That was awesome! I love this stuff. Thank you. I bet you would love the 3 (?) docs Bob Landis has done for the show Nature on PBS.
Rally fans are crazier than rally drivers. I used to be a huge racing fan. I liked all racing but was really into F1 and by far my favorite driver was Ayrton Senna. The Prost/Mansell/Senna/Berger era was my favorite era in racing. I would get up in the middle of the night to watch qualifying FFS. One of the best trips of my life was going to the 1990 Monaco Grand Prix and seeing all of them race and Senna win. So when Senna crashed and died it was a big deal for me. It was also the first time that I ever cared about a "celebrity" death which also surprised me. Later I stumbled across the footage from Senna's onboard camera on his last lap at San Marino in 1994 and I could see what he saw in the last few moments of his life. That was spooky enough but what really gave me frisson was when I saw him move his head after the crash. I always thought it was an instantaneous death but then I realized that he probably had at least some awareness of what was going on and that freaked me out beyond reason.
OK fine. I was thinking about posting this video that I have watched dozens of times:
That is amazing. Thinking about the universe (especially when I was a teen on acid and laying on the ground pontificating about the stars) is stretching the limits of my brain. I am lucky I did not have access to images like this then. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140605.html Small nit pic: Isn't that Mike Oldfield music and not Pink Floyd as attributed?
Scary thing is WRC is now as quick or quicker than the B's were, despite roughly half the power-to-weight. Let's hear it for computers. I was at this rally: And you watch the SCCA guys, and you're on the corner, and you're on the inside, thank you very much, with a tree next to you, and you're getting good shots, and you brought a ladder so SpeedVision is your new buddy and they're hanging out with you, and you watch the cars and you get to the point where you think "I could do that, if I had some practice, and din't care about wrapping a $90k subaru around a tree." And then you go home and lookitthat! WRC Sweden is on! And you NOPE the fuck right out. RIP Colin.
So what you're saying is, we should all get SCCA licenses and do 24 Hours of LeMons or Chump Car as Team Hubski.you watch the cars and you get to the point where you think "I could do that, if I had some practice, and din't care about wrapping a $90k subaru around a tree."
Not mentioned - one reason I was at that rally in 2003 is my cousin was in it. he was in 2nd for amateur until he broke his car (a hot 323). This is his usual performance: he does really, really well until he breaks his car. Not his fault; he lacks the money to really keep the beastie in the kind of fighting weight necessary to roll against the heavyweights. But he's a hell of a driver. Both he and his dad were national autocross champions back in the '80s. My uncle used to navigate rallies professionally (primarily the IBGAR) and made enough in purses to get on Good Morning America. My cuz did one of those $200 races (you can't spend more than $200 on the car, excluding mandatory safety equipment) and said it was a spectacularly good time.
One of my good friends bought a cheapie car one spring and we fixed it up/down so he could enter stock car races. Every Saturday we went around to different small town 1/3 or 1/2 mile tracks and he raced and was trounced every night. At the end of the season he entered it in a demolition derby and that was the end of his racing career. That was an awesome summer.