Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
F1 Forever… and Clark… and Hamilton… Forever…
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
He died he did in ‘68.. So sorry. So sorry.
How the best, most tragic story of F1 ever, unfolded. Jimmy Clark. Just possibly the real GOAT of Formula 1.
Grosjean. Made podium one year into Indy racing.
Last weekend at Indycar’s Laguna Seca, Romain Grosjean put on an F1 Show not seen since Jimmy Clark won the Indy 500 in 1965. Grosjean waged a war. Americans might not know that Grosjean’s F1 career went up in smoke a year or so earlier in a fiery crash that should have ended his competitive driving forever. His hands were badly burned. People didn’t think he’d drive again. Said similar things about Niki Lauda. F1 is where the superheroes live. Presently, three F1 drivers competing in Indy stuff. Ericsson, Sato, and Grosjean. All fast, no hurt and rebuild on the fly, and forget the ad-heavy car costumery… Yet…
Burned his hands, bad. So he came to America.
In 100+ F1 starts, Grosjean had scored, well, this:
In that same approximate period of time, Lewis Hamilton registered 99 wins, 175 podiums, and 3,995 championship points in 280 starts. Like everyone else, we were spellbound by the F1 driving show Grosjean put on at Laguna Seca. But it made me concerned. Indy and F1 have tangled before. Not always to good effect.
There’s fun stuff. F1 Champion Jim Clark won the Indy 500 in 1965, having given a bye to the grand dame of Grand Prix races, Monaco, to enter. He won by a full two minutes in the 50th race at the 150th anniversary of the state of Indiana. Set records for top speed and fastest lap. Jeez.
Lewis only beat Romain lifetime by a factor of 100.
Clark was also the only man who ever won both the Indy 500 and the F1 World Championship in the same year. Record race lap, record average speed of 150+ mph. He made it look easy. In three Indy starts, Clark finished second, first, and second. First time, there was a dubious black flag by a well-intentioned local official that cost him the win. Second time he won going away. Third time his car started chuffing and he lost out to another Brit F1 Grand Prix driver, Graham Hill. Not DNF, his and F1’s second second they always seemed to take for granted. Until Fernando Alonzo in the 2000s started wanting a “Triple Crown” consisting of an F1 championship, a win in the 24 hours of LeMans, and a win at the Indy 500. Nobody has that. After Clark’s 1965 win, the Euros suddenly descended on Indy. A near holocaust caused by the confrontation between bald old Midwestern drivers and Jet Set longhair drivers the Offenhauser vets thought weren’t man enough for Indy. See? I remember.
Thing is, I really DO remember the Second British Invasion, not the Beatles and Stones but the European drivers who descended on Indy after 1965. It was a bloodbath. 1966. Heard it in horror on the tennis court, not knowing how many might be dead.
What happened? The Euro-drivers thought if Clark could win so easily at Indy, with its huge money payouts, they could too. The Americans — yeah the Foyts and Unsers and company — thought no fey long-haired Euro-drivers were man enough to race against them (‘cept mebbe that Clark fella) or could get anything from Indy but a horse-whipping’.
This one I remember. Testosterone showdown between America
and Europe. Midwestern Yanks thought the Euro longhairs weren’t
MAN enough for Indy. They were wrong. Result? Monster Crash.
Europeans littler. Physically. Scaredier not at all. Which would seem to leave open the question of who is the best driver of all time. Limited by category. Talking open-wheeled here. King Richard holds the honors for actual cars with fenders.
So. On the one hand we have Jim Clark.
Probably time to play the music, och?
On the other hand, what do they say most often about Clark and his two Championship wins? Gentle on his cars, on his tires, smooth, great in the wet. Sound like anybody else we know, say, somebody with 99 wins and seven World Championships? But he is, you know, black. Me? I got that covered.
Then there’s Lewis Hamilton. I just liked the way
he drove. He drove exactly like me. BLM.* Sure.
He’s never heard of of Breonna Taylor. I’ve heard
of Emma. I actually read Nietshzte. God not dead.
Why don’t I care? Because though I’m not a Vegeterian or a Vegan, I know where the steaks and potatoes are being cooked. You, most likely, have no fucking idea.
