Spotted in Fells. Glad they kept the old school rims!

Lets talk about this, rental car dicks.

FUCK YOU! Fuck you in your ass (unless your into that which is totally cool I’m not judging, but then fuck you in some other uncomfortable way). This is the most inconvenient shit ever. I was told by another rental agent they do this stupid shit so not to loose the spare key for when they resell the thing to some poor bastard who buys an ex-rental. Why on this cursed earth anyone would buy an ex-rental or any fleet car other than desperation to look richer than you are is beyond me. I treated mine like total shit for the 5 days I had her and I’m pretty sure her whole life is lived near redline, jumping over curbs, neutral drops and generally being raped.

Anyway back to this gas station key thing. Since many rentals fleets let you drop off cars at any location they want both keys to go with the car, but that should be their problem, not mine. Oh you can’t keep spare keys organized back at the office and mailed to the other offices, then fuck the customer right? Can’t figure out a place to keep them in the car, like say the glove compartment, then fuck the customer right? But why the fuck do they have to be held together with an overly thick inflexible cable? Oh right just to fuck with you.

Look, it doesn’t fit in your pocket assholes. I mean sometimes it technically will, but with the giant lump in your pocket don’t be surprised if you hear ‘did you just rent a car, or are you happy to see me’. Hey rental car assholes, want me not to loose your keys? Make it so I can’t put them in my pocket. Oh wait that’s right, you charge shit tons of money for new keys so that’s probably the point. Dicks.

Seen at random exit stopping for gas in the NC. I actually thought is was a mobility scooter at first. Went just as fast as you’d of thought. Not sure if crazy, ballsy, DUI convict or just didn’t care.

Now this prick knows how to not give a shit. Or they’re dead in the trunk. Being DC I give it 50/50.

I got my first parking ticket in Mobtown a couple of moths ago. Now it was not technically a parking ticket.  I caught one for not having a front license plate. Why don’t I have a front license plate? Because fuck you Maryland I’m not drilling into the front of my car for your bullshit. My guess is that since I was parked at the end of the row the fucking parking cunt was out writing a ticket for whoever was parked illegally next to me and decided to do a walk around of my car while at it. Have I paid it? No. Have I received what I believe to be a second notice about non-payment from he DMV weeks ago? Yes. Have I opened that letter? No!

So Bernie Eceelstone decided to run his mouth off t the press again. Ughhh.

How you have to explain F1 to your friends

Friend: “Is that like NASAR?”

You: “No!”

“Indycar then?”

“Well kinda, not really. No. It’s way better.”

“Oh it’s the European one, that’s owned by Putin?”

“No! They have one race in Russia but Putin has nothing to do with it. One of the guys who runs it is a bit of and old crazy and says stupid shit.”

“You mean that Nazi guy?”

“No! That guy ran the FIA for a while. But he wasn’t a Nazi, His parent where. Well kinda, not really it’s complicated. Don’t judge a person by their parents.”

“But didn’t he get caught having sex dressed as a nazi?”

“No. He was not dressed as a Nazi! The hookers that where flogging him where.”

“So he’s not the one that likes Putin.”

“No that’s his friend Bernie the other guy.”

“Who runs F1?”

“Well, kinda, not really. It’s complicated.”

“Oh he’s like Tony George”

“No! this is not Indycar. Bernie is just the commercial rights holder.”

“Oh that guy who hates women?”

“He doesn’t HATE women, he just doesn’t think they can drive or should be in F1. But he actually does sometimes It’s complicated.”

“But he doesn’t like immigrants right? Big Trump supporter too I heard?”

“Look, I..I don’t know. He love taking money from immigrants, in their home countries where he has races I guess. I don’t know, its complicated. He says stupid stuff.”

“Like saying Hitler got stuff done?”

“I really,… I don’t..Just.. just watch the race.”

“They look like Indycars, but don’t sound as good.”

“I hate you and this sport.”

So the FIA isn’t letting the teams scrap the new qualifying format and go back to the old one. They must modify the new one.

FUCK YOU Jean Todt. Seriously, Todt has shown an amazing combination of incompetence and impotence in letting the FIA run F1 into the ground. This man needs to go. He won’t, but he needs to. Grow a pair of balls and say no to Bernie Ecclestone for once.

We’ve had two really great races so far, IF you watch anything but the top three positions. And I’m fine with that. Haas F1 and Romain Grosjean have pulled off a miracle. The back markers all seem to have a chance to beat each other, and the midfield is anyones race. But no ones talking about that because qualifying is such a fuck awful mess.

The problems with the new qualifying are numerous. And it pretty much just leads to the last few minutes of each session with no cars on track, as opposed to last year where everyone made a last dash attempt to better their times.

Here are the main reasons.

Not enough tires-Fixable but expensive.

Takes too long to refuel the car-Possibly fixable by even more convoluted rules, but creates other problems.

Not enough time to make an in lap, change tires, and an out lap between eliminations-not really fixable.

