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?
This post was last updated at 12:00 PM., Thursday, November 6. Latest entries are “The Blobfish Boomlet,” “Is there a curse in New York City,” and “A Big Missing Piece.” The Instapunk Times is hot of the presses [ NOV 6 STRIKE ISSUE! ] Undernet Black was updated November 6. 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 the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and ...
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...
It’s Halloween! The funnest day of all for a certain sort of dreadly person. The music is just to set the mood. Feel free to come back to it in between the videos below. We’re all about masks today, and looking underneath them to see what’s going on with the elite saviors we’re depending on. Take a look and have some fun yourselves. Predicted this predatory new strategy back in February 2021 The Trump comeback victory in 2024 flattened the exhausted patriarchy of the Democrat leadership. Young eunuchs seeking to replace the Bidens and Schumers and Durbins are out of luck, whether they know it or not. Schiff, Buttigieg, Jeffries, Walz, Booker, and the fashion mannequin Newsom are doing nothing but give the male sex an even worse image than it already had. He’s slim and lithe enough. Just not us enough. Who’s left? What’s left of the old matriarchy reluctantly giving way to the new blood, which is raising the pitch of the public debate to ear-shattering levels. Sad to see pioneers ...
I’ll be quoting directly in chunks here, so there can be no claim that I am cherry-picking facts, situations, narratives, or contexts. It’s an old subject for me, as you’ll see, but I’m writing now because my wife gave me a hard time about surfacing the racial issues surrounding the mass shooting at Lincoln University, which I raised because she told me the report she’s read did not include the fact that Lincoln is one of the surviving Historically Black Colleges. This is important because the mass media are fastidious about concealing pertinent information about the identities of both shooters and victims these days. She suggested I was dragging race into a sad crime story. Then she left the room. As I expect many of you would too. We’ve been well trained not to see this particular elephant in the room. Or at least not to discuss it. Here’s the NBC account: One person is dead and at least six others were wounded in a shooting amid homecoming festivities Saturday night at Lincoln Unive...
The island of Manhattan once belonged to the Lenape people, like a lot of NY and NJ. Just asking the question. Because there is historical background, evidence, And repeated rumblings from our Jungian subconscious that’s afflicted with uncannily relevant visions. Writers used to be solemnly warned that “to be universal, you must first be local.” Why my explanation of a possible curse on the Big Apple will actually begin a two-hour bus ride to the south of the Holland Tunnel. Which is not mentioned by accident. The fingerprints of the Dutch are all over the origins of this story. The place down south of NYC is Salem County, New Jersey, which had a very special relationship with the Lenape people: The Salem Oak Tree was the real center of the county seat of Salem, where I grew up. It was so old and huge that its massive trunk had lower limbs that were the size of mighty oak trees themselves. The tree was already a landmark in 1675 when the treaty was signed under it. The Quak...
They make fun of Trump’s ability in racket sports. What he’s been playing in the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars in his second term. We explain. There’s a mass of loud keyboardists outside the beltway who develop and fanatically promote their own memes about the President of the United States. The recent news that Trump had had his second physical at Walter Reed fueled an immediate leap to the conclusion that he was at death’s door. People who had trouble spelling ( congenitive heart defect) were busy diagnosing presidential health with the expertise they’d already demonstrated by refusing to believe that there was anything physically or mentally impaired about the 80+ year old Biden. According to a flurry of breathlessly repeated inferences from brief mass media summaries of the Reed checkup and flu/COVID boosters, Trump was suffering from the results of a stroke, a serious blood disorder that was causing red blotches on his hands, and the penalty of a long lif...
Not quite true… Not quite true that I don’t care about you. Don’t care about whatever judgments you lay on me, but that’s different. Also not quite true that the big piece I’m referring to in the title is missing. It’s all there, more or less intact, but it’s missing to me. Why Facebook wants to sell it to me for just under $3,000. I’m not bitching about that. It’s the contract we accept when we join the network. Frustrated? Yeah. That’s the right word. Here at IPR, I refer to Facebook as something else I do in addition to this and my other website projects. Since 2019 (with one petulant year off), I have added posts here pretty steadily. They now add up to just under 700 posts in total. At an average of 1,500 words, that amounts to more than a million words of text and who knows how many graphics. At 400 words per printed page, excluding graphics, that’s about 2,800 pages. That’s a lot. I’ve never been able to guesstimate much hard data about Facebook. A little over 10 years of postin...
It could go a bunch of different ways. It could be signs and quiet crowds like the big Tea Party rallies It could be dominated by the womyns. On Instagram and X they seem the maddest. It could be clashes between protesters and law enforcement officers. Scuffles but non-lethal. It could be full-boat Antifa with violent intent. It could be hellfire, like the George Floyd riots. It could be Robert de Niro and a few of his very cross elderly friends and admirers. What do YOU think? Which is also important in and of itself. Investigating your own predictive imagination in this might be a helpful exercise in determining just how big a threat we are facing from the Deep State. I don’t know what’s going to happen. All I can do is share with you the factors I regard as the most telling. How they all shake out or come together is a mystery that can only be answered in the unfolding of events. But here’s what I think... The mass media want a giant national day of angry protest against the Tr...
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...
Her name is Rachel Gilman. I’m sure she’s a pleasant lady in person. Before we get into the nitty gritty, please take a closer look at the graphic in the lower right hand corner of the image above. This could be the most gruesome desecration of the American flag I’ve seen. It demonstrates the scare tactic of the coat-hanger abortion to a fare-thee-well. 300 deaths a year may be a sad statistic, but it is not a civilizational catastrophe. We stopped counting abortions many years ago. The numbers you see quoted are all guesstimates, riddled with acknowledged gaps smoothed over by minimizing assumptions to conceal the enormity of legalized deaths that occurred under Roe v. Wade. Numbers in our biggest cities are terrifying when considered by racial breakdown. In NYC, nearly half of all black pregnancies end in abortion. That’s eugenics-level population control. Why Planned Parenthood is so embarrassed about admitting the eugenic philosophy of their patron Saint, Ma...
Comments