Also-ran thoughts. You find where they came from:
“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly… Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you lullaby.“
— Langston Hughes
I’m a Formula 1 fan. Ethnicity doesn’t matter. In the small town of Vineland, NJ, I saw Mark Donahue and both Rodriquez brothers, all of whom died in Grand Prix crashes. Do I care who was white in that elect “die for your passion” context? Clark and Hamilton came from the same submerged tenth. Clark was a simple Scottish shepherd’s son. Lewis was similarly not to the manor born. Why you’ll never hear Hamilton claim he’s the GOAT. No matter how by far he outstrips the Schumacher hitman and his Nordic heir Max Von Schtuppenheil. Lewis is older than Clark or Senna ever got to be. He’s playing with house money. But like Clark and Senna he is to his soul’s depth a gentleman. Unlike wealthy Nordic SS Orangeman Max.who is and will always be a POS.
**********
Yeah. I can write better. Always could. Not a racial thing. A talent thing… and more importantly, a character thing.
P.S. Formula 1 Management doesn’t want you to see the video below. Max just walking away. Like any garden-variety sociopath. Hence no link. (Seriously, they won’t honor the link.) Max, whose wheel just crashed on top of Hamilton’s head, strides away from the crash without a backward glance at Hamilton. He will suffer a similar fate one day. Nobody there to care. Because why would they?
A Facebook friend sent me a comment today wondering why I was spending so much of my time lampooning a conservative news site he never looks at. I spend time on a lot of things, like ALL the news outlets, but in the grand scheme of things it only amounts to my spare time. For anyone else who’s concerned, here’s a look at the bigger news picture… The New Yorker: https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/2026/04/ai-fun-with-dick-and-jane.html The New York Times: https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/2024/12/gray-lady-down.html The Instapunk Times, 2019: https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/p/the-instapunk-times-morgue.html Brightbelt News, 2021: https://brightbelt.blogspot.com/ Brightbelt Perspectives, 2022: https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/p/brightbelt-perspectives-on-2022-midterms.html The Instapunk Times, 2025/26: https://instapunktimes.blogspot.com/ And before that, there was The XOFF News Network :
Graphic by Joshua Lake I’m changing my career mode today. If I were a senescent rock and roll band, which isn’t far off the mark, I’d be starting a series of farewell tours to give the youngsters a chance to see me before I take my final curtain call in the sky. I’ve already written enough to stop putting out albums, but it’s a habit that’s hard to break. Truth is, I am now resigned to the inevitability of an American Dark Age, which may come on slowly or rapidly depending, but the issue in the intermediate term is not in doubt. We have become an uneducated, secular, self-involved nation of barely conscious people taking up space in institutions that were corrupted past saving many years ago. What’s the point of me writing more? I’m writing what I do for the unborn ones who will come later and have to start picking up the pieces when being morally conscious and educated about the riches of human history becomes an aspiration again. Until then, I’m going to provide this préci...
Promise you, I’ll be fiddling with this one for a while. It’s too big for one go. Bear with me. CHYOS Club I’m going to show you a thundering herd of links. In a very deep sense, Oxford University is the compleat brain of the United Kingdom. If you’re to understand this post, you’re going to have to read, to look at long lists and deep piles of evidence. Their impact is simply too big to summarize in a neat way. Oxford is the intellectual culture of Britain, and its impact on the United States is not calculable so much as huge and inevitable. Oxford 1920, as depicted by Chariots of Fire. England 2020. 100 years later. How to get from there to here. So very simple. Oxford U. Evelyn Waugh, the greatest Brit writer of the 20th century, explained it all to the rest from his own Oxford throne; https://affirmationsmodern.com/articles/71/ : FTA: <<In 1946 the English novelist Evelyn Waugh infamously proclaimed that he did not write satire. Satire, Waugh wrote, “pr...
(1957-1966) You’re going to think this is as bad as being directed to the Hallmark Channel, the Lifetime Movie Network, or reruns of Fantasy Island. It isn’t. Yes, we found it because we’re old and remember when we watched it with grandparents or at home on Blaxk and white TVs. But this is one of those rare cases where the experience of seeing it again is better than the clichéed memory. There’s a lot more to watch than the one true plot of Perry identifying the murderer on the stand against all odds and confounding D.A. Hamilton Burger and Lieutenant Tragg yet again. You realize almost immediately that you’re visiting a skillfully produced presentation of a completely different, bygone world that makes every episode fun to watch. The first two or three years will do. Unbelievably, they made 30 a year from 1957 to 1960. Each episode is 52 minutes long, which means advertising was confined to about 7+ minutes, compared to the 12-14 minutes per hour of ads on network shows no...
