A couple of quick ones for you, appearing here because to have put them in the main write-up would have given the altogether false impression that what took place today was an interesting motor race:
- Martin Brundle called him ‘Teflonso’ on the grid. How many of you are sat kicking yourselves right now for not coming up with that?
- When Ron Dennis was around, he became known for something called Ronspeak, a way of speaking in which ‘the wheel fell off’ would become ‘we had a serious optimisation issue relating to the installation and alignment of a rotating cylinder.’ Today we learned that Ronspeak is still dear to the hearts of all at McLaren, which is why ‘Lewis, turn KERS off, it might be broken’ is actually pronounced ‘Lewis, there is a potential KERS issue, a potential KERS issue, we need you to set a default X three zero.’ It’s difficult to see why it would hurt them to give radio calls that aren’t then followed, as this one was, by the team explaining to their driver what a default X three zero actually is.
- Part of the reason I’d sooner see Rubens win this championship than Jenson is that when told both he and Jenson were struggling to make their brakes last, his first response wasn’t, “How far should I back off?” but, “Can we catch him?”
- Toro Rosso’s new pit strategy of allowing the driver to leave the pit box whenever he feels like it needs work. Jaime Alguersuari’s first pit stop was brought to an end not because the mechanics were finished working, not because the fuel rig had been removed and not because the lollipop man had given the signal to go. None of those things had happened. Jaime just drove off.
