Captain Fastbastard Mayhem

Parmesan crusted chicken fillet and veg.

F1 tests plan to wrap driver’s entire head in cotton wool Posted in Motorsport, News by Sniff Petrol on Friday, March 4th, 2016 http://sniffpetrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Ferraricottonwool.jpgRaikkonen testing the new safety measure, yesterday Ferrari has become the first team to test a proposed new F1 safety measure in which the driver’s entire head is wrapped in a massive roll of cotton wool. While in Barcelona this week, the Italian team sent Kimi Raikkonen out for two laps with his entire head wrapped in a massive roll of cotton wool to see how this would affect visibility and aerodynamics, as well as to gauge reaction to the appearance of the car once the driver had his entire head wrapped in a massive roll of cotton wool. ‘For sure, reaction to the driver having his entire head wrapped in a massive roll of cotton wool has been mixed,’ admitted Ferrari’s director of forward planning Luca Head. ‘Some think it is good to have more safety, some think it is good to be able to, for example, see where you are going.’ For his part, Raikkonen described having his entire head wrapped in a massive roll of cotton wool as ‘fine’ though his findings may be skewing as it was later discovered that the cotton wool had somehow been soaked in vodka.

F1 announces new **** ideas committee Posted in Motorsport, News by Sniff Petrol on Tuesday, March 8th, 2016 http://sniffpetrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/F11987.jpgSome F1, yesterday Formula 1 has announced the creation of a new body designed to ensure that the sport maintains its high standard of coming up with incredibly bad ideas. The Terrible Ideas Team (TIT) will suggest new ways in which F1 can endlessly fiddle around with its own rules and structures to make the sport as needlessly contrived as possible. ‘F1 is currently at a crossroads,’ admitted one high-ranking insider. ‘Yes, the engines sound shite, the artificially rubbish tyres are tedious, and we’ve had the new qualifying format debacle but somehow people keep with it. We’ve got to work harder to make this sport so unbelievably complicated and unsatisfying that you just want to hammer a spoon through your temple with a shoe.’ The job of TIT will be to suggest yet more excessively complicated rulings to bury Formula 1 under so much tedious fine detail that the average fan can feel the very life force draining from their soul as they make another joyless attempt to understand what the merry **** is going on now. ‘If F1 has a problem it’s that fans are put off because the whole sport is not brain fartingly complicated enough,’ said one source. ‘What, you think people just want to see talented, interesting people competing in simple, exciting racing? That’s not sport. You think football is just brilliant people trying to score goals or that tennis is just supreme athletes hitting a ball across a net? What? They are? Well it sounds like they seriously need a load of inelegant and contrived bollocks that adds nothing and stinks of desperation.’ Insiders say TIT will be formally announced at the Australian Grand Prix, then withdrawn and postponed until the middle of the season, then suddenly reintroduced for the first race, then maybe not, wait, hang on, does anyone know what’s happening? ‘Formula 1 needs this new TIT,’ said an FOM spokesman. ‘To go along with the one that already runs the sport.’

And another one. Older, but just as relevant now... Alonso asks if other teams ‘need any help’Posted in Motorsport, News by Sniff Petrol on Friday, February 26th, 2016 http://sniffpetrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/davegrohl.jpgFernando Alonso, yesterday After a disastrous start to pre-season testing, there was more bad news for McLaren today as Fernando Alonso was spotted lurking around other teams’ garages asking if they ‘needed any help’. Spies within the McLaren camp says that with the MP4-31 in a frequent state of malfunction, the Spanish driver has divided his time between skulking around other teams’ areas asking for work and browsing the internet for a new deckchair. ‘Fernando came into our garage yesterday,’ revealed a source from one front-running operation. ‘He hung around for a bit making small talk then, just as he was leaving, he asked if we needed any help with “you know, driving and stuff”.’ ‘Alonso was hanging around our stuff for ages yesterday,’ said an engineer for another well-known team. ‘After a while he looked at our data and loudly said, “Nice times. I wonder if I could do better in this car? Wouldn’t it be funny to find out, perhaps here, or maybe in Melbourne” then he laughed nervously, stopped for a minute, grabbed a spanner off the bench and ran off.’ ‘With his own car not working, I think he just wants to have a go in a Mercedes or a Ferrari or a Red Bull or a Williams or a Force India or a Renault or a Sauber or a Toro Rosso or a Haas or a Manor or a lawn tractor,’ said F1 journalist Maurice Ital. ‘Basically, anything that’s faster.’

F1 drivers write another letter by Sniff Petrol on Thursday, March 24th, 2016 http://sniffpetrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/aletteryesterday.jpgAn letter, yesterday Yesterday the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association wrote an open letter to F1 bosses pleading with them to avoid poor commericial decsions that will damage the sport. Hours later Sky announced an exclusive rights deal in the UK, ending free-to-air F1 from 2019. Now the reverse psychology wing of the GPDA has issused another letter, this time begging those in charge of the sport to ‘please continue with short term greed until there are literally no ******* fans left’. The letter also urges F1 bosses to ‘introduce lots of extremely contrived rules that do nothing to improve the sport but look utterly desperate and completely ignore the basic problem of how sodding boring it is’. The signatories of the letter also say they want to ‘encourage new tracks and new ideas, but these must NOT prioritise interesting racing above the vital cause of making cadaverous old ****s even richer’. Finally, the letter implores F1’s governors to ‘actively shun social media and other technologies because if you just ignore things they always go away and definitely don’t make an entire sport look like an outdated old farts’ club that won’t be happy until literally everyone who was once interested in F1 has given up or died’. Interestingly, the strongly-worded letter strenuously avoids naming individuals, although it does make several mysterious references to a ‘spiteful, greedy microtwat’.

