F1

Yesterday I watched the Formula One race in Melbourne. I never watch sports, but I made time for this. I guess I was curious, and it was a rainy afternoon with little else to do.

Part of my interest was stoked by months of playing Gran Turismo 4 on our PlayStation. I've spent many hours pushing high performance cars around tracks and learned some appreciation for things like finding your line with a corner. GT4 doesn't offer F1 cars, so I was also interested in seeing the fastest auto racing for real. Those cars accelerate and brake more quickly than anything short of aircraft; I'm gaining an appreciation for such engineering.

Lewis Hamilton, from England and on the Maclaren Mercedes team, is probably the best-known racer, but two other stars are Finnish and I love their names: Heikki Kovalainen, Hamilton's teammate, and Kimi Raikonen of the Ferrari team.

I wasn't exactly rapt for the whole 50-some laps; in fact I napped through much of them. And the action is mostly quite boring. But when things do happen, they are quite exciting, and over in seconds. For me the climax was Raikonen's overtaking of Kovalainen on a corner after tailing him closesly for some time. The overtake was successful, but it seems he put too much mental effort into it as he subsequently could not pull out of the corner fast enough and ended up in the gravel, and from then on the race most mostly over for the Ferrari team. It's how much those seconds matter that interests me.