We’re not at the levels of last summer yet, but I fear it’s a case of when and not if, that we’ll hit a new high in fuel prices. But have no fear! Hyundai are at hand!

Will this make you swap?

Hyundai has just announced that if you buy one of their new cars in the US, you will be given fuel for the whole year at a set price of $1.49. Read the whole story here Another gimmick from an ailing car company or a new sales ploy for the future? Only time will tell.

What do you think? Will the this make you want to buy a Hyundai over other cars? Why not comment and let us know?

Chavs annoy anyone who is not a chav. This is the modus operandi of the chav. The chav is the true avant-garde artist, bending society to his will through the artistry of his car. For him, the car represents the apogee of consumer society, of which he is the epitome. Buried under a Sears catalogue’s worth of cheap jewellery, caked in hair product and that weird sweat/slime only chavs seem capable of secreting, he mopes the streets feeling like the dog’s proverbials, queuing up at the McDonald’s drive-thru like he’s breezing into the Groucho Club, only the Groucho Club don’t serve quarter pounders so he’s got it, like, better.

This is a standard Chav car...

For everyone else, the chav is an idiot, and a consequential idiot at that. We will, despite our best efforts not to, notice him. The chav loves this. He loves this because he’s set out to make you notice him with a fully modified, hairy nutsack of a car, testosterone on four wheels, a phallus capable of doing 90 on a 30 road. He achieves this through a careful mix of shouting, hideous girlfriends, glow-in-the-dark pomp, the glory of the subwoofer and all other manner of twisted genius attention-seeking protuberances. Below are the ten most annoying.

10. Tinted Windows
If there’s one thing a car needs in the rain-sodden back streets, it’s tinted windows. These are not, however, your average tinted windows. They are full-on, post-laser-surgery welder glass, the kind that astronauts use on their helmets to protect them from the glare of the sun. This protects the chav from any of his fellow dipshits who might be roaming 10 or 50 cent short of a Big Mac with a replica handgun.

Try looking through those things when its dark

9. Low Riding
The chav believes that by making himself look like Danny DeVito, he’s going to get laid. In fact, the chav would, if he could, ride bare arse on the tarmac at 70 mph, just to prove how hard he was. Instead, he has to be content with only being able to afford one low riding bucket seat for himself. His girlfriend Shaniqua has to sit in the standard Nova seat, making her look a clear foot taller than him. He is the king of his castle.

Look at speed bumps and be scared

8. The Car Itself
With a good couple of grand spent on preparing to modify his car, the chav actually has little money left to spend on the car itself. The underpowered, smoke-belching monstrosity he ends up with triggers alarm bells with any insurance company worth its reputation, though this is not a problem for the chav because he doesn’t have insurance, he’s a triple-hard bastard and his girlfriend already looks like a riverpig so if she gets a broken nose and whiplash it might be an improvement and even the neck brace would hide her hideously long neck for a couple of weeks. Win-win.

A Vauxhall Nova. Chav staple

7. Driving Together
Not so much a modification, but as good as. Chavs always, always drive in packs. If you spot an isolated chav you can see the fear in his eyes. In any McDonalds car park after 10 p.m., nine out of ten cars will belong to a chav. This gives the impression to any passer-by that McDonalds has employed Zippo’s Circus to provide after-hours entertainment to their patrons.

6. Oversized Rims
On a car with 15-inch tyres, a chav will fit 30-inch rims. You can spot a chav car, even on a motorway, because it looks like the chassis is rolling along on four dustbin lids. It is also a rule of thumb that chavs spend more on the initial purchase of rims than they do on the car itself, so if they park it anywhere in Merseyside for any length of time they are guaranteed to lose over half the total value of their vehicle. Beware the chav masquerading with standard alloys.

These are a bit small

5. Name Tags
You’ve seen them, plastered across the interior of the windscreen: Chantelle & Smiffey, Chelsea & Mooney, Windolene & Pledge. Usually these tags are rendered in a font that comes with a warning about strobing. There is also nothing worse than seeing the girlfriend taking the wheel. Suddenly Griff is Charlene and Charlene is Griff. And you know what? No one can tell the difference.

C-H-A-R-L...what comes next?

