No, Elton John isn't entering the celebrity race at Melbourne next year... but there is a metric shitload o' racing on this weekend. Midway through our World Cup preview series, we take the opportunity to channel-surf during the half-time break and take a look at the biggest weekend in motorsport this year, including the Indianapolis 500, the Monaco F1 Grand Prix, the longest NASCAR event of the season in the Coca Cola Fahve Hunnert, and of course the only event on this weekend likely to actually provide an interesting race, the World Superbikes at Silverstone. We promise to at least TRY to (a) make this interesting for the rest of you and (b) get around to finishing off the World Cup Preview sometime before the actual start of the World Cup.
HOT FOR TEACHER: THE MILF COMPLEX IN MODERN FORMULA ONE
It had to happen once: the Courier Mail published something interesting and factual a few years ago. It was a 'Where Are They Now' photo of the Canberra Raiders' 1989 Grand Final winning side, with arrows and breakouts informing the valued reader (or the hapless schmo, given the usual respect for their audience that the Murdoch press retains) of the current whereabouts of some of the faces in the team photo. Guys like Badge Belcher, Glenn 'The Brick With Eyes' Lazarus, Smel Mefinga, Daley, Stuart etc - all pretty obvious answers, most of whom are either in coaching or commentating these days; Shaun McRae, then assistant coach to Tim Sheens, is now driving the bus at the Rabbitohs (needless to say it is not an Express service.)
One face that you mightn't have expected to see circled was that of one of the team's beaming ballboys. Until you looked REAL close and squinted a bit. 17 years on, that kid is on the front row of the grid for the Monaco Grand Prix. Yes folks, Queanbeyan's finest export (as distinct from Fyshwick's finest export, which is something altogether different), Mark Webber, has cracked the front row for the most famous and significant (if just a little preposterous) race on the Grand Prix calendar. We'll get to how he managed to pedal his underpowered Williams up the pointy end a little later.
Webber has gone on to encounter more hairy moments than your average Raiders ballboy, unless they'd happened upon Meninga with his shirt off in the changing sheds. Most obvious was some years ago when he was part of the factory Mercedes-Benz team at the Le Mans 24 Hours, where the Silver Arrows prototypes were absolutely flying. Literally. Through some aerodynamicist's dramatic fuckup, the airflow over the car at the incredibly high speeds attained on the long Mulsanne straight turned out to be not as great as the airflow under it. As a result, when Webber happened to be pootling along the Mulsanne in practice doing a mere three hundred and lots, the nose of the car lifted, and the motherfucker took OFF. The thing soared over the trackside fences, performed a complete backflip, narrowly missing a huge stand of trees, and crashlanded back on its wheels. It was actually in reasonable condition; in better shape, one would guess, than Webber's undergarments. So ended M-Benz's tilt at Le Mans that year.
Acrobatics in sports-prototypes aside, Webber rose through the junior ranks to become Renault F1 test driver, then scored a race seat with Minardi (cue his famous 5th place on debut in Melbourne). He spent a couple of years with Jaguar, where a whole lot of people who should have known better attempted to waste a whole lot of Ford's money by throwing a large self-promotional party in the midst of which they made a vague attempt at running a F1 team. Despite the crass incompetence he was surrounded by, Webber made many a good showing at Jag and finally got the call-up to the big time - Williams, world champions through the 80s and 90s with names like Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Nelson Piquet, Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve, as well as Straya's Alan Jones, who is still lionised at Williams for his complete lack of bullshit and willingness to drive the wheels off the thing. (He didn't turned into a fat lazy bastard until his later years in V8 Supercars.) Admittedly Williams were on a downward spiral when Webber joined them, about to lose their works engine deal with BMW (though that lot were arseholes to work with anyway), but Williams is still a top team. They may get Toyota power for next year (badged Lexus, to differentiate the branding from the Toyota team) which will help them out considerably.
