WOW Thread. I can't believe this actually happened.

[bobistheowl]

Ah, those early Grand Prix from the 60's and 70's were exercises in how to kill spectators and drivers alike.

The Coppa Acerbo circuit, near Pescara, Italy:

25.8 kilometers long, (16.032 miles). It passed through several villages, had a downhill straight longer than the flat one at Le Mans, then a 90 degree turn, followed by a four mile straight along the edge of a cliff above the Adriatic Sea, about 100 feet down. They probably had one ambulance, twenty miles away, and three or four marshals, covering 4-5 miles each.

This was a Formula One World Championship Grand Prix, in Italy, and there were no Ferraris in the race, because Enzo thought it was too dangerous to drive there. They never went back; it was too deemed too dangerous, after 1957.

 

[bobistheowl]

This is an onboard lap of Le Circuit, on the side of Mont Tremblant near Ste-Jovite, Quebec, where they held the Canadian Grand Prix in 1968 and 1970. It's all either uphill, or downhill, none of it is flat.



This is from my YouTube channel. It used to be a streaming video on the track's official website, and I saved the video file, (.mov format), that was downloaded to my Temporary Internet Files folder, a feature they used to have in Internet Explorer, up to IE6.

It was for the benefit of people with dial up Internet, who might have had to wait 40 minutes for this 2 minute, 11 second video to fully buffer, so if you wanted to watch it again, it didn't take another 40 minutes; you watched the copy that was loaded into your Temp files. People aren't as patient as they were five, ten years ago; now they want everything immediately, because the stuff they want won't be important anymore in 40 minutes.

They don't have it on the official site anymore, so this might be the only place on the 'net to see it. It doesn't have many views, because I don't add a lot of details and tags, to make it easy to find.

Jackie Stewart hit a rabbit in practice or qualifying, one of those two years.

A buddy of mine took the Jim Russell Formula Ford School course there, in the mid 80's. He didn't want to be a racing car driver, he just wanted to drive a single seat car on a road course for a weekend. He had a lot of fun doing it.

They had a CART/ Champ Car race there in 2007, the most recent major formula race held there. It was televised on that Newfoundland superstation that used to be on Rogers Cable, somewhere around channel 140, that had music videos, instead of commercials, to fill half hour blocks, around 1 AM, using the uninterrupted 'raw feed'.

I think they were the last broadcast station to air uncut episodes of the black & white Twilight Zone, because those were around 25-26 minutes long, including the 'next episode teaser', and a half hour broadcast is now around 21½-22 minutes, so they'd have to cut more than 15% of the show, to accommodate the extra commercials. That's a big reason why we don't see those old shows in reruns anymore.

The other alternative is Time Compression, like what TBS used to do to Connery James Bond films. If the film is meant to be seen at 24 frames per second, they run it at 28, and they can play a half hour of film in 25 minutes, and nobody really notices, other than that the actor's voices are a bit higher pitched.

That's why people buy DVD or Blue Ray, or download compressed rips from torrent sites. They want to see the whole show, not the part that fits the time block. I don't like watching one of my favorite old episodes of something, and the part I wanted to see isn't there anymore, because somebody thinks I would rather buy something from Vince The Shamwow Guy.

 

[User-E]

Desperate passengers push Russian plane in -52C weather after it froze to the ground. (they made their flight)

 

[bobistheowl]

Desperate passengers push Russian plane in -52C weather after it froze to the ground. (they made their flight)

The headline for Ivan Ivanov's article in The Siberian Times should have been
Many Hands Make Flight Work
in Frutiger 95 Ultra Black

Full size: https://cdnimg.fonts.net/CatalogImages/23/45030.png


That's just the sample text from the hot link, not some cryptic message.

papasmerf and oldguyzer will get the headline joke, and oldguyzer will tell me that my choice of font is wrong, but he won't offer a better choice. Even if he doesn't normally read this thread, he does use the Search for his own handle. A26F types always do that.

