A beautiful sunny day rose over Barcalounger as the F1 Circus began its swing across Europe today.  For the first time in 2015, someone other than Lewis Hamilton led the Blundering Herd to the grid as teammate Nico Rosberg had the honors of fast lap during Quals, and he was desperate for a win.  So what happened?  THIS is your F1 Update! for the 2015 Grand Prix of Spain!

Here is the most excitement we had all day:

This is Turns 1 and 2 of the first lap.  Nico Rosberg leads the Ferrari of Seb Vettel, who took advantage of a poor start by Lewis Hamilton to move into second place. 

From this point in time until the end of the race, the Grand Prix of Spain was one of sheer tedium.  There was almost no passing on track, no real drama despite the best efforts of the Legendary Announce Team to create some late in the race, and the only excitement came when two separate front jack men got run over by their cars (McLaren's HWPMBNSTITF suffered brake failure, and Lotus' Lettuce Grosjean suffered brain failure). 

It was a reversion to the bad old days of the early-to-mid 2000s, when all passing was done in the pit lanes, races were processionals, and the winners could often be named before qualifying based on tire manufacturer.  Back then, refueling was the gimmick that allowed for races to hinge on pit strategy.  Now we have DRS which makes it impossible for the car ahead to defend a legit passing attempt, and bodywork that messes up airflow over the car behind, making it impossible for them to get close enough to make a legit passing attempt.

Now, I'm not going to say that every race is going to be a Spanish Grand Prix, and we knew coming in that this wasn't going to be the most interesting race in the world ("I don't always race cars..."), but this was really not good at all.  Nico Rosberg only ever lost the lead during pit stop rotations, and then only briefly.  Hamilton never had a challenge for him and, as previously mentioned, could not do anything about Ferrari's Seb Vettel on track.  A quick change of plan to a three-stop strategy allowed him to race hard enough to pass him in the pits for second.  Fourth was Valterri Bottas in his Williams, another near-podium yet invisible race for the Martini-striped car.  The Ferrari of Kimi Raikkonen overcame his qualifying woes to pull himself up to a complaint-filled fifth.  The other Williams, driven by Felipe Massa ended up in sixth, with just as equally invisible a drive as his teammate's.

Nobody else was on the same lap.

So from a nearly-literal snoozefest in Spain, we head next to the Principality of Monaco and the streets of Monte Carlo.  When one thinks of Monaco, the first thing that leaps to mind is not passing.  However, it's such a visceral experience that one barely notices as the cars race down narrow city streets past fans wearing clothes that cost more than the F1 cars going by, or lounging on yachts in the harbor, or sunbathing next to swimming pools on the roofs of gigamillion-dollar hotels.  With everything else going on to excite the senses, the Monaco Grand Prix can get away with it.  Not so with Spain, a bare circuit with little visual stimulation. 

Monaco is the one place on the calendar where raw grunt is not needed.  Perhaps there we will see another dent in the Mercedes domination.  See you in two weeks!

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Hold the phone!  Stop the presses!  From border to border, coast to coast and all the ships at sea, we have breaking news!  Flash!  Here's the grid for the 2015 Grand Prix of Spain:

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I totally forgot to watch.  Completely spaced on today being Friday.  However!  I did say that I'd get back to you about if the new livery helped the McLaren go faster or not.

^{A McLaren, blood dripping from its wings, continues hunting for fresh prey.}

Jenson Button ended up 7th at the end of P2.  His teammate, HWPMBNSTITF, was solidly in 11th.  So I think we can safely say yes, at least for today the Dark Charcoal and Red livery gave the McLaren chassis a speed boost.  Never mind any other gewgaws and doohickies they may have added to the bodywork, it was all down to the livery.  For what it's worth, Button is still over 1.5 seconds behind times set by the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton.  In other news, Lotus has installed a particularly aggressive batch of upgrades to the E23 chassis for this race.

All joking aside, and please note they put the tires on backwards, Lotus had a spot of bother out on the circuit today.  Lettuce Grosjean was turning a lap at speed when the entire engine cover tore off like it was never attached.  Normally I would think that this would do terrible things to a car's pace, but this is Lotus we're talking about here.  Ahem.  Here's what it looked like when Lettuce made it back to the pits:

Quals in the morning.  The quals report probably won't be up until the afternoon, though.

