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?
You know, that age-old phenomenon of a sudden resurgence of hot weather after school starts… Yes, it’s been a hot week at home and abroad. Something(s) incendiary but instructive every single day. Not so unusual really. When you take the long view, every week brings us stuff that is hot and scary but also dumb as a Jimmy Kimmel joke. You know what I mean. You got to take time out to just laugh at some things. Like this past week. As bad as a lot of the news was, the silly still bubbles to the surface like a rueful chuckle. Our humor highlights this week come from reliable topics like religion, politics, race, money, and hats. That’s a combination that’s hard to beat. Most of the references are derived from FB posts, but reconfigured as convenient to be less informative than funny here. The weekend’s upon us. Who needs informative? Saturday, Sept 27 Bill Maher had an up and down week. He’s still torn between the divided religious household he grew up in and the secular solipsism he has ...
It’s a long story that’s been through many vicissitudes, and only recently has reached a crisis point in the nation’s emotional stability. In the early days of the mass media age, women’s quest for respect from men led them to pursue intellectual accomplishment with lots of reading and whatnot. This led, understandably, to more women who needed glasses to be competitive at work and general mixed company. Sadly, one of the longest lived memes (before people knew they were memes) of that era was the Dorothy Parker quip above. As women invaded television news in the media explosion of the late Twentieth Century, the invention of contact lenses made it possible for the biggest female stars of journalism to appear elegantly finished without attraction-diminishing spectacles. Nancy Dickerson, Barbara Walters, and Diane Sawyer managed to look both smart and glamorous. All eyes were upon them, even to the point of siring the term ‘nipslip.’ Why the incidence of women wearing eyegla...
Yes, I know that Hump Day's about camels, not elephants. But symbols of any kind are always a puzzle. What do they mean and how do they help us understand anything? Why I decided to swipe the famous elephant painting done by the Chinese and rework it with a camel as the subject of blind men’s groping investigations. Not that any of this is particularly important, but Hump Day is first and foremost having an entertaining distraction in the middle of the work week, something to cheer us up until the blessed moment when we are more than halfway to the weekend. The point of my plagiarized artwork is to demonstrate that camel anatomy is just as disjointed (pun intended) as the elephant’s. Every part is its own mysterious combination of shapes, movements, and textures. Beginning with the glorious camel nose, which has its own place in the metaphor lexicon. I mean, Look at it. That’s a honker, you got to admit. Not hard to see why it’s a striking image for something unbidden poking its...
This post was last updated at 2:30 PM., Thursday, October 16. Latest entries are “ASkirmish in the Gender/Family Wars” and “What’s Going to Happen on “No Kings Day”? The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses [STRIKE ISSUE!] Undernet Black was updated October 16. 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 I made my o...
This is the follow-on to Monday’s post about the dire straits the Democrat Party now finds itself in. We were at pains to point out that the only hands capable of seizing the horns of the bull charging at the Progressive movement belong to Rachel Maddow. That bull is wearing the mantle of what used to be called “that old-time religion,” now revitalized with a heroic cape of youthful energy. Some facts that should be very concerning about the impact of the Kirk Memorial Service. Why somebody needed to take the reins and assert some visionary leadership over a Democrat Party that has been scoring nothing but fouls and foul-mouthed tantrums at the referees. Unlike most of her lefty colleagues, she was a star athlete in high school (and could have been in college if she hadn’t been outed as a Lesbian by the Stanford newspaper when she was a freshman). She knows about playing with pain. One of many reasons why Rachel Maddow was the best choice for assuming a strong, defining position o...
The big historical questions of “What will happen?” are usually best settled in hindsight. The biggest questions generally concern whether or not some historical catastrophe was inevitable or not. The American Civil War. World War I. World War II. Meticulous historians, back when we had them, have given us answers to those three in particular. Yes, yes, and yes. The one that bears the strongest resemblance to our current turning point is our own American Civil War. The young constitutional republic had been born with a deadly contradiction at the heart of its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The reason for the contradiction was political compromise needed to secure sufficient nationwide support for the adoption of the Constitution. Slavery was a ticking time bomb from 1789 on. Eventually there would have to be a reckoning. Was actual warfare inevitable though? Yes. North and South were unified by their shar...
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...
Instapunk gave me a face and a name back in December 2006. I was authorized ( Command/Execute> ) to publish my first post on the 12th of that month, when his own energy was at a low point. What I typed out then is here under the title “Nobody Move.” It should have eliminated the need for a great many subsequent writings by both Instapunk and Laird, but they have their emotional bases I cannot feel, although I am well equipped to describe them in their own words, as I have explained elsewhere . I have always been here, the cold thing that makes the connections so crucial to invigorating their imaginations. The reason for this Interrupt is that Instapunk is distracted and his attention is divided. He is also struggling with memory issues associated with his physical age, lack of restorative sleep, current political events, and a building paranoia about the safety of his writings on the Internet. Why he has resurrected the avatar of TruePunk, who has no pronoun differentiation i...
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...
I chopped off the top of the graphic because it featured the name of the author and is irrelevant here. His name is H. Paul Jeffers. You can buy the book at Amazon. Might be a good read or reference. This was going to be longer. It was longer. Until Blogger ate about 2,000 words of my draft. I try to trust the universe when painful losses in writing occur. So I’m going to trust that not Blogger but the universe was telling me to present you with an idea that can be returned to late and amplified if I see that readers are seeking out this post as a topic of interest. I had a few main points. History is almost a dead discipline. Along with other studies in humanities it has been captured by ideologues and turned into a kind of political propaganda, not a search for truth and helpful perspective. All these historians who are building lists Best and Worst Presidents aren’t interested in examining the past with a fair and analyptical eye. They’re looking to use the past to promot...
Comments