Arrivabene out at Ferrari F1

[ZoWie]

Let's talk about Ferrari. They're the only F1 team that could beat Mercedes out on the track, but they beat themselves with bad management on the pit wall, and in the Vettel cockpit where he found a new way to mess up every race.

Ferrari, sadly, is essentially Philip Morris Racing. They don't own it, but they pay most of the bills. The only thing keeping Ferrari from actually changing the team name is because, well, they are Ferrari. They're the only car company besides Porsche that actually has its own theme parks.

The team manager came from PM. That's right, his background is in getting people hooked for life on nicotine. Guy with the really cool sounding Italian name of Maurizio Arrivabene. Always looked as if he'd just eaten his mother. Scary mofo, though the team seemed to like him.

Gone. New guy is one Mattia Binotto, another great Italian name, and he actually has a background in racing tech.

Things have been weird at Ferrari for some time now. I doubt that anyone else noticed, but right now it says MISSION WINNOW in a typically self-conscious designer logo all over everything. Cars, team uniforms, everything. WTF? Who the fuck is MISSION WINNOW?

I couldn't take it any more, so I read up. It's a venture by Philip Morris to get around the ban on cigarette advertising in F1. Its stated mission boils down to finding ways to get people hooked on nicotine without having to (yuck) smoke tobacco. Its real mission is to get a big sign back on Ferrari F1 cars.

As an actor in a bad movie about F1 once said, phonetically because he didn't speak English, "I have come to see the absurdity of what we do."

[Libertas]

The funny thing about Ferrari is with my PS game Gran Turismo, known to very accurately reflect the DRIVING of any given car included in their game simulator, the Ferrari was the worst handling of the high end foreign cars, and the BEST was the Nissan GT-R.

Ferrari and Lambo have more power for sure, but the Nissan handles better.

Now, my FORZA game which is Xbox, that all changed, basically all the high end cars handle similarly which cant be the case in real life so i assume my GT experience was more accurate.

I would therefore not want a Ferrari were I to drive a car like that. Maybe I would change my mind upon driving one. Have you driven one?

[ZoWie]

Well, no. I wouldn't want to be the guy who wrapped somebody else's supercar around a tree. I have been known to pootle around Beverly Hills or Pacific Palisades making noise in nice rides, but never a supercar. They're a different breed.

In realistic games and, of course, in real world racing, every car does something a little different out there on the edge. That's why professional race car drivers make so much.

[ZoWie]

Series of 4 or 5 short feature pieces on the BBC site, with a lot of new dish on Alonso's rise, decline, and fall. Basically, every team that signed him regretted it. His personality and genius for making the wrong moves at the worst times prevented him from having a career almost as amazing as Schumacher's.

Basically, Indy just got a lot more interesting.