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?
Exhibit 1. The Myth of Scientific Omniscience Where to start. There are so many places to start, all with consistently alarming intimations of one deep problem. The inference is seditious of rationality as we have deified it in science. I’m going to show you some of the more accessibly evocative starting points, not to drag you into the weeds of higher mathematics, but to stress some elements of simplicity that overthrow the fallacy called Artificial Intelligence. Bear with me. Just look for now. I’ll make connections as we proceed after viewing the items below. Exhibit 2. Turing Test Fallacy Exhibit 3. The Proof of Digital Inferiority (It works. Click where indicated on screen.) Exhibit 4. The Implementation Overreach Exhibit 5. The Implicatuons of “Sensitive Dependence” Exhibit 6. The Measurement Problem Exhibit 7. The Illusion of Control Exhibit 8. The Hammer/Nail Delusion Exhibit 9. The Impossibility of Artificial Intelligence Exhibit 10. The Oversimplification Problem Exhibit 11. ...
Yeah, I did that. Am I fair? I’m principally a thinker and writer, which often but not always go together. As a thinker I use writing as a tool for thinking, because writing forces you to deal with matters of order, precision, logic, and moral context in testing your thinking. If you can’t write a thought down and agree with what you’ve written, you haven’t thought it through. I tend to be, try to be, fair in that process. But being a writer also offers the opportunity to go the next step beyond documentation. Because much of what I think is not popular, generally accepted in its positions, or understood by undisciplined minds, I also tend to create a kind of commentary called satire. Satire is inherently UN fair, in that it is meant to provoke readers to do their own thinking when they are angered or offended by a satirical provocation. For those who are inclined to agree with the unfairness, there is the collateral benefit of laughter. Funny requires no justification. It just is...
The only objective of the current Deep State Democrat Party is just a hellish fetish. It was probably rude of me to interrupt the umpty-umpteenth nitpicking of the fascist/commie definitional argle-bargle that’s gripped American political partisans since the McCarthy era. (Explained here for all the trouble it’s caused). Not my concern anymore. There’s a bigger problem this kind of empty back and forth helps conceal. So I described the real problem in a comment I thought I’d share here with people who might actually read it: The UniParty State No Longer Has Any Ideology Historical antecedents are useful, but they can also be counterproductive diversions. Parsing the differences and similarities between communism and fascism/Nazism is no longer useful because we are looking at a new paradigm. Both fascism and communism had an ideological base on which activist organizations and ultimately states were built. But once they had shown the power and elitist protections of the state there wa...
Our own Queen Iris Stairway to Heaven A Whiter Shade of Pale (Procol Harum) You Don’t Own Me (Leslie Gore) All I Knead (The Hollies) Take on Me (Aha!) Grand Prize Winner: Bohemian Catsody Got your mind right, yet? Good. Happy Hump Day .
Click the graphic above to watch the Rumble video Why this post? The last 48 hours or so have defined the beginning of a new phase in the adventure of Trump 2.0. Phase 1 was fixing the border, addressing the hot wars in foreign climes, and launching a new trade strategy based on tariffs. Phase 2 was not a restart but a new layer, the beginning of calling the criminals of Trump 1.0 to account, ramping up the deportation campaign in Sanctuary locations, and fighting back against the locally based judicial insurrection against the 2024 election of Trump and his Americans First policies. Phase 3 is another new layer, the immediate aftermath of the death of the Democrat Party in last night’s election results. I’m calling it the Blobfish Boomlet, because the outstanding feature of the Blobfish is that it is ugly and shapeless, flaccid inertness disguising itself with inflated media presence. Pundits insist we are looking at an ideological divide, a collision between two diametric...
Representative Clay Higgins (R, LA) Is everyone ready for this? Getting what you wanted? There’s an old saying, “Be careful what you wish for… you might get it.” We’re about to have the most highly publicized rape trial media coverage in history for a rape trial that will never result in any convictions. A more tactless way of putting it is to say we are about to have the public pissing contest to end all public pissing contests. Trump called for this bill to pass. Democrats are smacking their lips. Republicans are afraid that MAGA constituencies obsessed with a sense of injustice about the victims are melting away in Christian-sounding dudgeon. Now it’s going to happen. Sometime today probably. Passage of the bill, I mean. Actual distribution of the documents will still be a burdensome process because everyone agrees redactions will be needed to protect the innocent. But, but, but… we will get to see the Democrat Party’s idea of “Democracy” in action. No wonder every member of t...
This was going to be a Facebook joke, playing on the contrast between the haughty New Yorker grand dame and the plainspoken Trump 2.0 disdain for reflexive mass media TDS. When I looked Jane Mayer up in Wikipedia I discovered the need to write this post. The woman is an archetype of the particular kind of box highly influential lefties in the nation’s press come from. They are by no means representative of the nation they purport to understand and cover objectively in their reporting and opinionating. Back in April of this year, I wrote a post called “ TDS is a coalition not a monolith .” It described criteria that define various ways in which Trump haters are limited in their knowledge of American life despite levels of education, power, and prosperity that might seem guaranteed to give them broad insight into their countrymen as a whole. Limiting factors include the isolating effects of being among the overpaid and over-indulged, the vertical siloing effects of geography...
This post was last updated at 12:30 PM, Wednesday, November 19. Latest entries are “Profile in Courage on the Epstein Fiasco,” “Sick of Fascist-Commie Circular Firing Squad,” and “Our Idiot Judiciary.” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses! [ NOV 19 STRIKE ISSUE! ] Undernet Black was updated November 19. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in th...
Yeah. He’s old. What of it? He can do it. But does he have to? …if Trump was thinking about resigning at some point. This could all be projection on my part. Probably is. But I’m old enough to have experienced the gradual loss of patience that comes with a life full of intense contending in a lot of different arenas. You get tired of seeing the same patterns of weakness and distraction even in people you have good reason to trust. He’s getting more irascible. I know what that’s all about. The usual army of enemies want to read this as a sign of burgeoning dementia. That’s not what it is. It’s rather the beginning of the question, “How much more of this shit is worth taking day after day? When have I done enough? When might it be appropriate to trust other younger ones to carry on, to come along from the ranks, to learn and practice the key lessons I have shown them?” Old age is about standing back to some extent. To see things from outside the fray, patterns indicating subtler ...
It’s Eastertide and I am moved to look for whatever bridges there might be to the people who suffer from TDS but are not necessarily evil at heart. The compound fracture in the soul of this nation needs to be healed, at least enough that we can begin to work together in sensible ways to repair years of decline in so many institutions and belief systems. This post is an attempt in that direction, a search for some different ways of describing and understanding the rifts that imperil us all. I’ll begin with a proposition: Susceptibility to irrational hatred of Donald Trump is not primarily a function of political convictions. It’s deeper than that, which is why it’s so hard to understand. The haters are so fond of labels that it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. Or forest s to be more precise. There’s more than one forest of TDS sufferers. This post is not about establishing more labels. It’s about describing several different mentalities that lead inadvertently to the Occa...
Comments