4. Body Kit
One of the great joys in life, when you feel justice is being served in an unjust world, is seeing a chav taking a speed bump at high velocity in a Corsa with a full body kit. Watching the sparks peel the paint off the back bumper is a cause for fist in the air cheering from anyone who drives an unmodified car. In fact, the ground clearance of most chav cars rivals that of a Formula 1 car, except a Formula 1 car drives on a flat track at 18,000 RPM while a chav car drives through the 7-11 car park and breaks down.

This is actually a nice one!

3. Exhaust
If you want to see what a chav dreams of, take a look at this. Oh yes, for a chav, the exhaust has to be precisely the same size as he imagines his manhood to be. This roughly equates to the size of the average war memorial. The chav exhaust could comfortably swallow a fox and have room left over for a small child. In order to be an authentic exhaust it also has to rattle so much that it makes anyone’s fillings fall out in a ten mile radius.

2. Undercar Lighting
Driving past a chav car is like being abducted by aliens. First you are bathed in a warm purple/blue glow, then a strange craft moves to intercept you at a speed and angle that seems to defy the laws of physics, then a loud pulverizing noise fills your ears and strange, humanoid figures shout incomprensibly at you. Some chav undercar lighting is so powerful it can be sent through the tinted windows of other chav cars. NASA is currently investigating this technology.

Why do you need to give the ants a suntan?

1. The Stereo
An absolute shoe-in for the number one slot. There are rules the chav must follow for the perfect car stereo. Firstly, it must be more expensive then the entire cost of the rest of the car, rims and all. Second, it must be a CD player, because the chav cannot afford a computer but also knows tapes are gash and cool, init. Thirdly, the speakers must bulge out of the door frames and the subwoofer must be vermillion or lime green in colour and consume the entirety of the boot. It must also require removal of the parcel shelf if the chav truly wants to impress. Finally, it must only be turned to full volume when in built-up residential areas after midnight, and it must always, always, always be playing dogging music.

She also passed away yesterday

You’ve probably heard about five songs of his in your car already this morning, that’s for sure!

The way in which his death has stunned both devoted fans and ordinary people the world over is almost akin to the reaction when the Princess of Wales was killed in a car accident over ten years ago. His followers are in shock, almost unable to accept the news. To many, it’s as if part of their life has just been ripped away. Music plays a huge part for all of us, particularly in our formative years. We grow up listening to favourite tracks by favourite artists and these stay with us throughout adulthood. Listening to them evokes memories, both happy and sad. Music is like a treasure box of our younger years. When an artist who played an important part in our lives because of their music passes away, it leaves a void. The bigger the artist, the greater the void. And they don’t come much bigger than Michael Jackson.

Fans saw him as some sort of religious figure!

It was the same when Elvis Presley died in 1977, or when John Lennon was shot in 1980. The importance of the person and the role that their music played in the lives of millions of people, means that this attracts global attention. Expect Michael Jackson tribute programmes over the next few days and weeks. His music will be heard from televisions and radios as the world celebrates his life and his back catalogue will soon be topping the charts again as the music moguls cash in.

Expect to see a lot of this over the coming weeks!

One company which won’t be cashing in is AEG Live, which was behind the 50 ‘comeback’ shows scheduled to take place at the O2 in London between July this year and February next. The company is apparently facing a liability of up to £300 million since they were unable to find anyone willing to insure such a massive venture.

There had already been talk of whether Jackson would be able to complete the arduous schedule of performances due to health reasons, and the start date had been put back, albeit apparently due the technical complexity of the show.

Tickets for the events had sold out in hours and immediately started to trade on the secondary ticket market for up to £10,000. Which means that a lot of people are going to have to do a lot of refunding in the next few weeks. Ticketmaster, which distributed the tickets in the UK, has a policy of refunding the face value of the ticket plus the booking fee, so about one million fans will get their initial investment back. But what happens if you have already sold on your ticket, or the promise of it since they haven’t been printed, and spent the money? You’ve now got to refund the person who you thought you were making a killing out of, with money you might no longer possess.

How much wheeling and dealing will be going on?

This opens up a whole can of worms for the secondary ticket market and I will interested to see how any problems are resolved.

And apart from the cost of refunding the face value of tickets, AEG Live must have invested millions in the production of the planned shows, all of which now goes to waste. Oh, and the O2 Arena is going to be a bit empty over the next nine months.

Empty....

I was never a huge fan of Michael Jackson but I’m sad for his family, friends and fans. He had become a sometimes strange and controversial figure, a fact that often diverted attention from his musical and entertainment skills. His death will continue to have far reaching effects for some time to come.

