The Explorers Club
№ CCLVII - The Hollow Nickel Case (1953-1957) & the Soviet spy Vilyam Fisher, a.k.a. Rudolf Abel, (1903-1971).







This Week in Motorsport
Let Us Drink Milk
The motorsport story of this weekend is the death of driver Dan Wheldon in the IndyCar Series finale at Las Vegas. I considered watching the race, but tuned in to find A.B.C. giving a pre-race retrospective on the mostly futile career of Danica Patrick, who is moving to N.A.S.C.A.R. full-time next year, which immediately soured the proceedings. (We will discuss why I hate Patrick at another, more appropriate, time.) I'm very glad I did not see the massive, multiple car shunt that killed Wheldon. I accept witnessing on-screen the death of a driver in a race I'm watching as a possible—& on a long enough timescale, inevitable—consequence of my two-year-old love of motorsport, but that doesn't mean I'm in any hurry to see such a ghastly happenstance.

Dan Wheldon (1978-2011), 2005 IndyCar Series champion & twice winner of the Indianapolis 500 Mile Race, resquiescat in pace.

Formula Fun!
{Round 15: Japanese Grand Prix - 9 October 2011}
Mighty Suzuka is one of the great grand prix circuits, in the company of Silverstone, Spa-Francorchamps, & Monza. It's flowing "Esses" & the sweeping 130R are amongst the best, most distinctive features of any track on the Formula One calendar. Honda shut down its factory team after the '08 season, Toyota withdrew from F1 after '09, & Bridgestone ceased being the official tire supplier after '10; there is only one Japanese driver currently in F1, the fearless Kamui Kobayashi of Sauber (Ferrari); yet the massive crowds at Suzuka attest that Nihon still cares about the sport. After the earthquake, tsunami, & radiation scare of the spring, it was also important that F1 showed it still cared about Japan; numerous charitable functions were organized around the Japanese Grand Prix weekend, foremost amongst them the gesture by F1 "supremo"-cum-Bond villain Bernie Ecclestone, who spend £1,000,000 of his own money to buy tickets for 3,000 residents of the radiation-afflicted Fukushima Prefecture. Having always been very fond of Japan & the Japanese myself, it is very endearing that the F1 circus always treats the Japanese round of the World Championships as something special. Mighty Suzuka!

Reigning World Drivers' Champion Sebastian Vettel of Red Bull (Renault) became double World Drivers' Champion Sebastian Vettel with a third place finish, his fourteenth podium finish in the 2011 season's fifteen grands prix (his only non-podium finish was fourth at July's Grosser Preis von Deutschland, his home grand prix). '09 World Champion Jenson Button of McLaren (Mercedes) claimed the victory, followed by '05 & '06 World Champion Fernando Alonso of Ferrari. Vettel started from the pole position, Red Bull's fifteenth pole out of fifteen grands prix, but hire tire degradation allowed him to be overtaken by Button during the first pit stop rotation & Alonso during the second. Vettel was gaining on Alonso in the closing stages of the race, but the team advised him not to try anything too brazen to pass the Spaniard, as the third-place points haul would be enough to garner the young German his second World Championship. Vettel became the sports second-youngest champion, second only to himself in 2010, & the youngest-ever double champion; Vettel is only twenty-four, having been born in July of bloody 1987.

In news of "my" other team, Team Lotus (Renault), for the first time since the return of the Lotus name to F1 neither car was lapped, finishing the race on the lead lap. Team Lotus has not made as much progress this year toward the midfield as many had expected, but their are clearly head & shoulders above the other two second-year teams, Virgin (Cosworth) & Hispania (Cosworth). Baby steps, baby steps.

