59 replies to this topic

[john aston]

Maybe it's time to hear from proponents of the Grand Prix du Roc...

 

DCN

Oh no , anything but that please. I know that , inter alios,  Nigel Roebuck thought it the funniest thing in the history of motor sport but I endured 3 minutes of this toe cringingly awful effort  and gave up ...Mind you . I never found The Goons funny either

[Rob Ryder]

Heretic... burn the witch !

[Doug Nye]

All depends on contemporary mindset John - I would largely agree re Ustinov (it seemed to me that nobody quite seemed to admire Ustinov more than Ustinov himself) - but (in period, 1951-1960 - so I would have been only 5-14 years old) if you didn't 'get' the Goons there was something unfortunately lacking...  Though I'm not sure what that something might have been.

 

I have heard that it was - for example - a great source for larkin' about at the fun-loving Cooper works, and at HWM - but it largely passed over the heads of the stoic, perhaps unimaginative, Lincolnshire lads at BRM.  Perhaps then it was more a soft southerners thing?  

 

DCN    

 

Rob - bit extreme perhaps, but yes - I've got some matches... 

Edited by Doug Nye, 18 April 2019 - 06:38.

[uechtel]

I don't understand this fervour of discounting the Indianapolis World Championship races, what have they done to you, where have they wronged you?

And no, I don't understand uechtel's post, either. So, in effect you meant 1,072 randomly picked races? For what purpose? If you wanted to show the "true" number of Grands Prix, why did you then forgot the 46 AvD Oldtimer Grands Prix, for example, 38 Grands Prix des Frontières, and countless others? Whatever, nothing of that changes the number of 1,000 World Championship events held so far.

 

So what have the World Championship Grands Prix of 1925 to 1927 done to you, where have they wronged you?

 

And all those other Grand Prix races before 1950, are they really not worth it, just because in 1950 somebody had the idea to add their results with some randomly chosen points together to appoint a world champion? It is only from a retrospect view that pople want to see the World Championship as a "closed series" to mach it with their modern view on Formula 1 (and their useless statistics like adding up WC points to find out that Ralf Schumacher was more successful than Fangio). And my original post was caused by when I heard from the reporter of the TV broadcast for the race, that "the very first Grand Prix (or Formula 1 Grand Prix, I can not quite remember that in detail any more) was in Silverstone 1950...". So are you supporting the viewpoint, that Farina has won his very first Grand Prix race as a rookie?

 

But in 1950 the races itself it did hardly matter, besides just two teams the vast majority of drivers were still driving single races and not yet really taking part in the championship. So to exclude the Grands Prix of 1949 and before from the celebrations is really as 'random' as my list (which includes - if your read what I have written - all the International Grands Prix, which were run to the 'Formule Internationale' - and its predecessors - and had the status of Grandes Epreuves. I don´t insist on the number 1072, but only wanted to make it clear, that celebrating the 1000 opens a big ditch between 1949 and 1950 which is totally undeserved.

 

And finally, I really don´t have anything against the Indianapolis races, include them if you want, but they simply don´t fit into the criteria. Otherwise I could bring up the question why you don´t celebrate the Indy races befroe 1950 and after 1960 as well. Were they lesser races just because they did not count to the World Championship any more? Indeed. absolutely to the contrary, I think the Indy races are representing a completely different 'world' of racing and therefore are worth to be regarded as an item of their own (it is hard to me to find the proper words in English at the moment). To include them into the World Championship was a quite useless effort of the FIA (and the AIACR before in the 1920ies), but in reality it did have hardly any effect on the real happenings on the race tracks.

Edited by uechtel, 18 April 2019 - 08:30.

[uechtel]

If we do count it, dose that mean Carlos Reutemann  is the true 1981 World Champion after all?

 

No. The World Championship is something that is much over-rated (in particular if the results are very close so that having one point more or less at the end of a season is mostly accidental). The FIA has some random criteria to decide who is their champion and that is their good right (even if in my opinion sometimes somebody else would have been a more deserve winner). But to me it is very unfair not to credit Reutmann with 13 Grand Prix victories (instead of 12), while for example Pironi´s win at Imola in 1982 or Schumacher´s at Indianapolis in 2005 are mostly undisputed.

 

I simply don´t like that the FIA tries to re-write history just to force it into their today´s viewpoint. To me it seems, what does not fit into their 'legacy' they want to be neglected as much as possible.

[Sterzo]

... are you supporting the viewpoint, that Farina has won his very first Grand Prix race as a rookie?

No, surely that was Charles Jarrott.

[D-Type]

Or Tony Brooks

[Vitesse2]

Or Ferencz Szisz.

[Tim Murray]

Or Maurice Farman.

[ensign14]

Or Emile Levassor.