A tie with the Faroes, despair-o

I hadn’t been going to comment one way or the other about the death by car accident of far-right Austrian politician Jorg Hairder, who wrecked his car after a long time in da club. While politics isn’t really enlivened by what he was peddling, he was on his way to see his mother for her 90th birthday and I’m sure she loved him very much. It wasn’t karma, I thought, don’t be cruel.

Then I noticed that Austria only managed a 1 – 1 draw with the Faroe Islands on Saturday, and the Faroe Islands scored first at that. My feelings about getting a draw against the Faroes are well documented, so I can understand why Haider might have been distraught and it all flowed from there.

Whether Austrian politics would have been improved by a loss ten years ago to a team composed of Gypsies, socialists, and illegal African immigrants, remains in the realm of counterfactual speculation.

Of racehorses and racecars

Since I don’t follow horse-racing, the salient detail from the press about the on-track euthanization of Eight Belles was that I found myself agreeing with Sallie Jenkins – not a frequent occurrence. However, I think she was quite right that Eight Belles’ fate was in no way unrelated to the breeding paradigm for elite horse racing.

The analogy I make, for my own simple understanding, is that breeding race horses is rather like building a Formula 1 racing car: the parts that give speed are allowed to grow, but weight must be saved somewhere else. In breeding terms, it’s by selecting for skinny legs and ankles, and in racing terms, it’s keeping weight, especially unsprung weight to a minimum. There’s a reason that there are safety requirements for drivers’ areas in the cars, or else they’d still be sitting on cushions in the middle of the fuel tanks and counting on being thrown clear for survival. But I digress.

At the risk of sounding unsentimental, it’s no surprise that horses break down periodically – and while spectators may recoil at the prospect of a horse being put down on the spot, it’s part and parcel of the sport. If you’re there, you’re part of that culture, even if the mercy killings bother you. Still, it’s surely better to be upset about an animal’s suffering than to be one of the yahoos who watches car racing for the crashes, which could easily result in the death of one or more humans.

To which end, I’ve picked a couple of crashes from Formula 1 to illustrate the point about selecting parts to be light for speed and how it can all  go wrong – but in both cases, the driver walked away.

a change of youtube pace – Vatanen demolishes Pikes Peak

Much as I likes the bunda, it’s time for something a little different… Ari Vatanen tearing up Pikes Peak in a Peugeot 405 T16, built so that Peugeot could amuse themselves after the demise of Group B rallying. (Because when the FIA bans a racing class for being too dangerous, plainly the thing to do is make a version of your car that goes to 11 and race it up the side of a mountain.)

There’s plenty to enjoy here – the bug eating shit on one of the cameras at about 2.45, or the right rear wheel almost going over the edge on one corner, for instance, but I think watching Vatanen driving like this one-handed so he could shade his eyes might the thing I most want to be able to do in a car… unlikely, alas.