Driving is a long learning curve

It was on this dirt karting track that I learned all about oversteer and understeer and the practice of drifting which the gifted Argentinian Grand Prix driver, Juan Manuel Fangio, used to employ to such graceful effect at 140 mph in a Maserati 250F.
I like to think it’s not wholly by accident (excuse the pun) that I’ve managed to remain prang-free in all those years.  Sure, there’s always the issue of some luck at play because there are some situations which simply cannot be avoided through the simple expedient of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But if you really enjoy driving, if you really enjoy cars and/or bikes, it stands to reason that you put in a bit more effort to get the best out of them and to protect them.  A small stone chip really grinds me so the thought of  inflicting damage on paintwork through sheer negligence is too horrible to contemplate.
Common sense is the most important ingredient in safe motoring but you’d be stupid to rule out the value of intuition.  Intuition is developed through a long term learning process which goes under the more familiar but less fancy sounding description of “experience”.  I’m sure most of you, hopefully all of you if you’ve been behind the wheel for any length of time, know where I’m coming from here.  Picture yourself driving along a busy road while you assimilate what’s going on around you.  Something in the hidden reaches of your grey matter identifies an unfurling problem and you take early steps to avoid getting caught up in that problem.   Your brain stores a locker-full of situations which it identifies as being probable hazards and up to a point, you develop conditioned antidotes.
The problem is though, that there’s always something new to encounter and I did that just the other day, fortunately without any consequences because I was riding my motorbike at a speed appropriate for my surroundings as opposed to slavishly following a speed limit mandated by some gnome who lives his whole life in a city council office and has never driven a vehicle during that entire life.  You see, my neighbourhood features heavily sloped terrain and rather a lot of lush lawns or paved areas which are intended to stop soil washing away during the rainy season.  Lawns need water and surplus water finds it rather easy to rush down paved areas.  As I came round a corner in the suburbs, I encountered a deep stream of water running across the road (out of someone’s property) at 45 degrees to the direction of travel.  You can’t straighten a bike in mid-corner to brake and anyway, there was no time to brake which would have simply compounded the potential problem looming just metres away.
There was nothing for it but to head into the stream of water with the bike heeled over and trust that the correctly-inflated Bridgestone Battlax tyres would find enough adhesion to keep my very precious  BMW heading in the right direction. A mild rear wheel skid triggered my pulse rate just a little but other than that, the hazard was negotiated without consequence.  It could have been very different though and this incident has now been added to the aforementioned store of warning signals lying somewhere in the brain.  Which brings us back to where we began.  The learning curve of life never stops, especially when it comes to dealing with road hazards.
Snippets from around the world
Just for a change of scenery, I thought I’d dish up a smorgasboard of news snippets for easy digestion. Here goes:
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 As you might expect, the British press is going into raptures over Jenson Button.  The columnist of one leading weekly compares his skills to those of Michael Schumacher.  The Brawn-Mercedes  “simply shimmered from apex to apex….without using great lashings of lock and sawing away at the wheel”.  Strange how that self-same journo looked under every stone in the paddock to find something nasty to say about Mighty Michael when the German left all and sundry trailing in his wake virtually every other Sunday.  The same guy also built a pedestal for Lewis Hamilton that Saddam Hussein would have been proud of, but curiously, both have suffered the safe fate and been forgotten about.
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 Jenson is indeed driving very well (and I’ve said as much in recent columns) but I have a sneaking suspicion that his cause is being aided by team tactics skewed in his favour, witness what happened in Spain last Sunday.  Poor little downtrodden Rubens thinks so too as he’s threatened to walk away if he gets “a sniff” of any favouritism being dished out in Jenson’s direction.  Well Rubinho, I suggest you start packing right now because Jenson’s the one who can string together every lap of a GP at a good lick and if that means he gets favoured, then so be it.
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 On a related subject, it galls me to read in some dailies that “Rubens was not allowed to race Michael when he was at Ferrari”. What twaddle.  Michael was the undisputed Numero Uno in the team and so he should have been with a record like his.  Clearly, tactics would evolve around maximising the team’s competitive advantage and that advantage mostly lay with the initials MS.  On the odd occasion, Rubens could keep up or very rarely actually lead (invariably when his car benfited from a better set-up) a race but how I remember a GP at Spa when Michael built up such a lead that he exited the pits from his first fuel stop before Rubens even appeared.  I know it to be true because I was there.
