This Week in Motorsport
I realized something when I pulled into the grocery store parking lot a couple of weeks ago: I hate Mercedes-Benz. (More properly, I hate Daimler AG, formerly DaimlerChrysler AG, formerly Daimler-Benz AG.) I looked at the Mercedes next to Lumi—by no means does this mean I hate luxury brands—and realized I hate those German bastards for what they did to Chrysler. I'm a G.M. guy, I've no particular love for the former Chrysler Corporation/current Chrysler Group, L.L.C., but those Krauts bought an American company, gutted it of everything that had ever given it any value, and then set it adrift, whining as if they were somehow the aggrieved party. What has this to do with motorsport, specifically Formula One, the main focus of "This Week in Motorsport" posts? This means that only over my dead body could I become a fan of any F1 team using Mercedes engines, currently Brawn, Force India, and McLaren (it turns out that McLaren is actually Mercedes's F1 "works" team; Mercedes doesn't just supply engines, it owns 40% of the enterprise). This dovetails nicely with the curious phenomenon that I seem to greatly dislike Brawn, but is inconvenient in that I'd enjoyed seeing Force India's massive improvement in performance over the last two grands prix. Of course, I'd largely chalk that up to generalized affection for underdogs: in their first thirty grands prix (2008-09), Force India failed to score a single point, meaning they'd never had a car finish better than ninth; then, suddenly, a Force India driver finished second(!) at the Belgian Grand Prix and another was fourth at the Italian Grand Prix, just barely missing the podium. Sorry, boys, you're in league with evil, and in the words of William Shatner & Henry Rollins, "I can't get behind that."