Fast past 🏁

McLaren have won the constructors championship again. I knew that the team was started in the 60s but not much more of the early stuff. Bruce McLaren was driving for Cooper and couldn't get them to build the cars he wanted to run in an Australian race series, so he started his own team for that. It didn't enter Formula one for a few years. This was in the time when driver life expectancy was pretty limited. McLaren said this about one of his friends who was killed.

To do something well is so worthwhile that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardy. It would be a waste of life to do nothing with one's ability, for I feel that life is measured in achievement, not in years alone.

Then he was killed testing one of his own cars.

I watched a documentary about the Brawn year, 2009 (synopsis: Honda wanted to close down their poorly performing team after the 2008 financial crisis, but the team knew their next car was very fast and persuaded Honda to sell them the team for £1 (an actual pound coin which the Honda guy still has) and they won 6 of the first 7 races and both championships despite doing almost no development). The chances of death are pretty low now, but the Bruce McLaren quote still seems relevant. The Brawn team did something absolutely amazing. All the people interviewed agreed that they'd done the impossible. Their lives have been made greater because they did that.

I enjoyed watching Ross Brawn. He didn't seem like a ferocious competitor who'd run several race and championship winning teams. He sat facing the camera like an old man in his slippers telling stories. But they were excellent stories. Bernie Ecclestone was unsurprisingly slippery in his answers to everything, and it was strange to have a window back into the world where he an Max Moseley had F1 in their pockets. I liked the artifice of sitting Rubens Barichello down for an interview on the starting/finish straight of Interlagos, his home track in Brazil, to tell the story of how his title bid slipped away. And Keanu Reeves did a good job of being the interviewer. It's worth a watch if you've any interest in motor sport.