The Nostalgia Thread
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There is a lot of nostalgia around here, so lets see how much we can fit into this thread.
If you are unsure as to how to make a nostalgic post, it is a cry out to when F1, or indeed any motorsport was better in your eyes.
For example,
Back in my day men were men and drove machines that took real skill do drive.
There will never be another Tazio Nuvolari.
Brooklands was a track with real grandure.
Oooh, a thread in which I can throw a picture perfect tantrum à la five year old in the candy aisle…
“Gimme a French GP. I want a good ol’ French Grand Prix (well, actually a new one, merci beaucoup). The F1 World Championship is just not cool when there isn’t even a proper real “Grand Prix” in it.”
As if anyone is going to care about etymology and country origins of phrases, I know…
Back when I was a young’un, half the grid didn’t finish each race, which meant that small teams could occasionally sneak a point. None of that bulletproof reliability we get nowadays
I remember retro drivers including Mika Hakkinen, Heinz Harald Frentzen and Olivier Panis, and there were some excellent pay drivers too like Gaston Mazzacane and Tora Takagi. Not like the boring, talented pay drivers we have in 2011.
And the liveries were on the whole much more exciting than the largely uninspiring corporate ones we have today. You couldn’t beat the Zipline BAR, the Orange Arrows, the green Jaguar- and Williams painted their cars red!…
The circuits were so much better too. Only one Tilkedrome, and it was Malaysia which is a good track anyway. Circuits were surrounded by grass and gravel, tarmac run off seemingly still uninvented. There was Imola and the old Hockenheim, and the first chicane at Monza was actually a cool corner rather than the monstrosity it is today. Interlagos was at the beginning of the season, and Malaysia at the end- madness!
I like reminiscing, so I like this thread! It makes me feel old though…
The subject was Mónaco’s track being outdated/out-of-fashion or not, I was just starting here and ended up writing a post that come out more nostalgic than anything else, also about nostalgia, so maybe this is a suitable place to revitalize it; I’ll just paste it here with some minor alterations:
Sunday beginning of the afternoon, some 20-30 years ago, lunch with family as usual, in the dinning-room as usual. TV is on, and as usual (every other weekend) it’s race day, the cars are going around in circles with all that loud noise. Nobody is paying attention, but nobody changes the channel as in the other ones is on some other boring stuff, nobody turns the TV off, because that’s just the way it is… the TV stays on if there’s people at home.
My first memories of F1 are from Monaco: the image of that amazing hairpin is stucked in my mind forever (and the angle of the camera that covers it hasn’t changed since); the cars speeding through the tunnel and out of it (never did appreciate that camera that used to cover the exit, first of a wide view of all the yachts and as the driver exits the tunnel a zoom in into him, fortunately seems they’ve changed that approach). Every year, every Monaco GP those first images come back to me, they literally come alive. I sense I’m not the only one with this experience.
This feeling is unreplaceable. Psicology is a very complex subject, not a science in the same sense as physics, bio or maths, so one can’t be totally sure certain conclusions are accurate. One can only use reason, common sense and create a theory. It’s not easy to put this one into words, but I’ll try:
We (as humans) tend to stay very much attached to the first memories (and sensations, and images, and sounds, etc) we have of an event or a sport (something) we come to love. For instance, a person loves F1, she started to watch around 1994, 95, the year that Schummy began to show his talent: that person will probably like Schumacher for the rest of her life if the first truly exciting race she saw was a spectacular exibition for him like Spa 95 or Barcelona 96, or, hate him forever if it was Adelaide 94. Or will became attached to Raikonnen if one of the first races she saw was Suzuka 05. Or Hakinnen in same races in 98, Villeneuve 97, Hill 96 (obviously it’s probably all unconscious). The point is when a passion is born, along come many more passions.
And with Monaco is the same: it’s a magnificient, glamorous place which can generate eventful races and may be the original seed of the passion of many F1 fans today. And that’s the reason it’s on the calendar and it will stay there for many many years, despite safety, “processionality”, etc, despite all reasons that say it shouldn’t.
Nostalgia for me was when my father used to tell me stories.My favourye was when he would tell me how he watched Carraciola, Nuvolari, Campari, Borzacinni,etc.,racing in the Phoenix Park in Dublin. He used to wax lyrical about the sound of the 7 litre straight 8 supercharged SSK accelerating amongst the trees in the park. Mind you he said the Alfa’s & Bugati’s sounded brilliant as well.
Nostalgia is watching Beltoise winning the Monaco GP in 1972 with its BRM under torrential rain and realizing at the tender age of 12 that I had finally found something of real interest.
Nostalgia is being at Le Mans in 1973 watching an epic battle between Ferrari and Matra for the win with drivers such as Regazzoni, Pace, Reutemann, Redman, Ickx, Cevert, Beltoise Pescarolo, Elford, Hailwood, Watson competing. Nostalgia is seeing the awesome Lotus 72 in its JPS livery driven by Fittipaldi and Peterson in 1973. Nostalgia is feeling like the world had ended the day Cevert died at the Glen. Nostalgia is Lauda in his 312T being the class of the field in 1975, Nostalgia is James Hunt and Hesketh giving the finger to the F1 world at Zandvoort the same year. Nostalgia is seeing Gilles Villeneuve scoring his first points at Spa in 1978. Nostalgia is following Prost through his F3 days in 1978/79 and knowing I was watching history… And then I got old.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You’re right there, Obadiah.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Who’d have thought thirty year ago we’d all be sittin’ here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o’ tea.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
A cup o’ cold tea.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Without milk or sugar.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Or tea.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In a cracked cup, an’ all.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, “Money doesn’t buy you happiness, son”.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, ‘e was right.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, ‘e was.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
I was happier then and I had nothin’. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, ‘alf the floor was missing, and we were all ‘uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t’ corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin’ in a corridor! Would ha’ been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, when I say ‘house’ it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
We were evicted from our ‘ole in the ground; we ‘ad to go and live in a lake.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t’ shoebox in t’ middle o’ road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t’ mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi’ his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of ‘ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to ‘ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o’clock at night and lick road clean wit’ tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit’ bread knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ….. they won’t believe you.
ALL:
They won’t!
Asanator, I love you. The best version was with Palin, Cleese, Jones and Atkinson http://youtu.be/cYtYBI6eZ3E
NOOOOOOO! Don’t make fun of us!!! Yorkshire is brilliant
This was fun, I was touched by the inspired writing of LL and then a couple of posts below I was laughing my a** off reading Asanator’s post!
When I was young, drivers with uncompetitive cars could occasionally have a day of glory. Just think about Panis winning in Monaco (1996), or Alesi clinching his only F1 victory in Canada (1995). Even Damon Hill almost won in Hungary when he drove for Arrows.
But one of the greatest moments was seeing Schumacher getting his first WDC in a Ferrari and putting an end to the Dark Age of the Cavallino Rampante.
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