Still has the sound transmission, so you need to get the software and a microphone for your PC. It says it uses the speakers, but speakers cannot detect the sound transmitted by the device. EDIT: But I'm not too sure on how you can use the data once you have it. AFAIK it doesn't allow uploads to Polar Personal Trainer...

Always stream. A true on demand thing.

Re the winglets - I remember reading somewhere that the original & primary benefit was not on downforce, rather on engine cooling as it created a vortex right around the rad air exit points, allowing air to flow faster through the radiator. Which is why the Duc had them on in the first place, as it had troubles with engine cooling. The new ones though - those certainly seem to be downforce oriented

You don't get it. They're asking you not to. It's not that you CAN do it, it's that you shouldn't. There's a difference.

Dan at iRide Africa should know... Or... I am riding there on Monday next week, if you want to look at my Strava. Will send you a link for the times I've already gone there on the new trails.

piss off... From what I know of HA, she's used to snow and cold. So winter isn't going to be an issue. But, as always. Badass representing...

LOL Skynet or Umbrella Corp?

I don't know why they don't have it, where the CE does. But I know why the CE does. Quite logical, from my point of view. Landowner request in order to open up routes, hence rule forbidding GPS recording data, and rides being flagged / requested to be made private when the CE finds them on Strava etc.

simply put, land owners don't want the epic route to be publicised via downloadable gps files, as it creates a problem. Maybe not because of people like you and me, but you get people who actively search out routes and if they see something on Strava / Garmin Connect etc etc they think it's a legitimate route, and just ride it - without checking legitimacy. "It's on the internet, it must be true" Adding to that, someone may want to download and ride the "epic route" which would, again, be trespassing on private property, in places. It's exactly how we lost a couple of the farms on the Wannabees and Tygerberg trail networks. Point is as well - it's a rule of a race YOU want to ride. YOU signed up for the terms and conditions. You cannot then say that the t's and c's are stupid, for a reason such as this. You can query it, sure. But the rule is there most likely due to landowner requests, as a condition for them opening up their farmland to cyclists for one event each year. Thereafter, the routes are on PRIVATE land in places. This rule is there to respect their wishes, and property rights. Don't piss on that. It's not your right to request that they drop that rule just because you think it's stupid. EDIT: "you" referring to people who sign up and then complain about the GPS tracking, when it has a clear basis.

it most certainly does. You'll find that over teh next few days, if those rides aren't made private, they will be removed or the guys will face disqualification from any future events.

adding to the above - it's most likely a requirement from the landowners themselves in order to gain access to the private land it traverses.

yeah, but that's not the point. If you had recorded it, then they wouldn't have to screen cap the entire route as and when the screen changed. Point is, if you create a downloadable GPX file or other tracking file, which you can use to navigate across private land, that IS trespassing. People have lost existing MTB trails for less. With the live tagging, you have to manually plot the route on google earth or another geo-tagging device if you want to plug it into your gps and create a route...

Having been on the coal face regarding permissions related to access for MTB, I'll say that it's a darn good thing that this rule is there and is being enforced. We have enough rogue riders already stuffing land access up for us without everyone getting downloadable route info and "riding the epic"

It's a lekker fun section. As you get to the top of Spykers hill on Hoogekraal, there's 2 options (and I think Epic created a 3rd, but whatever) You come around that last switchback (just a couple after the fence crossing) and there's a fork. Cobra on the left, and a continuation of the climb on the right. Cobra goes down again on a fairly technical piece of single track, laden with small jumps and rocks. It's another ~250m of descending & climbing and 4 km or so altogether. The other option is to carry on straight, and then hook a left into a small section of loose single track, which takes you immediately into a contour hugging climb. I suspect (based on the TV footage) that you didn't take any of those options, rather just continuing straight over the crest of the climb straight to the top of Spyker's hill, and then went into the singletrack which has the switchbacks and WidowMaker. All 3 options end up at the same point, but with different degrees of technical difficulty.

There's some coming this weekend, by the looks of things. But ja. There's apparently a huge divot on the Canyon line on one of the tabletops thanks to all the front-wheel landings.

yeah. Patrick. In his own words - they're ****ed. And to boot, I know now why they didn't use Cobra. The large majority of those riding the event wouldn't have been able to handle it, based on the shortcuts and requests for removal of features.

#peoplearestupid

Like the guys that created an entirely new line in Hooogekraal, cutting out the entirety of the "Flow" section?! Just after that small rock hip jump on the lower section of Spyker's hill (the one with the landing made out of a rather sharp rock on the RHS of the trail) they made a new "line" right next to "Flow" - the super fast bit with the banked berms that goes through the trees - cutting it out altogether... Boggles my mind. Why would ANYONE want to skip that bit!?

what is that, a 36" wheel with an effective head angle of 60 degrees? Too much internet for one day...

And that, folks, is why it's important to have some sort of non-slip on wooden devices in rainy / mossy conditions.