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-Hibike!  Euphonium, Ep05

Meet Yoriko.  A third-year student at Kitauji High School, she is the librarian for the band club.  As such, she is in charge of marking changes in the sheet music for individual performers, correcting errors, which means she's supposed to work closely with the director.  At least, that's the way it works for professional ensemble librarians.  I assume that her position has at least some passing resemblance to those requirements.

She's playing the piccolo here, but she's been seen practicing with a flute as well.  She has had one line in the show to date, during Ep02: "When you switch from C to D...".  In that one line, she is soft-spoken.  In short, she's what I would usually call a "Skippy" in a writeup if she was important enough to have a scene devoted to her.  Since she hasn't been, she is, instead, a step down from a Skippy, a J Random Student.  She's got a name, but she's still a J Random.

Coincidentally she is also very tall, with only three male members of the band having inches on her.  She's just another J Random, "third-spearcarrier-from-the-left" type. 

Yet, in the perhaps twenty seconds of screentime she's had in five episodes of Hibike!  Euphonium, most of which in an group of people (the picture of her doing the librarian stuff is the only time she's solo onscreen, and that's for perhaps two seconds) KyoAni has managed to work in a surprising amount of characterization and background.  After all, she's a tall, soft-spoken, bookish type with a passion for music (note that she's the only one with her eyes closed in the ensemble picture!) and an eye for detail.  It's amazing what you notice when you look for stuff.  This whole character profile began simply because I liked the picture of her sitting at the desk, transcribing music.  J Random Student?  Skippy? 

Or Yoriko Saika, character.  I wonder what her story is?

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Back in the preseason that now feels so far away, when the McLaren MP4/30 debuted it looked a little something like this:

This morning, McLaren decided that it didn't look ominous enough for the European leg of the F1 calendar and debuted a new livery.

The infamous "glare with wheels" is now completely gone, and the car looks better for it.  The new red striping looks pretty flash too if you ask me. 

I don't understand why there haven't been that many teams that go all black in the past.  Oh, of course there's the historical "nation colors" that gave Ferrari its famous red livery, and British Racing Green isn't just a phrase.  But the only team I can think of that normally used all-black was UOP Shadow in the early '70s.  Minardi's PS01 was mostly black, with white on the upper section of the nose and stripes on the sidepods... and that's about it.  So big props to McLaren for going for drama in lieu of useful speed. 

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-Hibike! Euphonium, Ep05
This week, the Goofy Wacko we've come to adore is almost entirely missing.  In her place is a being we've never quite seen before: Deadly Serious Asuka.  I mean, last week she was the voice of reason in a band leader meeting.  This week, she was the stern taskmaster who drove the marching band to levels they didn't know they could reach.

Because she's the Drum Major and darn well in charge on performance day.  She was also the consensus pick to be President of the Band, but she didn't want the job.  Well, no wonder she was so influential last week.

I did say "almost", didn't I?

On a completely different note, if you're not watching this show, you're missing out on perhaps the best work KyoAni has done since the Haruhi movie.  I mean, yes, there's the scene that everybody will be talking about, but they're making sure every single box is checked everywhere.

Sure, just a simple train station, but holy crap, I thought I was looking at a photograph when I saw the screenshot.  Honestly, KyoAni brought their "A"-game for this one, and when they do that, ain't nobody in the same league.

It goes without saying that the reflection of the train's lights in the stream is animated horizontally, but if you watch the scene carefully, you'll see there's also movement caused by the flow of the water.  It's a throwaway shot, on-screen for a couple of seconds at most (and, ohbytheway, the train is exactly as long, end-to-end, as the screen is wide), but there's more care put into it than you'll see in almost all flash-based style animation, and most anime in general.  Yes, I'm fanboying.  Yes, I'm gushing.  No, I don't care.  It's just.  That.  Damn.  Good.