 

[bobistheowl]

I have about six terabytes, (about 6,100 GB), of digital video connected to my computer, and less than 1% is porn, by disk space used. Of that <1%, three-quarters will be recycled, if and when I need the disk space. I'm keeping the rest. I never watch it streaming online.

 

[papasmerf]

:unknw:

 

[User-E]

The headline for Ivan Ivanov's article in The Siberian Times should have been
Many Hands Make Flight Work

:biggrin2:

 

[SQUISH]

:biggrin2:

:biggrin2:

 

[God]

 

[RED]

 

[blackram]

This is an onboard lap of Le Circuit, on the side of Mont Tremblant near Ste-Jovite, Quebec, where they held the Canadian Grand Prix in 1968 and 1970. It's all either uphill, or downhill, none of it is flat.

Back before 1978, they used to rotate the Canadian GP between Mont Tremblant in Quebec and Mosport in Ontario each year; now the permanent home of the Canadian GP is Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal of course. I drove the Mosport track in the classic F1 simulator game, Grand Prix Legends, in various 1967 F1 cars. I wished they'd had the Mont Tremblant circuit available too, but 1967 was a Mosport year. Mosport and Mont Tremblant had many simularities, such as the natural hilly nature of the tracks back then.

 

[bobistheowl]

Blackram, they only ran the Canadian Grand Prix at Mont Tremblant twice, in 1968 and 1970. It was held at Mosport in 1967, 1969, and from 1971-77.

In addition to Mont-Trembant, the 1970 F1 season was the last time Grands Prix races were held at the old Spa-Francorchamps circuit in Belgium, (the new Spa course, incorporating portions of the old, was first used in 1983), and the Hermanos Rodriguez course in Mexico City, (it returned a few times, beginning in 1986, without the half tires embedded in the track, and with spectators no longer allowed to sit right next to the track). The Charade circuit in France, (also know as Clermont-Ferrand), hosted one more race, in 1972.

Jackie Stewart was largely responsible for having those courses removed from the schedule, along with Jochen Rindt. They were primarily opposed by Jacky Ickx.

In 1966, while driving for BRM, in a wet race at Spa, Stewart's car turned upside down, and the fuel tank was ruptured. He couldn't get out of the car, his racing suit, (not fire retardant, in those days), became soaked in gasoline, and there were no marshalls around to help him. Stewart's BRM teammate, Graham Hill, and Bob Bondurant, (who had also crashed nearby), got him out of the car, using a wrench borrowed from a spectator.

The old Spa circuit was all public roads, and part of the track ran beside farms, where there was barbed wire a few feet from the track, to fence in cows.

Charade:

was sort of a twistier version of the Nurburgring in Germany.

Rindt won the World Championship in 1970, but did not compete in the last four races. having died in practice for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, with a points lead that proved to be insurmountable.

Rindt was driving for Colin Chapman's Lotus team in the Lotus-72, a car which had a large technical advantage over the others that year. Chapman's cars traditionally were both fast and dangerous. Colin was always looking to make his cars lighter, often at the expense of safety. He gambled that his cars would hold together long enough to finish a race, and if they didn't, there were always other drivers ready and willing to step in, and drive a fast but dangerous car. He had a lot of success with driver Jim Clark in the 1960's. In 1963, Clark won four consecutive Grands Prix using the same set of tires, (I'm not making any of this up!).

Ickx was stupidly brave, and though all F1 drivers should be, too. He typically won most of his races on the most dangerous circuits.

I have a video file of a F1 paddock from around 1970. Rindt is wearing a helmet with his name hastily added with a felt marker, and one of the drivers, possibly Jo Bonnier, drives up, with his race car hitched to the back of his road car. Bonnier, or whomever, was a one-man team, acting as his own driver and mechanic, using some other team's car from the previous year, with his own modifications and repairs.