An aside about Piquet and Monaco. The Brazilian, three-times world champ in the 80s, was always handy for a quote. He once said driving a F1 car around the ludicrous confines of Monaco was like riding a motorbike in your living room, which is as accurate a picture you can paint about the race tonight as you can get. It's not so much a race as a two-hour-long Evel Knievel style daredevil extravaganza. You won't see a passing move all race, but you will be sitting there going 'how the fuck do these jokers manage to race theis fucking cars around this place without totally munting themselves?' As an aside to this aside, Piquet also had a dog called Senna, named so Piquet he could kick him whenever he liked.
Monaco is all about qualifying well and holding station throughout the race, so for Webber to pedal that thing so far up the grid is an astonishing effort. Webbo truly is an axe - solid, dependable, and very sharp. The only vaguely disquieting thing about him is that he seems to have a MILF complex; his long-term girlfriend is nearly old enough to be his mother. Still, it seems to work for him.
SCHUMACHER: STILL CHEATIN' AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
Webber actually qualified third for the GP tonight, behind Alonso and Schumacher M. However, one look at the faces of Fred and Webbo in the post-qually press conference told you all you needed to know: they'd been gipped.
Here's how it happened. With a couple of mins to go in the final qualifying session, the quick lads all went out to bang in a 'banker' time, leaving themselves enough margin to dive back into the pits, bolt on some fresh rubber and head out for a last-minute banzai qualifier lap. Schumacher put in something like a 1m14.1; Alonso was a gnat's pube down on that, Webber less than a tenth back as well, Raikkonen and Montoya likewise very close behind. The second runs would undoubtedly be quicker. With three or four minutes left everyone dived in for new tyres. The way it panned out, Schumacher would finish his last-effort lap before the other guys, so they would get 'right of reply' if you like before the time ran out.
Schumacher was 'up' on the provisional pole time on his first sector split - for TV's interest they give split times at two points around the track, but the time only counts at the start-finish - but 'down' by almost two tenths at the second split, just after the 'Swimming Pool' complex. Behind him, everyone was 'up' - Alonso, Webber and Raikkonen were all on absolute flyers, any one of which would have been good enough for pole. So Schumacher decided to lock a brake entering the tight right-hand hairpin at Rascasse, the second-last corner on the circuit, and parked his Ferrari on the outside of the corner. Track half-blocked. Yellow flags. Everyone has to back off. Everyone goes slower than Michael. Michael is on pole. Michael will lead the procession around all afternoon tomorrow. Everyone else thinks of ways to kill him.
Whether this is the ultimate in pragmatism or the latest in a long line of bastard acts of cheating on Schumacher's behalf, I will let you decide. However, his ill-gotten success lasted precisely eight hours. By which time the FIA stewards had heard the case, listened to the weak excuses of Schumacher and the Ferrari team, then looked at the data from the car, which they'd ordered the team to hand over. And then they reached a decision.
Michael Schumacher will start tonight's Monaco Grand Prix from last place on the grid. Finally, if only for once in his long and dubious career, he's been nailed. Ironically, he'll share the back row with his teammate Massa Attack, who stuffed it into the tyre wall at Casino Square early in the first qualifying session.
WE NAMED THE DOG INDIANA; WE NAMED YOU HENRY JONES JUNIOR
Thanks Sean. The other big mo'sport event this weekend is the Greatest Spectacle In Racing™, the eighty-somethingth running of the Indianapolis 500. Most pre-race media talk has surrounded the chances of Indy glamour girl Danica Patrick, who qualified fourth last year and finished in the same position after leading late in the race. The astonishingly self-perpetuating bullshit factory that is the US sports media machine has generated some quality fertilizer this time out, with several talking-head columnists declaring that if she doesn't win this year then she's the Anna Kournikova of racing: massively overhyped and overrated. Thus unequivocably demonstrating their complete lack of knowledge about motorsport. Regardless of her talent, Danica's chances depend on her car (which ain't that quick, her team (Rahal-Letterman Racing - Rahal as in '86 Indy winner Bobby, who was briefly money-waster-in-chief at Jag F1; Letterman as in Dave, briefly host of the Oscars) and sheer dumb luck. By their logic, Michael Andretti, who has never managed an Indy 500 win despite years of trying, several IndyCar season championships and a tilt at Formula 1 with McLaren, was an abject failure who should have been culled at birth. Which isn't true, on the whole. The other irony of course is that it's these clowns who overhyped and overrated her in the first place, in order to get themselves more prominently on ESPN.