It all begins with the perpetrator pressing the brake pedal too hard. Behind him, caught unawares, the next driver presses his break pedal harder still to compensate for the unexpected heavy braking. This in turn triggers a wave of progressively harder braking until, some point several miles back, a traffic jam happens.
The perpetrator continues on his journey, completely oblivious to the frustration and - yes, let’s go there - pain caused by slow moving traffic as far as the eye can see. He is the silent assassin of your time. He must be caught, captured and ruthlessly murdered. His kind prevent astronauts from getting to the launch pad, his kind think it’s okay to turn up to your surprise birthday party after you, his kind think ginger wigs and mimes are funny. His kind must be stopped.

But how? For inspiration, we must turn to the movies. All of the following suggestions could easily be retrofitted to your vehicle by the local garage for a reasonable fee.

We begin with the Batmobile. Any incarnation will do, from the missile-launching Batman of the late 80s to the roof-tumbling badass mofo of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Late braking will be the least of your target’s worries when he sees a classified military vehicle chewing up slow-moving Pontiacs at breakneck speed. The satisfying crunch of running over the offending car would counteract any built-up tension waiting in line for movement. It would be the relief of squeezing a stress ball to the nth degree. Also, as Batmobiles are technically uninsurable, the idea of exchanging policy details with the offending driver would be laughable, and you could continue to laugh as you reversed over his smoking wreck of a car.

Better still, imagine being able to pick the asshole up by the time you get to him. Piledrive through the queues with a brilliant red-blue decal’d cab-over semi truck which then turns into Optimus Prime, supreme bad boy of cartoondom, leader of the Autobots, and the kind of help you need on a stressful journey to work. Not only would he transform from a truck into an ancient robot from outer space, but his already impressive mechanical hands would then transform into glowing energon blades, which are like lightsabers only massive, and able to tear the roof off the average Chevy. This is definite brown trousers territory for any incompetent driver. One problem you may encounter is the subsequent attack on Prime by Megatron, which would result in a delay similar to encountering single-lane roadworks.

Perhaps it would be better to play safe and fly instead. Over the years James Bond has grabbed himself his fair share of traffic-beating transport, including the infamous it-really-works! jetpack from Thunderball and Little Nellie, the gyrocopter with the odd cult following from You Only Live Twice (or, if you’re big on Connery-speak, ‘Luttal Nellayh’). Problems arise almost immediately with both of these options. Firstly, neither of them are cars, which means you would have to abandon your car on the hard shoulder. Secondly, while Little Nellie has sufficient firepower to take out a car, you have to wear a white cycling helmet which makes you look like an extra from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest. Even Connery looked like a tit in it. With the jetpack, the best you could hope for is to get run over.

If those options feel a little too sixties, how about fast-forwarding to the 80s and the flying, time-travelling DeLorean from Back to the Future. As well as making back any time you might have lost from being stuck in traffic, it has a developing retro-chic. Now you can wear that cheap Casio digital watch you won from the claw machine with pride. Again, though, as with all the flying cars on this list, problems will rapidly develop, namely the DeLorean’s build quality. Before you were ten feet in the air the entire floor would collapse and dump you on the middle lane where your face would encounter an 18-wheeler at high speeds.

Outer-world technology is a more promising proposition. The Men In Black had some excellent wheels at their disposal. A touch of the red button would send you rocketing over the standstill with the kind of rapidity normally reserved for the morning after a rich three-course Mexican. Whether you would be able to control the beast without crashing headlong into the nearest row of cars is another matter, and a question that can only be answered by giving it a go. It may well be your last trip to work.

If the thought of ending up as human soup on the tarmac doesn’t appeal, there are other alternatives available. Blade Runner had its fair share of flying cars, but to pull off the look you have to be living into a dystopian future dominated by European Union humanoid robots who have witnessed battles off the shoulder of Orion and some other such utter rubbish. It’s like living in Brussels, without the Eurostar.

Failing that, you could borrow Fab 1 off Lady Penelope and fly that about for a bit with all the other Thunderbirds. It’s as camp as a feather duster, and your chauffeur would be fresh out of prison and completely incapable of speaking like a Londoner. If you can live with that, good luck. Harry Potter also stole a spare set of wheels to get to Hogwarts, though as it’s reliant on magic to get up in the air, you might simply be stuck with a knackered Ford to get to work, in which case you could have an empty road in front of you and still be catastrophically late.

