Wilson
There was a bat in the house last night. I faced it not alone but with brave Diva by my side. I trapped the fell beast in a small cooler & dumped it out the front door. My mother was near panic when I recounted the particulars of the battle, which I only did because she asked it of me. Such is her fear that tennis rackets have been positioned strategically around the house for use against any other Fledermäuse: my modern (1990s) tennis racket is at the ready in the living room & my room is to be defended by a vintage '50s or '60s Spalding racket (endorsed by the great "Pancho" Gonzales!). I thought it only right to keep her in the loop as to what was happening in the house, but if I had it to do over again I'd have kept my trap shut & allowed her to continue in blissful ignorance. I should have done a better job of protecting her.

The "Pancho" Gonzales racket is emblazoned with "Manufactured by A. G. Spalding & Bros. of Belgium." The obvious conclusion is that my father brought it back from Brussels, where he lived as a teenager with his parents & younger siblings, & attended high school. There are precious few artifacts of the years the Wilsons spent living in Belgium; so, neat!

This Week in Motorsport
Formula Fun!
The British Grand Prix was wild. Mark Webber of Red Bull (Renault) started from the pole, with his teammate reigning World Champion Sebastian Vettel alongside in the second slot. Vettel beat Webber off the start, but lost the race lead to '05 & '06 World Chamnpion Fernando Alonso of Ferrari during a pit stop that took three times as long as normal. Vettel then found himself stuck behind the much slower McLaren (Mercedes) of '08 World Champion Lewis Hamilton. Alonso disappeared into the distance as Vettel just couldn't find a way to get around Hamilton. Finally, in frustration Red Bull pitted Vettel for fresh tires & to get in clean air out from behind Hamilton's McLaren. Near the end of the grand prix, with Vettel running in second & Webber in third there was concern that the teammates would collide & take each other out of the race as they did last year in Turkey. Red Bull ordered Webber to maintain his distance from Vettel, but the grizzled Aussie ignored the order & tried his best to pass his younger German teammate. Webber couldn't find his way around the defending Vettel & they finished Vettel second & Webber third behind the lightning fast Ferrari of Alonso. Hamilton came fourth just a few hundredths of a second ahead of Ferrari's Felipe Massa in fifth; the two cars had made contact with each other several times as they drove through the last several corners side by side.

Vettel now holds an eighty-point lead in the Driver's Championship standings over the man in second place, Webber. Going into the weekend, Vettel's lead was seventy-seven points over Webber & '10 World Champion Jenson Button of McLaren, the two being tied for points but Button holding a place advantage due to his having won a race this year. Button dropped to fourth in the standing while British Grand Prix winner Alonso jumped up to third. Hamilton sits at fifth, with a big gap down to Massa in sixth. Vettel, Webber, Alonso, Button, & Hamilton, the same five who went down to the wire in the championship sweepstakes last season, in possibly the most competitive season in the history of Formula One. This season finds the same five in very different circumstances. Vettel has won six of the nine grands prix, & he finished no worse than second in the other three. No other driver has been on the podium in every single grand prix so far in the year. To make up the eighty point gap twixt Vettel & Webber, Webber needs to outscore Vettel by an average of eight points in each of the remain ten grands prix. (First place is worth twenty-five points, second is worth eighteen, & third is worth fifteen.) But Vettel has finished no worse than second, & second is worth only seven more points than first, not the necessary eight. Worse than that, the three grands prix not won by Vettel have been won by three different drivers (Button, Hamilton, & Alonso); so, no one man is accumulating the points necessary to challenge Vettel. Vettel's amazing dominance cannot continue, can it? Surely he will finish worse than second at some point in the remaining ten races. But will anyone else find the consistency necessary to derail Vettel's bid for a repeat championship, or will the trailing four divide the scraps amongst themselves, allowing Vettel to claim the honors as F1's youngest double World Champion?

Team Lotus (Renault) had a miserable race, with both cars dropping out in the early laps due to mechanical failure. The team has not made nearly the strides in competitiveness they had hoped for this year; they continue to be better than the other two two-year-old teams, Virgin & Hispania (both using Cosworth power), but the goal of scoring points--finishing a grand prix in the top ten--looks as distant as ever. Here's hoping that a corner will be turned at the next round, the Großer Preis von Deutschland the weekend after next.

By Endurance We Conquer
The week just past saw the American Le Mans Series return to action for the first time since April, the lengthy lay-off required by the series's dedication to its namesake, Le Mans. The 24 Heures du Mans is a brutal test of man & machine under even the best of circumstances; it is made all the more difficult if a team must relocate its men & its machines from one side of the Atlantic to the other. The return was inauspicious, more about why in just a moment, but there will be chances aplenty for redemption as the famine turns to feast with races to be held every fortnight for the next several months.

The inauspicious return is due to two factors, {a} venue & {b} medium. The venue was Connecticut's Lime Rock Park; I hate Lime Rock Park. Lime Rock is the antithesis of the Le Mans's immortal Circuit de la Sarthe. The track is short, narrow, & nearly ovular. Driving at Lime Rock must be the racing equivalent of sitting in a traffic jam. Adding to the woes was the television coverage on E.S.P.N. Not only was the race coverage abridged, which turns out to be just as loathsome on E.S.P.N. as it was last summer on C.B.S., but the commentators were horribly amateurish. Instead of referring to, for example, the green & white Black Swan Racing car as "the Black Swan Racing car," they'd say simply "the green & white car." Hell's bells, man, if your camera is showing a green & white car I don't need you to tell me that you're talking about the green & white car! But if you tell that it's the Black Swan racing car, & that Black Swan continues to be the class of the G.T. Challenge teams, then I've begun to have a greater knowledge of the series & the sport. What is to be gained from dumbing down the race coverage? The worst part of an abridged race is the lack of any sense of how the race is unfolding. An abridge race is inferior to both a full race & a highlight package; if I'm not to see the race as it happened, to gather for myself a sense of its rhythm & its surprises, I'd really just rather watch a short presentation of the race's highlights. I won't be watching any more A.L.M.S. races on E.S.P.N. 2; I will give the A.L.M.S. one more chance on the streaming espn3.com website, but I hold out no great hope for my future as a fan of the series.

In one last bit about motorsport, I recently read a short article about Audi's dedication to racing. (My hope is that this means Audi will continue to compete at Le Mans in L.M.P.1 even after Porsche's reentry into the fray in 2014.) The article contained a great line from Dr. Wolfgang Ullrich, head of Audi Sport: "Motorsport is brutal: only the best system prevails." Under the aegis of Dr. Ullrich, Audi has been the overall winner of the 24 Heures du Mans in ten of the last twelve years. I once heard it memorably remarked that Dr. Ullrich (& he's always called Dr. Ullrich) has forgotten more about running a racing team than most racing team bosses will ever know.

"Motorsport is brutal: only the best system prevails."

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
Moving Cloud, "The Chinese Polka/William Durrette's Clog/The Boys of the Lough" from Green Linnet Records: The Twentieth Anniversary Collection (T.L.A.M.)