F1 used to be nuts. I've seen footage of Juan-Manuel Fangio from the 1950's pull into the pits, and get out of the car to have a glass of wine and a cigarette while the tires were changed. In the 1930's, Tazio Nuvolari used to drive with a lit smoke in his mouth. Even into the 1970's, during the races there were spectators walking around in the pit lane, and the drivers had to avoid them on the way out.

I have some amazing pre F1, (1920's-40's), Grand Prix video, most of which is on an external drive that has hardware problems. I'm confident that my geek can recover the data, and put it on a new drive, but that could be expensive, and is a low priority to me right now. I just have that drive disconnected for now, and it's not going to get worse.

If I can find that 1970 paddock video, I'll put it up for you on YouTube, and post a link here. I know a lot about F1 history until the early 1990's, and I still follow it, but I don't know modern era F1 in as much detail.

... I drove the Mosport track in the classic F1 simulator game, Grand Prix Legends, in various 1967 F1 cars...

I've never played that game, but I have seen and downloaded video files of GPL - back to 1967. Some guys had a 'league', and they made videos of the races they had against each other, with rock music sound tracks added. Those were really cool. I think the game was Japanese, because the had some additional circuits from Japan. One looked like a panda bear, and that might have been the name of the track. I saw another video game with cars driving on cobblestone roads in Sicily, like the town of Corleone, in The Godfather Part II.

 

[papasmerf]

I tried to draw myself but I had no idea what I actually look like.

 

[blackram]

I tried to draw myself but I had no idea what I actually look like.

Voila:

 

[papasmerf]

Voila:

Ok Let me try

 

[blackram]

Blackram, they only ran the Canadian Grand Prix at Mont Tremblant twice, in 1968 and 1970. It was held at Mosport in 1967, 1969, and from 1971-77.

Yes, I know, but the original idea was to be able to round-robin between Mont Tremblant and Mosport every other year. I assume this was done to assuage the incessant English vs. French debate that was already raging in Canada back then, and which affected even the choice of race tracks. But ultimately, it turned out that Mosport was the more modern track with better safety facilities, so they switched it to Mosport completely for the next 7 years, until Mosport itself was eventually removed for similar safety concerns. Since Mosport hosted it for the next 7 years inside English Canada, I think people probably smartened up and decided it doesn't really matter what part of Canada it's hosted in. After that, the race has been in Circuit Gilles Villeneuve (in French Canada) for that past 40 years almost. No protests from English Canada yet, for that slap to English dignity. :wink2:

Gilles Villeneuve, the driver himself, was killed in one of those tracks that were hosting it merely to placate intra-national tensions, this time in Belgium. He died in qualifying during the Belgian Grands Prix in Zolder, which was round-robinning it with Spa, because Zolder was in Flemish Belgium, while Spa was in French Belgium. These "national civil war" tracks were never a good idea. You learn how to make a track safer by holding it at the same place over and over year after year.

If I can find that 1970 paddock video, I'll put it up for you on YouTube, and post a link here. I know a lot about F1 history until the early 1990's, and I still follow it, but I don't know modern era F1 in as much detail.

Yeah, I've seen some videos from that era too. One in Britain I saw was run in the rain, and just as the green flag dropped, there were still spectators on the track itself, and they all scrambled to get away from the cars in the soaking rain. If somebody had just slipped in the rain, then they would've been history under the wheels of one of the cars. I thought to myself, "come on, forget about modern safety walls, and run-off areas, at least back then couldn't you have had the common sense to clear the track of spectators first?"

As for modern F1, past 1990, it's been mainly a story of utter domination by one team or another. This actually started in the 1980's with McLaren, but it continued into the 90's and beyond with Williams, Benetton, Ferrari, McLaren again, then Red Bull, and now Mercedes-AMG. Only interrupted by a few awesome seasons with relative parity between many teams, which were 2005-2010 and 2012.

