Today I completed the task that I’ve been procrastinating over for months – and only mentioned on here in passing. It was a maths data analysis. Dull and boring. But necessary. And almost, nearly, possibly interesting.
That took much of the morning.
And then I realised, upon reaching the final page – and this really isn’t an exaggeration – that I had done loads of it wrong.
The air was blue.
At this point it had looked like I would be finished in time to watch qualifying for the Singapore Grand Prix. However, I had promised myself that I wouldn’t watch it until the work was finished. Still, at least I caught the error before thinking it was all complete – and it’s finally off my jobs list.
The delay meant that I didn’t get anything else sorted today so have loads to finalise tomorrow for the week ahead.
After qualifying, in which Vettel gained another pole position, we set off for a cache in Batley (GC4MCYJ); a puzzle we had solved earlier in the week.
This was a very quick find once the puzzle had been solved. Very easy overall really – we’re surprised to be only the third to find. Neither of us had our GPS with us for the hunt but it didn’t matter as we had scouted it out on Google’s Street View. A nice little hide here. The cache fills a calendar gap and continues our streak. Thanks for the puzzle and the cache. SL
Then, we continued to Birstall for a Nando’s and a trip to the cinema to see Rush, Ron Howard‘s latest film based around the events of the 1976 Formula One season. This was the year that tensions between Niki Lauda and James Hunt were at their strongest, the year that Tyrrel attempted racing with a six wheeled car, the year in which Lauda suffered his horrific accident.
On the second lap of the German race at the Nurburgring, Lauda lost control at high speed due to a suspected rear suspension failure and crashed into the barriers before bouncing back on to the track, and the car caught fire. The car was then hit by Harald Ertl‘s Hesketh and Brett Lunger‘s Surtees. The two drivers immediately got out of their cars, and soon Arturo Merzario stopped his Wolf-Williams as well and also Guy Edwards helped. They pulled Lauda out of the burning car, and the race was stopped. Lauda was sent to hospital with serious burns and was fighting for his life.
There are some hard to watch scenes in Rush, but the drama of the season, along with some of the pre-history is covered. All of this happened well before I was born but that season is one of the most talked about in Formula One history. Mrs Pitts wasn’t so keen – some of the gorier bits weren’t for her, plus she isn’t overly keen on motor racing as a whole. Still, I would certainly recommend it to anyone with a passing motor sport interest and those of a certain age who loved through the 1970s, when Hunt was the darling of the British media will probably like it for the nostalgia. The contemporary cars and racing were among the highlights, along with how accurate the voices of the two lead actors were – I totally believed that Daniel Bruhl was Niki Lauda and Chris Hemsworth was James Hunt. Utterly fabulous.
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