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The slow boat from Bahrain has finally made landfall in the Old World, and the F1 Circus has disembarked in the traditional home of racing boredom, Barcalounger, home of the 2015 Grand Prix of Spain.  Let's take a look at the track map, shall we? 
I call it a boring race because it almost always is.  For many, many years, the Circuit de Catalunya was the winter home for testing, with every team putting in thousands of laps annually.  As a result, every tiny rise, every small dip, any bump, crack or irregularity is known and processed through the filter of the teams.  Every single inch of this circuit is mapped and imprinted directly onto the cerebellums of the drivers, to the point that the race has spawned some legendary processions.  Indeed, if there was ever an argument to be made for the necessity of gimmicks like DRS and KERS in Formula 1, this track right here is it.

Over and above all that, there's nothing particularly challenging about this Spanish track.  It's a burrito from Chipotle is what it is.  Filling, and you know you've eaten something when you're done, but real burritos are so much better.  It wasn't always that way... I remember when Sector 3 was ridiculously fast: Turn 10 was a sweeper instead of a hairpin, and the final turn ran in a single arc from Turn 13 to the exit of Turn 16 and cars barely slowed for it.

But those days are dust, now and forever more.  At least we'll have the Legendary Announce Team to bring us coverage over paella and tortas from the Basilica Templo Expiatorio del Sagrado Corazon de Jesus.  Here's the broadcast schedule:
FRIDAY
7am - 830am: Practice 2 on NBCSN
SATURDAY
7am - 830am: Quals live on CNBC
SUNDAY
630a - 9am: 2015 Grand Prix of Spain on NBCSN. 

All times are Pond Central, of course.  Add an hour if, for example, you're in a hospital in Virginia.  Subtract two hours if you're having a Mission burrito in San Francisco.  And if you're in the Midwest, have a breakfast pastry with your sangria.

We'll see you then.

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There was a nasty wreck during the ARCA series race at Talladega today.  Austin Self got a little squirrely and spun in the tri-oval, not an uncommon occurrence.  As his car flailed around, it caught the hard-charging car of Brad Smith right in the nose.  Along with the obvious damage, Smith's throttle was stuck open.  He went up the track, smacked the outside wall, and then...

Rescue crews actually had to cut Smith from the wreckage of the car, but he was able to walk under his own power to the ambulance, though unsteadily.  Taken to the infield care unit, he was later helicoptered to the nearby University of Alabama-Birmingham Hospital for further observation. 

I mention all this because of a screenshot I saw of the wreck... to whit, this one:

The particular stretch of wall that Smith impacted had what's called a SAFER (Steel And Foam Energy Reduction) Barrier installed in front of it.  When hit, it's designed to crumple like a beercan, reducing the strength of the impact before the car makes contact with the concrete wall behind it.  That's why Smith's car looks like it's smooshed to half its size: part of it is inside the SAFER barrier. 

During the NASCAR Xfinity race at Daytona back in February Kyle Busch had a similar accident, except the wall he hit notably didn't have the SAFER barriers installed.  He suffered a broken right leg and left foot.  Certainly there were differences: impact angle, size and weight of the cars, so on and so forth... but that one man could walk away and the other is sidelined and will remain so for an unknown amount of time may very well come down to the way the wall deformed.

F1 doesn't use SAFER barriers; instead, they use tire walls which really do much the same thing, or TECPRO barriers at four or five circuits.  TECPRO is the same idea as SAFER, just with much more foam and less steel.  It's used mostly at Monaco, where it protected Sergio Perez from what would have been a catastrophic injury in 2011.  Compare that accident to Jenson Button's in 2003, when they had a tire wall instead... no give at all.

In most cases for F1, tire barriers are sufficient.  Walls are usually far away from the track, and when they're not, a car isn't likely to hit them (on straightaways, for example).  Tire barriers are "good enough" in those circumstances, combined with the way F1 cars are designed to absorb impacts.  A SAFER barrier might actually hinder the way a F1 car takes damage, come to think of it.

Well, there you go.

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I can't explain.  I can't.  Not without whining.  It's my fault anyway.  Way to go, Wonderduck.

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-Hibike! Euphonium, Ep04

A rather Asuka-less episode, with the cute goofball having maybe a minute of screentime.  She was remarkably serious this time around, too.  From being the voice of reason in the section leader meeting that actually determined the course of the series from here on out to teaching the newcomers to the bass section advanced techniques, she played the role of "good sempai" to a Tee.