{Round 16: Korean Grand Prix - 16 October 2011}
The Korea International Circuit is my least-favorite venue on the entire F1 calendar. (Though to be fair I've not yet seen the Buddh International Circuit, site of the inaugural Indian Grand Prix, to be held in a fortnight's time.) It's a disgrace. Every F.I.A. rule in the book was broken last year as they rushed to finish the track ahead of the inaugural Korean Grand Prix, every supposed "deadline" relaxed at the behest of the shady organizers. The track surface had barely cured before Friday practice, & all throughout the weekend oils & sediments oozed out of the tarmac, making racing conditions incredibly hazardous. It rained cats & dogs during last year's grand prix, so heavily that the race was red-flagged for over an hour, but that can hardly be blamed on the circuit; I love that F1 races in the (reasonable) rain, unlike those pansies in N.A.S.C.A.R. The long & short of it is that the circuit wasn't ready for last year's race, which should not have been held.

For this year, the track was in better shape, with the most dangerous corner having been reshaped to improve the drivers' sight lines, so as to be less of a plunge into the unknown. The pit lane entrance & exit are still the worst & most dangerous in F1, the clear cause of at least one perfectly avoidable shunt during practice & more heart-stopping near collisions than I could count during the race. It's as if the track was designed & built by amateurs, a fundamental design flaw that simply finishing the track could not fix. Something must be done before next year, before there is a more serious coming together of two or more cars.

As to the action, '08 World Champion Lewis Hamilton of McLaren earned the first non-Red Bull pole of 2011 with an electrifying performance in qualifying. Vettel started from second, passed Hamilton on the first lap, & lead the rest of the way, finishing twelve seconds ahead of Hamilton in second place. It was Vettel's tenth win of the season, compared to six cumulative victories for the rest of the field. Mark Webber of Red Bull finished third, while Button finished fourth, & the two podium places earned enough points to give Red Bull its second consecutive World Constructors' Championship! Vettel in '10 & '11, Red Bull in '10 & '11! Woo hoo!

Rally Monkey
I watched the Rallye de France this afternoon as soon as we returned home from Mass. Watching the W.R.C. is much like watching Formula One in '09: without a team to root for or against, I find myself wishing every competitor to do his or her best. I am simply fascinated by the activity itself. The more rallying I watch, the more I like what I see. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world!

Beyond Thunderdome
Since the summer of '10, I've watched a few races in the Australian V8 Supercars series, my interest being quite casual. (The name is atrocious, I know.) V8 Supercars is a touring car series, using heavily-modified versions of what were originally street cars. Last weekend I watched live coverage of V8 Supercars's signature event, the Bathurst 1,000, a six-hour endurance race up & down the insanely steep gradients of Mount Panorama in Bathurst, New South Wales. Everything about V8 Supercars—especially the Bathurst 1,000—screams "Aussie," Australia being a continent-cum-country of barking mad lunatics for whom devil-may-care would be a cautious, timorous attitude. Mad Max after all, was set in Australia.

Most of the races I've seen have been edited presentations from Australian T.V., races on consecutive days edited down to a two-hour package. Speed's usual coverage is M.C.ed by Marcos Ambrose, a former V8 Supercars champion who now races in N.A.S.C.A.R. The Bathurst 1,000 was covered live by two of Speed's N.A.S.C.A.R. broadcasters, one of them the former driver Darrel Waltrip, who screamed something bizarre at the start of the race, something that sounded like "Boogedy boogedy, let's go racin', boys!" Byeh? (Angels & saints preserve us from the corrosive influence of N.A.S.C.A.R.) I did not watch the entire 1,000, flipping back & forth from the race to the Ohio State-Nebraska game to Comedy Central's transmission of the motion picture Sex Drive (I've a wee crush on the actress Amanda Crew), but what I saw fit in nicely with my Le Mans-inspired love of endurance racing. The third of V8 Supercars's three "season of endurance" races is to be carried live on Speed next weekend, & my intention is to again watch the fine racing that comes from the strange land Down Under.

There are plans for a V8 Supercars race to be staged in these United States in 2013. An Aussie invasion? Watch this space.

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
Fountains of Wayne, "Amity Gardens" from Utopia Parkway (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: I started singing "Amity Gardens" this morning in the shower. As often as not, the R.B.D.S.O.T.D. is apropos of nothing.