IT'S THE GOOD OLD BOYS, NEVER MEANIN' NO HARM
The same motormouths have cracked an almighty collective boner over the recent comments by Lord of the Cletuses, all-time NASCAR great Richard Petty (kinda like the Peter Brock of NASCAR except with a ten-gallon cowboy hat and big ol' sunglasses) who came out and said that racin's not rully a sport for wimmen. The gist of his statement wasn't that they could all get back in the kitchen and make him some pie, but that historically, for whatever reason, women haven't been successful in motorsport. Whether this was part of a carefully orchestrated campaign by NASCAR to draw attention away from Indy to the Coca-Cola 600, their own Bathurst 1000 held on the night of Indy race day (some guys in the past have tried to run both races, necessitating some rapid plane connections from Indy to Charlotte, North Carolina), it wasn't clear - but it certainly got column inches from the talking heads, decrying Petty as a busted-arse old yeehaa. Women can do anything, they spluttered. Which is true. There's no reason why they shouldn't make good race drivers - all you need, basically, is eyesight, reflexes, stamina, strength, intuition and marketability. So on that basis, the question is why haven't they made it, why isn't Formula One or NASCAR half-full of Y-chromosome-deficient types, rather than whether Petty is a Cletus for daring to point this out. Our position: There aren't too many sports in which women are asked to compete directly against men. And there's a good reason for that: men are from Mars, and women can't read maps. Or something.
THE BATTLE OF TROY...
...is the getting-old-very-quickly byline which is being attached to this year's World Superbike championship, which turns up at Silverstone this weekend. Wollongong's Troy Corser on his Corona-backed Suzuki GSXR1000 is pursuing Taree's Troy Bayliss on his Xerox Ducati 999R. Pursuing being the operative word; he hasn't actually caught him since race one at Phillip Island a couple of months ago. Baylisstic's inexorable surge towards the title aside, the racing in World Supers is always tops and will probably outshine the higher-profile events on the card tonight in terms of sheer entertainment.
In other bike news, perennial MotoGP champion Vale Rossi has decided to tell Ferrari to bugger off and will stick with bikes rather than going to F1, as he was concerned that being an F1 star would completely fuck with his personal life (i.e. he'd be even more of a celeb and would find it bloody difficult to pick up in nightclubs, unless he wanted to end up with slop-bucket merchants like Paris Hilton). In truth, Rossi has never been a F1 fan; he's more interested in rallying, if it has to be four wheels. The thing about rallying is that you don't necessarily have to be in your mid-20s to be good - forty-something guys like Marcus Gronholm, Carlos Sainz and Colin McRae have been very quick in recent years - so we're predicting he'll turn up in the WRC once his bike days are over (presuming he doesn't fuck himself up badly in the course of his bike career). Ferrari's interest in Rossi has certainly made the MotoGP title chase more interesting - with his eye off the ball, Honda's youngsters (Pedrosa, Hayden, Melandri and Stoner) plus the almost ancient Loris Capirossi on his big Ducati (old enough to be a hero of Rossi when he started out; Loris won his first world title on a 125cc Honda as a teenager in 1990) have taken over. Rossi failed to finish in the last two races - tyre problems in China, then the bike packed up when he was leading comfortably in France - and is a mere 40-odd points behind the leaders. 25 points for a win, 20 for second; game on next weekend at Mugello in Italy.
THAT'S RUBBIN'. AND RUBBIN'S RACIN'. COLE TRICKLE ROUND THE OUTSIDE, HE'S GONNA PUT HIM IN THE WALL. YEE HAW.
That's all we got for our Big Racing Weekend Preview; tune in again real soon when we get back on the Germany 2006 bandwagon and look at Group E, where we slag off the Seppos for losing to Morocco.
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