What might not be obvious at first blush is that Asuka has, to date, gotten everything she's wanted in this series.  From corralling three of the main characters to making sure the band is trying for Nationals to subtly siding with the new teacher in the section leader meeting and thus pushing everybody to accept his somewhat abrupt (but effective) style, Our Goofy Fascination is proving to be ridiculously skilled in playing the political game.  One gets the impression that if she was even slightly normal she'd be president of the student council, or maybe dictator-for-life.

You know how there is a school of thought that says that the Star Wars series of movies is actually telling the story of R2-D2?  At least through Ep04, an argument can be made for Hibike!  Euphonium being Asuka's tale, told from the standpoint of the three so-called main characters.  To be honest, I'm not sure if I really believe that or if it's just because I'm doing this weekly thing, but I find the possibility to be intriguing.

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I got very frustrated with the game War Thunder, the player community as a whole, and most importantly, its match-maker (which I've learned much more about than what I mention at that link).  Roughly, vehicles have Battle Ratings, or BR.  When you're looking to join a match, the game looks only at your highest BR score, and matches you with a maximum 1.0 BR spread.  So if you have a BR plane of 3.0, you may be matched against a 4.0 BR plane.  In this situation, you would NOT be matched against anything lower than 3.0, though, because then the gap to the 4.0 plane would be too large.  The important thing is that you're only compared via the top rating in your lineup of three planes/tanks/whatever, so if you have a Corsair, a Buffalo and a Peashooter, you're matched up via the Corsair... which means you're going to be sealclubbed after your Corsair is gone.  Further, as you play you earn improvements for your plane... you get a new engine instead of one rebuilt and repaired; you get fresh machine guns instead of ones with worn-out barrels, that sort of thing... but the BR doesn't change.  The difference between a stock plane and one that's fully improved (or "spaded" in player terminology) is huge.  So, you have a stock P-38 Lightning and you're flying against a spaded FW-190D (or whatever)... and you're on the ground, upside down and burning before you know what hit you.

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You can't get more Chicago than this without a deep-dish pizza somewhere in the picture.   Though, considering where this must have been taken, there's probably a few dozen Italian places within a few blocks.

The Pond's internet connection is... poor... tonight, so I'm hoping this posts, and leaving it at that.  Maybe I can go back to being creative.  Everything is breaking down at once over here.  The apartment complex will be replacing my toilet on Monday... until then, I have to manually "flush" it by pouring water into the bowl in copious amounts.  Came home from lunch on Friday to discover the floor of the bathroom was pretty much a swimming pool in the making.  After cleaning it up, I took a nap... and woke up to another swimming pool.  Seems one of the bolts (?) that holds the tank to the stool (?) had loosened.  No problem, the maintenance guy said, just need to tighten it up.  Except he couldn't.  The toilet is old, the water from the well is ridiculously hard, and between the sediment and corrosion, the bolt was frozen and he couldn't budge it, no matter how he tried.  Whatever, he said the upshot was that it was easier just to turn the water off to the thing so I don't wind up swimming in the bathroom and they'll replace it with a new one.  As I'm not paying for it, I'm game.  Thankfully, I have an empty mini-water-cooler bottle lying around the place, I can use that as a tank.  That, and the handheld shower head reaches that far, too.

I'm going to shut up and take a nap.

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-Hibike!  Euphonium, Ep03

It's not uncommon for me to be more interested in a secondary character than a main... I love background characters, and always have. The Skippy T Spearcarriers of the world are people too, and they all have stories, at least in a world well-created.  Sure, the true background characters, i.e., the ones there to make it look like the world is populated, they won't have anything, but the students sharing a classroom with Our Heroes?  They should be people in their own right.  Maybe not as interesting as a 12-year old high school senior, or a schoolgirl who fights demons at night with a holy water-powered steam iron, but people nevertheless.

However, it is uncommon for me to create a weekly entry for them, but yet that's what I'm going to do for the character of Asuka from Hibike!  Euphonium.  There are two reasons for that.  The first should be obvious.  The second is that, while she's loonier than a sack full of wet quokka, she's also dearly devoted to the concert band in the show.  So much so that she's one of the true driving forces behind its continued existence after the second-year student walkout alluded to in this episode. 