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 For the first time ever in the Japanese domestic market, a hybrid topped the April sales charts.  Honda’s Insight led with 10 481 units.  What I can’t establish is whether this is because general sales were depressed.  This comes at a time when industry commentators are increasingly voicing an opinion that Honda is changing direction and is making more and more cars that appeal to older and older people.  Maybe their withdrawal from F1 reflects this?
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 When Porsche displayed its new luxury four door  Panamera sedan to the press prior to its public unveiling in China, it was squeezed into a lift and taken 94 floors up the Shanghai World Financial Centre building.  Meanwhile, Porsche’s evergreen 911 continues to show a clean pair of heels to its Ferrai 430 rival in international GT races.
 Its GT3 RSR has won two Le Mans Series races on the trot in America and in Europe, its latest triumph coming in last weekend’s Spa 1000 kms race.  Now who was saying the car had no development left in it and who said rear engines couldn’t work?
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 Still in the same neighbourhood, rumours that VW was hatching a plot to buy out Porsche seem wide of the mark with the recent announcement that the two companies will merge their interests.  The Porsche and Piech (call them the “in-laws”) families will own more than 50 percent of the company with the Stae of Lower Saxony retaining its 20 percent holding.  Rumour has it that Qatar might be interested in taking a few share options.
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 The fate of GM’s European operations remains up in the air with German unions still resisting the thought of a Fiat takeover.  The Italian giant has got into bed with Chrysler though, and two of the first casualties could be the Jeep Wrangler and the Dodge Caliber.  The former is frankly an anachronism and the latter has never received market acceptance so in these days of enforced pragmatism, the weakest must go first.  It seems that any connection with Chrysler leads to a nappy rash as VW’s joint US venture with that company, the Chrysler-based VW Routan MPV, has disappeared from American dealers’ floors.
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 It often pays to see things in the flesh before making judgements based on photographs and never was this more true than in the case of VW’s 2-door coupe, the Scirocco.  This completely-built-up model has just arrived in SA and I spied one in the local dealer’s window last week.  It was sold before the water drops had been leathered off the paint and the pouting new owner had understandably left strict instructions that the interior was to be kept under lock and key.  So getting in was not an option but let me tell you, this is one great looker especially in the fetching shade of pale metallic champagne which clothed this example’s shapely flanks.  For now, the Scirocco will be be available only with the 2,0 litre turbo FSI motor but more variants will come in around October.  I’m not surprised it was Top Gear’s Car of the Year. On looks alone, it would earn that accolade but reports say its motion is every bit as fluid as its appearance.
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 Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame also writes for The Times and in a recent report, he launched a multi-barrelled attack on the UK press for its ongoing psychophantic support of any car carrying the Jaguar brand name.  He rightly pointed out that the brand has a chequered history of poor reliability, poor sales, and indifferent back-up and support not to mention different owners which are no more British than Jaco Zuma.  Even with its not-so-distant quality glitches, Clarkson pointed out that a Mercedes remains a Mercedes whereas a Jaguar is presently a Tata (Indian) having just morphed from being a Ford!  Nonethless, he reported favourably on the the XK model he’d been loaned by…er, Tata.
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The dithering FIA, the body that governs motorsport, has changed its mind again and removed the clause about “winner takes all” in the 2010 rules. The body’s proposed two-tier rules which will grant favours to teams that cap their budgets below an agreed level, are sure to hit huge flak with Ferrari moaning and groaning and Toyota threatening to pull out altogether.
It’s not certain whether the latter’s protestations aren’t an excuse to withdraw for financial reasons as the German-based Japanese team still hasn’t won a GP having threatened to do so a couple of times this year. Interestingly, Ross Brawn attributes a lot of his team’s unexpected success to the very fact that a large corporate body (Honda) is no longer controlling the day to day operations and drowning practicality in bureaucracy.