I once made a Fernando Alonso voodoo doll. Well, not an Alonso doll per se, but a few of us fanatically pissed Formula One supporters took a tiny F1 car, wrote Renault on it with a felt pen, and called it the Spaniard’s vehicle. Tacks were jammed into tyres, and a magnifying glass may or […]
Why Jenson Button has enough to smile at
2012 was supposed to be a Jenson Button year. No, the ridiculously fast Red Bull cars weren’t suddenly backing off. No, the McLaren hadn’t gotten away with photocopying Ferrari’s notes again. It’s just that this year was all about the tyre, and the whole field looked on the 32-year-old Englishman as being extraordinarily kind to […]
The world’s shortest love story
How romance began, blossomed and withered all in the space of an epic 98. I first saw her at the Arts Centre. The University’s cricket-loving population was sprawled under a giant screen, a distinctly visible demarcation between hundreds in blue and an equal number in green. Actually, I had seen her before — even […]
Not just another sports movie
The problem with pitching a story way, way too good to be true. “We open with a young boy,” gushes the director breathlessly — exaggeratedly enthused by every word he himself utters, his very tone an exclamation mark — hardselling his pitch. “Cute, middle-class, short even. With an afro. Wants to play cricket, be a […]
The article that inadvertently got me into Rediff*
*A friend forwarded this blogpost to someone he knew at Rediff, and they mailed in asking if I would write for the sports section. I was incredulous, because they had the one and only Prem Panicker. I did scribble a couple of cricket pieces but became their F1 columnist.. and one thing, as they say, […]
F1 Column: Melbourne 2009
That magnificent Brawn and his flying machines Goodbye, pecking order. The last time a Formula One team won on its debut was 32 years ago, in 1977. The team was called Wolf, and owner Walter Wolf took some aid from then-collaborator Frank Williams, and an engineer went over from Williams to work on the cars. […]
Most Wins=Champ? F1 09 Poll
Answer here, and let’s have a discussion group on the subject below. Also, here’s the FIA list of what would have been, had the wins-for-title theory been implemented through racing history. Of course, considering that the drivers didn’t know the rules,the results might have been significantly different. Heh.