Cuts the running time down dramatically for the lesser teams-yea, lets give less on camera time to teams struggling with sponsors, that should help.

Will always end up with just two cars running at the end of Q3-fixable by using the old formate for Q3, but that begs the question why use the new one for Q1 and Q2 at all then?

So why are we even doing this shit anyway? What was wrong with the old format every one liked? With all the other glaring problems within the sport why did they change the one thing no one had a problem with? Oh, apparently we need to mix up the grid now that’s why.

So who hell wants the grid mixed up anyway? Oh that’s right, Bernie Ecclestone does. Every interview I’ve seen or read points to the ‘promoters’ demanding a change in qualifying for why this shit got pushed through. Well’ ‘the promoters’ representative is Bernie Ecclestone. Yes the FIA has blame here, but that blame is mostly not standing up to Bernie and saying no, get this crap idea out of here. Well they somewhat did, that’s why we have this fuck awful format now, because what Bernie demanded was even worse! Bernie wants either a reverse grid, ballast added or some other such bullshit like a lottery drawn grid. The FIA (and the teams) came up with this crap as a ‘compromise’ with Bernie. No matter how much Bernie says in public how he hates it, this shit show lands squarely on his desk.

But a lot of people are bending over backwards to absolve him of responsibility, or at least obfuscate where the blame lies. They’re playing the “the blame lies with everyone’ game and that’s not quite true here for qualifying.

There has been a tendency with some F1 commentators that I greatly respect to defend Bernie from any accusation or criticism throughout his career. Now I understand some of this, Bernie has threatened some of these people before. A couple of years ago several fan run websites got the legal equivalent of a ‘I’m watching you and can shut down your site in a minute letters. Bernie works for CVC, the actual owners of the rights to use the ‘Formula 1’ names (Bernie sold his rights to CVC a while ago but part of the deal kept him in charge). So they threatened several websites with shutdown or at least a name change. So I’m not sure how much of the Bernie pandering comes from a position of having to play nice with the man that can fuck up their sites and communities they care about so deeply.

But I suspect there’s also the tendency of ‘rich person worship’ at play with some of the American commentators here. And Bernie certainly is a rich man. Personally I blame this on those awful Puritans that infused our culture with a belief that god shows his favor by blessing people with wealth, so the rich by definition are moral and ’good’ (while the poor by definition are morally deficient and ‘bad). But that’s a different rant.

Bernie gets much praise for being a great dealmaker (sound like someone else?) but it’s always left out that many of those ‘great deals’ are in fact part of what’s strangling the sport. Sure, the deals with the smaller teams was a ‘great deal’ for Bernie and CVC, but the financial screwing the smaller teams are getting because of that is drowning them in debt, threatening their very existence on the grid, and they are struggling on track because of it. Sure the deals he’s made with the tracks have been ‘great deals’ for him and CVC, but the many of the tracks fans love can’t pay up anymore and get dropped of the calander. Hell we almost lost the US GP after only three years because of how great a deal Bernie made with them. The one consistently is the only party who benefits from these “great deals’ are not the fans, the teams, the tracks or promoters… It’s Bernie and CVC. He’s the only one that wins in these deals. Yet his defenders continually refuse to take that into account when looking at problems in the sport (sound like someone else?).

He also holds extreme and fluid positions on what the sport should be doing, like reverse grids, a lottery grid, a medal system, and other such garbage. But because he says so many more outrageous things like installing sprinklers or calling female drivers appliances, his actual crapy ideas get lost in the noise (sound like someone else?). Ok. fine, I’ll just call him the Trump of F1. And he’s been getting the same media treatment Trump did at his start, that media crush as I call it. He’s a ‘great personality’ so he gets a pass. And like Trump that plays right into his hands.

As I said I respect some of these Bernie Ecclestone defenders greatly, hell I owe one of them a lunch the next time I’m in their town for all they do. And while it certainly is true some fans blame Bernie for everything wrong in the sport (he had noting to do with this terrible engine format or reliance on aero for instance) that isn’t an excuse to free him from blame on anything. Especially when he’s the one that pushed that first domino no one wanted pushed.

Bit of back story here. Johnny Herbert has been talking smack about Alonso all week. Saying he doesn’t try anymore and should just retire from F1. So Alonso found him in the paddock today.

https://streamable.com/z2kp

Yep, I did. And it was just as lame as I thought it would be.

Look I get it, electric racing is going to happen, but this is just rubbish, that’s why fans where leaving with 5 laps to go. The whole thing kind blows. First, you’re not a ‘sport’ if the fans get to have a vote on who gets more power. The whole changing cars thing halfway through is a joke too. Hell at first I wasn’t even sure it was at Long Beach since I never saw a shot of the iconic fountain but then I remember that a Formula E car can’t make it that far so the track is a Fisher Price’s my first street circuit.

At least Neilson Pique Jr. wrecked. So that was good. It is the only thing he can do well. Even Pastor Maldonado never did it on purpose.