Cup? Why shouldn't the same happen for motorsports - all it needs is a bit of time. If it hadn't been for the financial crisis, I reckon the A1GP had the potential to really compete with F1, the WTCC and the like. Perhaps its what the sport needs most of all.