I've never played that game, but I have seen and downloaded video files of GPL - back to 1967. Some guys had a 'league', and they made videos of the races they had against each other, with rock music sound tracks added. Those were really cool. I think the game was Japanese, because the had some additional circuits from Japan. One looked like a panda bear, and that might have been the name of the track. I saw another video game with cars driving on cobblestone roads in Sicily, like the town of Corleone, in The Godfather Part II.

Yeah, the game could've been Japanese, I don't doubt it, as all of these video game companies seem to be highly spread out, having offices all over the world, sharing duties with each other. I would doubt that Grand Prix Legends would have had extra tracks on it, other than the ones on the 1967 Grand Prix circuit, as they were trying to be as true to the 1967 environment, as possible, unless they released extra tracks later as an add-on. The reason they chose the 1967 season was because that was the last year before F1 cars started sprouting wings. So the car physics were much closer to road car physics, such as the cars being skittery, and drifting all over the place. You could break traction on these cars in any gear.

 

[bobistheowl]

I still see almost every F1 race. I'm just not up to date on regulation and driver changes, tech development, etc.

Early 80's, I worked in a magazine distribution warehouse for about a year and a half. The new issue of Grand Prix International usually arrived the day after the race. About 90% of the magazine was completed editorially by Saturday, and they just needed to do the race day coverage, and send it to the printer, for air delivery. The issues would start to be sent out to stores about 3-4 days later, so I was the first person to read the new issue, in Quebec region. All of the 'artistic' two page spread pictures were usually shot in Friday/ Saturday practice and qualifying.

I think my picture may have appeared in the 1984 GPI issue that covered the Canadian Grand Prix, and probably Detroit, as well. There's a guy in the background, about 4 millimeters high, wearing a dark red t-shirt. I was in that area on the Saturday, and wearing a t-shirt the same colour, so that might be me. If I can't tell, neither could you.

In 1985, I was sitting near the approach to the hairpin. In qualifying, a ground hog came out from under the low fence that was between the two sides of the corner, and sat on the track, scared shitless. Then it would move a few feet, and stop again; just what a driver wants, debris that moves on its own. At one point, two cars went around the corner at the same time, about two feet apart, with the ground hog in between. Everybody expected some driver to hit the ground hog, and most people thought it would be Andrea de Caesaris.

Elio de Angelis won pole for Lotus, and on the front cover of Dimanche Montreal, the Sunday edition of Le Journal de Montreal, sort of the French Montreal Toronto Sun, there was a picture of de Angelis, with the ground hog looking up at him, about eight inches from the left front tire, and the translated caption was Best Seat in the House.

The guy who wrote front page headlines for Le Journal de Montreal had a dry sense of humour. Once there were six bikers killed, stuffed in sleeping bags, with cinder blocks chained to their ankles, and dumped in the Lachine canal. Some anonymous tip told the police where to find the bodies. The picture showed the six guys laid out on some concrete, still in the sleeping bags, and a few cops standing around, taking notes. They knew this was a professional job, and the only way to find out who did it was for someone to tell them, in exchange for some sort of leniency. The dead guys would all have been well known to the police, who would not be terribly displeased by their departure. The translated headline was Settling of Accounts.

After the 1985 qualifying, I went to the exit of the hairpin to watch the Formula Atlantic race. de Angelis walked into the crowd near where I was standing, still wearing his racing suit, unzipped to the waist. I spoke to him momentarily, and shook his hand. Less than a year later, he died in a testing accident at Paul Ricard circuit, near the French Riviera, in a Brabham. Nelson Piquet had left Brabham after 1985, and team owner Bernie Ecclestone fielded shitty cars after that, because his interests in controlling the sport were stronger than those of owning a team.

 

[Wanker]

[h=1]Meet The Mice Whose Brains Are Part Human[/h]

https://www.iflscience.com/brain/mice-part-human-brains-are-smarter-their-peers

 

[User-E]

 

[Oilcan]

Look at this bitch.