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Simon: Nils? You can close in now. Nils?
John McClane: [on the guard's phone] Attention! Attention! Nils is dead! I repeat, Nils is dead, ----head. So's his pal, and those four guys from the East German All-Stars, your boys at the bank? They're gonna be a little late.
Simon: [on the phone] John... in the back of the truck you're driving, there's $13 billon dollars worth in gold bullion. I wonder would a deal be out of the question?
John McClane: [on the phone] Yeah, I got a deal for you. Come out from that rock you're hiding under, and I'll drive this truck up your ass.
These days in a race, when the driver retires there's some dude on a scooter waiting to whisk him back the the safety of the pits.
But it's nice to see competitors who may battle each other with fierce determination treat the other with respect and human compassion when the competition is over.
But there are drivers who do treat the mechanicals less harshly than other drivers. That will probably be a perpetual agrument, because in racing the only goal is to get the car across the finish line, what condition it is in when it's all over really isn't relevant. The ultimate race car designed for 200 km should fall part at 200.1 km.
But the engineers try to work around driver abuse. Automatic shifting, electronics to avoid damaging downshifts, warming up the car carefully long before the driver climbs in, lots and lots of things are done to make the car survive.
I just wonder what kind of success Kimi may have had if he had been of another era, where you could easily damage a car if you abused it. Could he have taken a Lotus 49 across the finish line? Who knows, maybe if he had to, he may have had the ability. But these days, the drivers go 100% from the word go, and the only thing they do is go fast, very fast.
And a Formula One car is fundamantally a spring car, most moving parts are designed for a lifetime af around four hours. From the brake pads, to the suspension bearings, they don't have a long life. And the engine and transmission have tons of spftware to protect them from driver abuse, from limiting downshifts, to controlling the air fuel mixture, to prevent a driver from abusing the engine in conditions where it might have run lean in earlier cars.
Not sure if this has been said, but I think our man DC gave Mika a lift home in '99. Being 9y/o I thought this ws fantastic and assumed DC didn't know he was there.
Murphy's 9th Law of Technology:
Tell a man there are 300 million stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.
Was that not the one where it failed on the last lap.
Also in the Science Museum in London there is Mika's '99 car, which he apparently crashed at 207km/h. It looked relatively undamaged for such a speed, although I think it was partially rebuilt.
Any pics/info?
Murphy's 9th Law of Technology:
Tell a man there are 300 million stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.
