Quiet News Day?

Most of the car sites today, like Autocar for example, are going with the announcement of the Vauxhall Insignia Country Tourer - a four-wheel-drive family estate car.

Not particularly interesting, even for someone like me who drives a four-wheel-drive family estate car.

It's brown:

 The Telegraph have been running two non-stories since the weekend.

A pointless review of the first episode of series 20 of Top Gear.  Pointless because it is written by someone more interested in repeating the fact that he is "not the target audience" for the show and then telling us that he didn't enjoy it.  Well, what a surprise!!!  Prat.  Some of the reader comments are suitably scathing though.

Their second non-story promises us the Top 10 Long-lived cars still on sale.

Only it doesn't.

I was expecting a list of cars that haven't really changed much in many years like the Land-Rover Defender or Porsche 911 (OK the 911 has changed a lot, but it still looks the same).

But no.  What we were given were a bunch of car names that have lived on - like the Ford Fiesta.  The early Fiestas bore no relation whatsoever to the new ones.  Pointless journalism.


Meanwhile, Autoguide have got hold of the story that "Ferrari is limiting its employees to only three in-house recipients per email."

This will cause problems if Fernando Alonso wants to send an amusing jpeg of a cat to Felipe Massa and all of their mechanics.

He will probably have to send the email several times to groups of three each time.

I'm not convinced that Ferrari have really thought this through.

Move Over Darling

This time it was Ferrari's turn to show driver favouritism - effectively ordering Felipe Massa to make way for Fernando Alonso to win today's German Grand Prix. Felipe was told by his obviously disgruntled Race Engineer Ron Smedley that "Fernando is quicker than you." This was team-code for "Make way for your team-mate who is higher in the Championship points tabel than you." They couldn't say it directly because that would infringe the Formula 1 rule about letting team orders bugger about with actual entertaining racing.

I actually do not agree with this particular rule but I do see why it is in place since as a viewer, I was robbed of an exciting battle between the two of them. But, at the end of the day, Ferrari want to win the Driver's Championship and the Constructor's Championship too and the best way of doing this is to favour their (currently) more successful driver. However, since the rule does exist and they did clearly break it, they should be punished by losing some chamionship points - and I wonder if it had been any team other than Ferrari, whether they would have escaped with just the fine that was imposed.

I enjoyed the brief interview with Christian Horner after the race - he was clearly delighted to be being asked about a favouritism row that didn't involve his own two drivers. But don't get too smug just yet, Chrissy, it's Hungary next weekend so it could be your turn again then.