The Magic Position

When I was in Grade 2 I walked up to my teacher Mrs Barber and informed her that I knew how to spell "Piquet". She probably assumed that I was referring to the popular brand of chewing gum PK, as when I started to spell P-I-Q-U-E-T she developed a curious look on her face. Because she was a dumb fuck, she had no idea I was actually referring to Brazilian Formula 1 driver Nelson Piquet. Realising she was out of her depth, she merely told me that that was "good" and preceded to busy herself with some other arsehole's finger painting or some shit.

Ever since a very young age I have had a keen interest in the world of Formula 1 race car driving. Every second Sunday during autumn, winter and spring I stay up to ridiculously late hours in order to watch the races in Europe. The thing is, unlike most fans of the sport, I have absolutely no interest in cars whatsoever. As long as a car can get me from A to B I don't give a fuck what make it is, I don't care what it looks like and I especially don't care (and have no idea about) what's "under the hood"*. I hate "car guys" and I'm both suspicious of, and disappointed with, girls who like guys who like cars. What I do like, however, and what appeals to me about Formula 1, are charts. I love charts, from my early fascination with the Australia and American Top 40s music charts, to my current last.fm obsession, charts are something I just can't get enough of. But not just any type of chart, the charts I like are movable ones. You see, rather than see cars racing around the track, I see entities that are moving up and down a chart. The start of the race is always the most interesting part. Whereas there is an orderly positioning of cars after the qualifying session, the start of the race immediately jumbles those positions and there's usually about minute where my breath is held as I wait to see just how the cars will reposition themselves in the chart after the first few corners of the track. It's wonderfully magical.

Although some people believe that the dominance in recent years of the Ferrari, McLaren and to a lesser extent Renault teams has made the sport boring, I tend to think otherwise. Not only does having dominant teams make races where one of the less strong teams does well more interesting, but also, quite frankly, I'm not actually concerned with who wins. All I'm concerned with is that there is chart movement somewhere, and as the second tier of teams are all quite close together in terms of performance, there has been plenty of movement in the team's positionings throughout the past few seasons. This year is set to be no different, whilst Ferrari and McLaren are once again going to be leading the chart positions, Williams, Renault, Honda, BMW-Sauber, Toyota and Red Bull will all be challenging each other for the position of the third placed team overall, indicating that there will be some significant chart shuffling taking place throughout the season.

Tomorrow is the staging of the Melbourne Formula 1 Grand Prix. People who know of my interest in the sport often ask me why I don't attend the event. The reasons are fairly obvious to me. I have no interest in watching cars speed around a track, my interest lies in all the data that is transmitted about the cars, not the cars themselves. I need to know all the factors that will effect a car's positioning in the race, what movements are made up and down the race chart and how this will effect the overall standings. This is information I can't receive whilst sitting in a grandstand, I need to be in front of a television.

Tomorrow's race will be the debut of Nelson Piquet Jr driving for the Renault team. Although he is driving one of the quicker cars, he has qualified second last on the grid, a very interesting chart position in the context of the race. In fact with the last two World Champions in Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso starting 16th and 12th respectively, and BMW-Sauber's Robert Kubica starting from second it makes for some utterly fascinating potential movement in the positionings.


*This doesn't mean I'm not taking good care of your car, Kate!