What I'm saying is, there's more to her than a cute goofball.  I mean, sure, that's undoubtedly what I'll be focusing on in this running feature, but don't be surprised if it gets deeper than that.  If you're interested in a weekly writeup on the series, visit Ben over at Midnight Tease; he's adopted the show.  In contrast to my writeups, there's actual thought behind his!

Since I missed Week 2, here's a special bonus Asuka:

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Today is World Book Day.  It is also Canadian Book Day, which tends to be covered with gravy and unerringly polite.  In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, today is the Feast Day of Holy Glorious Great-martyr and Victory-bearer and Wonderworker Saint George.  April 23rd is the birthday of Baseball Hall of Fame players "Sunny Jim" Bottomley and Warren Spahn, and non-HoF players Dolph Camilli and Emilio Bonifacio (Mr Goodface!). 

Today is also the birthday of Charlie "Slats" Dorman, who played one game for the White Sox at catcher in 1923.  He went 1-for-2 in his debut, which would be promising if not for the other side of the coin.  He came into the game against the Philadelphia Athletics in the 6th inning, relieving Roy Graham (who was relieving Roy Schalk) behind the plate.  In the four innings he played, the A's went three-for-four in steals.  The final score was 9-0 A's, and Slats was never seen in the majors again.  He left baseball later that year and moved back home to San Francisco, where he joined the police force.  Late in October of 1928, he was playing a game of baseball with his Elks Lodge when he shattered his kneecap during a play.  Infection set in, and he died of pneumonia in the hospital in November of that year.  He was 30.

Some 40 years later, in a hospital near Wrigley Field (which also debuted on April 23rd), a Wonderduck was foist upon an unsuspecting world.

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Because it's been years since I last mentioned it, and I'm feeling a little melancholy today.

It's funny... I see this little object many many times a day, and yet I almost never look at it.  Shame, that. 

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1 Grey duck!

Posted by: GreyDuck at April 22, 2015 10:14 PM (/zxpg)

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Over at Brickmuppet's place, there was a lively little discussion of the second official trailer released for the new Star Wars film coming in December.  I decided to let it cool down a touch before bringing it over here... and here it is.  See, over there I mentioned that I didn't believe it to be so heavily "wow factor"'ed as the first trailer.  There's no holy crap that's awesome! moments, but it still does a great job of getting people, aka "me", geeked up for the movie.  Reader David disagreed, saying that the scene showing the crashed Imperial Star Destroyer did the job quite nicely.

Personally, I was amused by this shot, as I can't imagine any way a 1.6km long starship with obvious battle damage could survive re-entry to an atmosphere and a crash landing that buries most of it under the ground.  Yet there it is, essentially in one piece.  David also suggests that it's the first time in the series that we get an idea of the true scale of these ships.  Really?  Because eight-year-old me had a pretty good grasp on the concept after seeing this scene from the beginning of Star Wars.

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Back again for the second night race at Sakhir, the assembled F1 Horde sat burbling quietly under the lights.  Would the Mercedes massacre?  Would Ferrari fight fiercely?  Would Williams win?  THIS is your F1 Update for the 2015 Grand Prix of Bahrain!

The beginning of a race is signaled by the sequential lighting and mass extinguishing of five red lights.  The way these work is interesting, to a certain extent.  Once the field has taken to the grid, Charlie Whiting, technical overseer for Formula 1, presses a button on his control panel that begins a random countdown.  When the countdown reaches zero, the set process begins.  Today, there was a remarkably long stretch of time between the cars hitting the grid and the lights coming on.  Part of that was due to Pastor Maldonado taking the wrong place on the grid for reasons not worth getting into and easily capsulized by rolling your eyes and saying "Maldonado" in a disgusted tone.  But part of it had to be the timer taking longer than we can remember.  This is somewhat more important than you might at first think... F1 cars are cooled by airflow over relatively small radiators.  Thus, if they aren't moving, they aren't being cooled... and the cars had been still for a very long time indeed.  Much to our surprise here at F1U! HQ, everybody on the grid got away clean... Felipe Massa started from the pitlane due to a problem getting started on the grid, and Jenson Button's power unit woes continued, the team giving up on getting him into the race.  Meanwhile, both Manor cars took the start.  Just sayin'.

