Hello from the outside, peeps. I’m coming to you LIVE from the real world, welcome to our first proper Charla where we charlamos all things motor racing and no politics/social media. I’ve disabled comments below meaning you can’t, at any rate, argue with me. Nice work if you can get it.

How am I doing after NOT tweeting for a few days and uninstalling the evil Twitter app? I’m doing great actually, I feel wonderful, there was no going cold turkey or anything like that, ta-da! But as they say, if you need to go cold turkey, you need to go cold turkey – for the less fortunate and heavily addicted ones. I urge you folks: quit social media, leave all this useless fakery behind, skip the insincerity of memes, GIFs or whatnot. I can guarantee you I’ve achieved more in 4 (that’s only FOUR!) days without social media than in a whole year of constant suffering. To quote Juan Lennon, although I laughed and I acted like a clown, beneath this mask I’ve been wearing a frown; my tweets were falling like tears from the sky. More or less.

I’ve learned and tried many new different things, such as selling my poop online. Thanks to bit of research, I can now fund Iberianmph properly. More food, more poop, more money. I like that.

Sell you poop!

Our motto today – bite! (simple and to the point) – is inspired by the late great John Peel and his lust for “unlistenable records and delight in writing long and facetious essays”. There will be a major code brown video at the end, while we have already offended many a twittterati (I insist on the three t’s in the middle).

Back to Formula 2 then.

Formula 2 is back! The least boring championship on the F1 bill, along with its smaller sibling in the form of the relaunched Formula 3, is about to thrill us with some mighty action in Austria, at The Red Dull Bull Ring. The track is kinda conducive to wheel banging and first-lap incidents, plus they’re all going to be rusty, coming off digital eSports intoxication. “E” stands for “eez eet sports”? But check out dis beautiful virtual halo!

Screen grab: https://youtu.be/39OwweVgRx4

I watched all Formula 2 virtual races and it looked okay, however I fancy the real thing a tiny bit more. “E” wasn’t better than the real thing. It’s a game for schoolkids, and yes we DO want to attract Generation Z’s attention and make sure the sport is supported with fresh blood and freshly printed money. Digital is fantastic, we can win bigly, together. MF3GA.

I would call F2’s approach to racing pragmatic and that’s essentially a good thing. Here’s a small excerpt from an interview we did Didier Perrin, Formula 2/Formula 3 technical and overtaking brain, a couple of years ago. Enjoy.

There are three key elements/targets that we have in mind when designing the car: safety, cost, performance. When I say performance, be careful! It’s not the fastest car ever, performance for a one-make formula means not being as fast as possible, since they’re all driving the same car. Performance means a car that is not too ride height sensitive to allow the teams to make a difference with various types of setup, a car that can follow another one and enable our drivers to overtake. This is what performance means for a one-make series. Nothing to do with developing a car when you are competing with other designers, where performance means lap time in this case. For me, performance means on-track behaviour, being able to race, provide a useful tool to the drivers and a good show to the public.

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. And they have reverse grids. And it works. And they don’t complain.

It translates into a somewhat different looking top 10 pretty much at every race. Should the same driver win both races on the same weekend, he/she is God/Goddess. Surely.

It wasn’t an easy phase for F2/F3 fraternity at all (COVID shutdown), the phase when they didn’t know whether they’d even have a championship in 2020 or not. Jean Alesi had sold his Ferrari F40 in favour of son Giuliano’s career. The offspring drinks less fuel than the F40, I can comprehend Jean’s decision. Zë best deci-jean is his deci-jean. All jokes aside, we applaud Bruno Michel’s team of dedicated motorsport junkies. Bravo! Bruno is of course the championships’ CEO. I’m thinking of our 8-year-old followers. Chop social media now, kids! You’re up to no good tweeting.

Les BB (BIG BOSSES of the FIA and F2)

My top pick for at least one top 5 finish is Hitech‘s Luca Ghiotto, who also happens to be one of our fave interviewees.

It’s prediction time as far as I’m concerned and voilà, this is how my wild top 10 FIA Formula 2 Austria Feature Race is shaped. Girl, I’m wise enough to know that SR = Sprint Race first needs to happen before we can start applying our crystal ball magic. And you’re looking at the best predictor in the business. I’m the dude who stated Heikki Kovalainen would finish at least in the top five from dead last on the grid at the 2007 Canadian GP. Who did amazing? I did!

Here we go.

Pos. Driver.

1. Pedro Piquet
2. Christian Lundgaard
3. Guanyu Zhou
4. Jehan Daruvala
5. Luca Ghiotto
6. Louis Deletraz
7. Artem Markelov
8. Nobuharu Matsushita
9. Dan Ticktum
10. Jean Giuliano Alesi (F40 still drinks more fuel)

What else did I promise in the beginning when we was whining? Ah, a major code brown video to help you generate some poop income! Yes. This one is dedicated to the WRC’s lack of rallying activity and their season basically going to waste, the housekeeper – the FIA – arrived to find the place in a shambles. I guess that’s what you call “a period in the doldrums”. Well – a little bird told us turbochargers could very soon start “pressurising the fuel/air mixture into the engine” in exotic locations around Europe, e.g. a Baltic country on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland; population 1,300,000 (estimated 2015); capital, Tallinn; languages, Estonian (official) and Russian. Press to play. Watch the video.

Now you can sell your poop online. You’re welcome.

And don’t forget to delete all your social media accounts.