Prepare for the Californication of the United States. Am I surprised? No. There will be much to discuss in future about just how ugly and violent things will get and how quickly, but those who thought they were voting for some return to pre-Trump normalcy are going to be shocked and dismayed about how much they will come to rue this day. Right now, I am simply marking the moment by reposting my current pinned post at FB as an indicator that I have long had a deep awareness of just how much trouble we are in for the shirt and intermediate terms. It may still be possible to head off a true Dark Age in western civilization, but the odds have shifted materially against that chance with the election results tonight. Here’s what I wrote back on September 19th. I stand by every word of it today. ********************* Take a minute to look at the opener here. We all know this is pretty much how things are nowadays. Everything chaotic, backwards and upside down, as if some law of nature h...
Lights on, nobody home. Strangest thing happened yesterday. I don’t usually get much help from other nosey people in finding material to write about. Usually, I just make it up for myself. But UPS made a surprise delivery here yesterday with a fat envelope containing a bunch of photographs and a small breast pocket notepad containing hand-scrawled sentence fragments keyed to the photos. So I’m sharing what I have, although there’s not much I can confirm in the way you’re supposed to do it. My source seems to be claiming that the New York Times as we have known it is gone, purchased by a third party, repurposed, and moved from its current location to another headquarters building. Still in New York City but no longer in the high-rent district. Until a few weeks ago, the derelict brownstone had been vacant for years. The new owners have done a high-speed rehab just sufficient to resume publishing. I can hear all the questions now. Who bought them? Why does the NYT give every appeara...
Here’s the gist of what she has to say: FTA: <<For those of us who have spent our lives trying to dismantle this endlessly destructive paradigm of patriarchy, it has become increasingly clear in recent months that something more terrifying is afoot. The wheels are off the cart. We are in the midst of a chaotic, demented acceleration of the most violent and cruel aspects of this system which has evolved into what I am calling Psychopatriarchy . Psychopatriarchy is a reaction, a backlash against the progress we have made on all fronts: women’s rights, civil rights, immigrant rights, workers rights, trans rights etc. It has birthed an authoritarian fascist reality, poisoning our social and psychological environment with terrorizing violence, cruelty and precarity. It has consolidated the billionaire class who are driven by the mindset summed up in the slogan “move fast and break things.” Or, one might say, grab things, rape things. Psychopatriarchy is found in the 12 people wh...
Take a minute to look at the opener here. We all know this is pretty much how things are nowadays. Everything chaotic, backwards and upside down, as if some law of nature had been violated. Which it has. Early in this century, wishful thinkers believed in a mirage called Hope and Change that turned out to be shallow, insincere, and small-minded. We survived that, sort of, but the ones who felt most betrayed, about 30 percent of the nation, believed they deserved more than the eight years of delusion which had been their sacrifice given in exchange for the real prize. In compensation, they wanted to elect a very bad woman to the Presidency of the United States. They were denied that wrongheaded but deeply felt desire. Since that bitter disappointment they have become obsessed with becoming as mean and hateful and ruthless as it took to wreak their revenge on the man who defeated them and the people who helped him do it. The bad woman led the legions of those smashing everything in ...
Available at TUBI and Pluto streaming services. PREAMBLE This will turn out to be relevant. I promise. There is a 1982 movie called “The Secret of NIMH,” which is an animated story for children about quite dramatic and dangerous events in a world most of us pay little attention to. In fact the movie itself has been characterized as one of the greatest and yet most forgotten masterpieces of its film genre. NIMH won a prestigious ‘Saturn’ Award but achieved only modest initial success at the box office, though it became quietly popular with home purchases over the 40+ years since. Here’s a quickie plot overview, courtesy of Google: “Mrs. Brisby, a widowed mouse (Elizabeth Hartman), must move her children out of their home in a field before the local farmer starts plowing. Unable to leave because her son is ill, Mrs. Brisby seeks the help of nearby rats, who have heightened intelligence after being the subjects of scientific experiments. She receives an unexpected gift from the elde...
Comments