1. Verstappen didn’t win last time. And the weekend is about so much more than F1 – there are other races too and those races are often more entertaining than F1.

   But that level of motorsport is best viewed on TV. Really, unless you can see almost the whole circuit, sitting in front of your TV is best. Especially at that price. Even the Goodwood Revival has fallen to this: the central complex is now so large that a large part of the circuit is blocked from view. Fortunately they have big screens.

   1. David also killed Goliath — but it’s not the way to bet.

2. It’s not clear which is worse, being able to see only one small part of the circuit from a great distance, or suffering the arbitrary choices of what to see made by some silly TV producer. Back in the day, those who knew would set up on a corner or a set of corners and watch all the action that one place. Rally watchers did the same. You didn’t have any sense of who was winning, but the pleasure was watching the skilled drivers work. Given the two bad choices for watching circuit racing, one gets a glimmer of the appeal of Nascar, at least before it became homogenized to death … you can see all the action.
   Like rock concerts, where you can’t see the performers without a telescope or hear without earplugs, the appeal of “being there” has nothing to do with appreciation of the performance.

   1. At the First 2 F1 races I attended in the 60’s at the Glen, those of us who were still sober and not part of the Frat Boy crowd would keep manual lap charts. That allowed you to understand who was leading and what was happening deep in the field. Three months later you could compare your chart to the one published in R&T. There was a PA system. But even on the rare occasions that it worked and you could hear it, it was not understandable.
      Much like a Baseball box score card.

      Later races I was a a member of “Race Communications”, The Glen’s corner workers in white. We had more knowledge about what was going on than the PA Announcer.

3. The old Michelin tyres are long gone. Pirelli is now mucking up everybody’s race strategy by providing the wrong rubber for every race. Recommend an F1 TV subscription. You can watch every turn of every lap from the on-board of your favorite constructor, regardless of how many seconds they’re behind both Red Bull cars. And playback puts every weekend on your time zone, commercial free.

4. Kim you were right the first time. Marshall Mather’s “work” certainly is illiterate doggerel.

5. Who gives a flying fat fuck who is performing at a race, during the opening moments of a game, during a football half time, or during a 7th inning stretch or any other pause in a sporting event? I can only hope I can go piss or otherwise escape the performer’s usual self-indulgent butchery of a good song like the National Anthem, or the likewise painful experience of them shoving their own drivel down my ear canal.
   I go to sports for sports; if I wanted to hear music, I’d be elsewhere, like in a small concert hall with a few hundred or less like-minded people, not in a fucking stadium or race track with a shitty sound system and 80,000 other sports fans.

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