F1 at the Nurburgring Nordschleife

F1 cars haven't raced at the Nurburgring Nordschleife since Niki Lauda's 1976 accident. And for good reason. The 14 mile track is hugely bumpy with plenty of blind corners and points where cars can jump into the air. In addition, the track is ridiculously dangerous - the whole track has almost no runoff areas. So I was thrilled to see that BMW let their F1 driver Nick Heidfeld tackle the track in the 2006 F1 car this weekend. Sadly it was more of a photo op than a serious attempt at a fastest lap which (for all the reasons listed above) would have been an extremely risky proposition.

Thankfully video of the event is provided - notice how much higher the ride height of the car is set. This is likely due to the extreme bumps on the circuit but must have seriously affected the aerodynamics of the car. From the video, it's clear that Heidfeld is not pushing too hard - his best lap was ~ 8 mins which is slower than some fairly inexpensive cars. Heidfeld had to slow down at various points on the circuit for photo ops though and I'm sure if BMW had let him, he would have tried to break the lap record.

The current lap record is held by the late Stefan Bellof at 6:11.13 in a Porsche 956 and it looks like that record will probably not be challenged for some time. Disclaimer: My only driving experience on the Nordschleife is playing Gran Turismo 4. My best lap in the Formula 1 car is ~ 5 mins but it's not all that realistic.

BBC Top Gear on YouTube

The BBC has started publishing content on YouTube including one of my favorite shows - Top Gear. Things are broken up into short clips rather than full episodes but the quality is fairly high. Now if they will just start selling full length episodes on iTunes!

Worst Commute ever

The New Yorker has an article on the increasing long commutes that people are willing to endure - apparently 1 in 6 Americans commute more than 45 minutes each way. This part just floored me though:

Last year, Midas, the muffler company, in honor of its fiftieth anniversary, gave an award for America’s longest commute to an engineer at Cisco Systems, in California, who travels three hundred and seventy-two miles—seven hours—a day, from the Sierra foothills to San Jose and back. “It’s actually exhilarating,” the man said of his morning drive. “When I get in, I’m pumped up, ready to go.”

Yikes!