Pah!Really? is to approach the FIEh?FIA
Max Mosley's preferred option for the location of the new FIA offices in Amsterdam. The FIA (or Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile to give it its full, inexplicably french, name) is an ominous association formed to represent motorists and motoring organisations. Its headquarters are at 8 Place de la Concorde, Paris (ring top bell), coincidentally just up the rue from one of the city's best bordellos. The federation acts as the governing body for a number of motorsport series and championships, mostly in a venal or, if we're feeling charitable, incompetent manner. It should not be confused with the Fédération Internationale de l'Alcosport, which governs Drink-A-Long-A-Grand-Prix almost as badly. Comprising 222 member organisations, the FIA can also boast a Senate, a Court of Appeal and a General Assembly and it wouldn't take a stretch of the imagination to see its activities as part of a sinister plan to get itself recognised as a sovereign state in its own right. It's not a million miles from how Hitler started, that's all we're saying. Its decisions have at times left the FIA open to accusations of favouritism and manipulation and its credibility wasn't helped any by revelations that its married president, Max Mosley, was partial to sado-masochistic orgies involving more tarts than you can fit on one hand. Mosley, seeing no incompatibility between his behaviour and his position, failed to tender the resignation that many were keenly anticipating. They claim to do a lot of work on road safety but we've never knowingly seen any of their campaigns. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper to seek a change in Formula 1's tyre regulations for next year in a bid to cut down on wasted sets of hard compound rubber.
Figures show that of the five sets of option tyres and six sets of the harder primes allocated to each driver for a race weekend, the final set of hard tyres is never used. Even Lewis HomeboyHAMILTON, LEWIS
Throughout the difficult 2007 season, McLaren insisted that Lewis was always given exactly the same equipment as his team-mate Fernando Alonso. Born in the picturesque English hamlet of Stevenage in 1985, Lewis Carl Davidson Hamilton was named after the American sprinter Carl Lewis and the legendary British easy listening DJ David Hamilton. He has since moved to Switzerland and attempted to distance himself from association with David Hamilton. Hamilton famously approached McLaren boss Ron Dennis at the Autosport Awards in 1995 and told him that he wanted to race for him one day. Dennis told the ten-year-old Hamilton to call him in a few years and thus was a mutually rewarding relationship forged. Some of the more disreputable members of the dotdotdotcomma staff have since adopted a similar strategy in approaching girls in clubs, although they have yet to demonstrate a level of success anything like Hamilton managed. On his way to F1, Hamilton picked up titles in karting, Formula Renault UK, the F3 Euroseries and GP2, after which he picked up Nicole Scherzinger, who was apparently already a well-known singer with girl band Pussycat Dolls, but who first came to the attention of the dotdotdotcomma editorial team for wearing a really smashing dress during the title-deciding race at Brazil in 2008 and then jumping about in it quite a lot. Hamilton's time in F1 has been far from dull and he has shown almost as much ill-conceived misjudgement as he has jaw-dropping ability. The audacious overtaking moves and lightning pace have been accompanied by pit-lane crashes and overly optimistic first-lap lunges, as well as more than his fair share of FIA wrist-slaps. The decision to strip him of his win at Spa in 2008, seemingly for being too good at overtaking Kimi Raikkonen, still baffles those of us who don't wear Ferrari T-shirts. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper, it seems, can struggle through a race weekend on just 40 tyres.
The tyre company has pointed out that lugging these 24 redundant sets of tyres to each race, allocating them to the drivers, having them handed back unused and then having to destroy them - for reasons that have yet to be adequately explained - seems a bit pointless, even for a sport based on driving round in circles very fast.
Pah!Really?'s main proposal is that the FIEh? change the rules, so that each driver is allocated only five sets of each compound, but it has other suggestions to make similar savings.
"We're going to stop providing wet and intermediate tyres for Felipe MassiveshuntMASSA, FELIPE
The view from Felipe Massa's car for most of the 2008 British Grand Prix. Pretty much since his F1 debut with Sauber in 2002, Felipe Massa has been doing his best to shake off his reputation as a driver who is fast but wild, while for roughly the same period, dotdotdotcomma has been doing its best to reinforce that reputation. It's not that we harbour any particular dislike of the chap but Massa is no more capable of changing his underlying nature than he is of, oh, I don't know, not spinning five times in the wet at Silverstone in 2008. During the duller parts of a Formula One season, it's nice to have someone a bit mad in the field for the occasional moments of insanity they provide and ever since Takuma Sato left the sport, Massa is the best we have. That said, Massa has been guilty at times of Ferrarigance, which is a word we've just made up for the special brand of arrogance only a fully brainwashed Ferrari team member can display. His ridiculous protestations that Fernando Alonso had impeded him during qualifying at Monza in 2006 readily spring to mind, as does his failure to acknowledge that his spin at Fuji in 2008 had been caused when he turned in on Sebatien Bourdais. On both occasions, of course, the stewards favoured the bloke in red. In any case, F1 would probably be less of a spectacle without loonies like Massa and "fast but wild" is not a bad epithet to have. It could be a lot worse. Just look at what we've called Michael Schumacher or Jacques Villeneuve. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper," said a spokesman for the tyre manufacturer. "Whenever it rains, you'd think he was driving on slicks anyway."
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