Thus the race started, and noticed was served quickly that Ferrari were not messing around.  The two Red cars, starting second and fourth on the grid, actually seemed to team up as they headed into the first turn.  In doing so, they positioned themselves so that the Mercedes of third-place-sitting Nico Rosberg had two choices to make: either back off the throttle and surrender the place to hard-charging Kimi Raikkonen, or bury his Silver Arrow deep in the bowels of one of the Prancing Horses.  Wisely, he backed down, but the tone for the race had been set.  A dogfight was in the offing!

And then a lack of refreshing sleep caught up with the members of the F1U! staff.  This is not an uncommon problem when the weather begins to change around Duckford.  It was right around the time of the first pit stops, with Hamilton leading Rosberg and Vettel leading Raikkonen, that the whole of the F1U! horde found itself in that state of not-quite-asleep, eyes closed, brain right on the edge of pulling up a pillow and shutting down.  The first time we watched the race, we stayed that way until the winner's anthems were played.  The second time, we picked up from where we remember leaving off.

And promptly went under again.  This time though, the F1U! staff managed to pull ourselves out of the blissful arms of Morpheus (the Greek god, not the Matrix character) after roughly 20 laps, just in time to see the second round of pitstops.  In the rotation, Hamilton still led, but Vettel's Ferrari jumped Rosberg's Mercedes for second.

This situation only lasted for a few laps.  Vettel, finding himself under all sorts of pressure from Rosberg, went wide out of a fast turn and badly damaged his front wing, either on a rumblestrip or from just barely getting into a sandtrap at high speed.  Either way, the Ferrari had to come in for an unscheduled third stop, letting Raikkonen into third... well, not really.  In truth, Raikkonen was in the lead at this point, but only because he had yet to stop for tires.  He did not stop until ten laps after everybody else, emerging on fresh Option tires in third place.

While much faster than either Mercedes at this point because of the tires, Raikkonen was 24 seconds in arrears to Hamilton, and 19 to Rosberg.  By Lap 50, the gap to Rosberg was 10 seconds and dropping by over a second per lap.  By Lap 55, Rosberg had mirrors full of Red car, and it looked like we were going to have an exciting fight for second.  And then both Mercedes drivers reported problems with their rear "brake-by-wire" systems.  Rosberg's glitch occurred just as a turn approached, and he had to run very wide, letting the Finn past with no fight at all.  The question then became "could he catch Hamilton in the few remaining laps?"

Alas, the answer was "nope."  He did cut the lead to only a few seconds while Hamilton wallowed around the track with recalcitrant braking, but it wasn't enough.  Lewis Hamilton led Raikkonen, Rosberg, the Williams of Valterri Bottas who was some 45 seconds back, and Vettel who probably would have passed Bottas in another lap, across the line for his third win of the season in what turned out to be a pretty interesting race.

It's clear that Ferrari may not be able to match the overall pace of the Silver Arrows.  However, it's also clear that it's a lot closer than anybody expected, and while I'm not positive about this, it seems like when the cars are on the softer, less durable tires, the Red cars are quicker.  It's not enough to make up the overall gap between the two marques, but it does make it a lot closer.

The next race will be Spain on May 8th, as the European leg of the season begins.  At that point, we'll have a whole new championship as that's traditionally when the upgrades start to get applied to the cars.  Might make for some extra excitement!  We'll see you there and then.

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Pretty night at Sakhir tonight as the F1 Circus gets ready for tomorrow's race, but who's going to be leading the horde towards Turn 1 when the lights go out?  Here's the provisional grid:

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-The Wind Rises
Because we all need more Hosho in our lives.

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Today is the birthday of Official First Friend of the Pond Vaucaunson's Duck.  We've known each other for something like 38 years, more or less.  During that time, we've had our differences like any friends will, and there was one long period where neither contacted the other for nigh on six years.  Despite that, we remained friends.  I suspect we've become rather closer as the number of candles on our cakes have increased.

Friend GreyDuck and I joke about being related, what with our similar tastes in music and affection for vinyl waterfowl.  With Vauc, however, it stopped being a joke long ago... I'm happy to call him family, even if that pesky genetics thing says otherwise.  Hell, I'd call him "brother" if he didn't already have one that might take offense.

Here's to ya, Vauc.  Enjoy the chocolate gingerbread cookies.

Happy Birthday.

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