Day 11
On the other side of the mountains is the city of Chiltern. Surrounded by cattle farms, Chiltern is not a particularly impressive city; though it has a cathedral and a court house; which kind of affords it city status.
Founded in the 1840s, Chiltern swelled in size during the 1880s when gold was discovered but after the gold ran out, a lot of the city became and still remains empty. That is, except for one weekend in June when a new kind of gold rush happens – albeit a rush at 300km/h and for a gold cup. I am talking about the Chiltern 500; which is a motor race.
E
rnest Hemmingway once wrote that “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” I think that bullfighting is barbaric and I have no idea how one wins at mountaineering; which leaves motor racing as the pinnacle of sport. Sport by its very nature is interently pointless and motor racing, which is the pitting of machinery against machinery to see who can go the fastest, surely ranks as the most pointless sport of all.
Just like going to the moon; which also served no real interent purpose, neither does motor racing.
Maggots, Becketts, La Source, Eau Rouge, The Rascasse, Casino, the Rettifilo, Arnage, Hunaudières... these are not just the names of corners, they are the names where helmeted gladiators in charge of many hundreds of mechanical horses pull them up and change direction.
Had I been charged with spending some vast fortune like Montgomery Brewster was in the 1902 novel “Brewster's Millions” by George Barr McCutcheon¹, then I probably would have come up with the idea of renting a sports car and going motor racing. I don’t particularly like the idea of having some loud motor car to go blasting through the neighbourhood in, I just want raw unadulterated speed for no good reason; the best place to get that is on a racetrack.
Thanks to video games, I have been on many virtual circuits many times. I can tell you for instance that there is a red house at La Caixa at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya that you want to aim for; or that if you are stuck behind someone at Ste Devote you had better plan to find a way around at Mirabeau.
I secretly resent being dealt the cards that I have been given with regards when I was born because all of the coolest cars ever built, had all been and gone.
At least in video games and in my mind's eye, I have been around many motor racing circuits. If you'd asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, as a small child I would have said 'a race car driver'; the truth is that I have been on more than forty circuits of the sun and if you ask me that same question, somewhere in the back of my mind, the answer is the same. Obviously I will never do it professionally but if someone wants to put me in a seat, even in a LeMons car worth a thousand bucks, I am more than willing.
¹of which there have been at least 13 movie adaptations.
No comments:
Post a Comment