Or, like everyone else, you could sit there, trapped in a metal tin like a friendless sardine, most likely with the sun beating in at you through the windows and squeaking lorry brakes whining continuously in your ear because you had to open the windows to get a breeze in and now the exhaust fumes are making you nauseous and you feel light-headed and…
…get me Little Nellie.

All of the entries from the current teams have been included, but those from championship leading team Brawn,  McLaren, BMW Sauber, Renault and Toyota are only provisional and are dependent on those teams removing the conditions that they applied to their entries not later than close of business on 19 June, two days before the British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

This effectively means that the FIA has bought more time, both for itself and for the teams, to try to negotiate a compromise. Or rather, from the FIA’s point of view, for everyone to fall into line with what it wants.

Everyone must follow the FIA!

The entries from Williams and Force India have been accepted as they submitted unconditional entries. Ferrari, Red Bull and Toro Rosso have also been accepted, despite them having submitted conditional entries, on the grounds that the FIA believes it already has binding contracts with these teams which they signed a few years ago. The teams dispute this, saying that the terms under which they signed have been broken.
In response to the publication of the entry list, Ferrari has said that its entry remains conditional and that it can’t be forced to race in F1 next year. A statement from the team said: “Ferrari submitted on 29 May 2009 an entry to the 2010 FIA Formula One World Championship which is subject to certain conditions. As of today, these conditions have not been met.

Ferrari are not happy

“Notwithstanding this and despite Ferrari’s previous written notice to the FIA not to do so, the FIA has included Ferrari as an unconditional participant in next year’s Formula One World Championship.
“For the avoidance of any doubt, Ferrari reaffirms that it shall not take part in the 2010 FIA Formula One World Championship under the regulations adopted by the FIA in violation of Ferrari’s rights under a written agreement with the FIA.”
Red Bull and Toro Rosso have issued similar statements, saying that they would not accept an unconditional entry.

I won’t bore you with all the details of the dispute between the FIA and the teams again. Suffice to say, the FIA is introducing a budget cap to the sport in a way which it knows the existing teams find unacceptable but which is attractive to other teams wishing to enter F1.

It's a long and boring arguement

The most surprising thing about the entry list for 2010 is the names of the three new teams which have been accepted – Campos Grand Prix, Manor Grand Prix and Team US F1. The latter is a known quantity, in that it has been working on its F1 project for many years and announced its intentions many months ago. It has been set up by Ken Anderson, a former technical director of the old Ligier F1 team and journalist Peter Windsor. Campos and Manor are both existing teams, albeit in other categories of racing. Up until this year, Campos, which is run by former Minardi F1 driver Adrian Campos, has been competing in GP2 while Manor Motorsport has been successful in Formula Three for many years. Their F1 team is said to involve Manor boss John Booth, together with Nick Wirth, who ran the Simtek F1 team in the early nineties.

Manor who?

But the biggest surprise is omission of the Prodrive team, which nearly entered last year and was rumoured to be bringing the Aston Martin name back to F1. The team is competing at Le Mans this weekend and is apparently still in discussions with the FIA over a possible entry. If any of the existing teams do not withdraw their conditions of entry, then it will leave the door open for other new teams such as Prodrive.
So where does this leave us? Well, no further on really, except that we now have to wait another week until next Friday to see how the situation will resolve itself. It’s interesting that Max Mosley and the FIA have given the teams more time instead of rejecting their entries outright. It shows that they realise the importance of keeping these teams within the framework of Formula One and not leaving them to set up a rival series on their own.

Everyone's got a liitle more time

The teams have now written to the FIA’s Senate and World Motor Sport Council asking them to intervene in the row and to help find a swift solution. The letter apparently states that if this is not forthcoming, they will reluctantly have to seek alternative solutions…

Let’s hope that this doesn’t result in a stand-off at Silverstone, with teams refusing to race. There were rumours of a possible boycott by the teams in Turkey, but this proved groundless. However, we are swiftly arriving at a situation where anything seems possible. The atmosphere at Silverstone next weekend is going to be electric.

We can live without these chaps, can't we?

You see, there’s a myth about Ferrari which I don’t believe stands up to close scrutiny. It’s true that it is the only team to have competed in the F1 world championship every year since its inception in 1950, but it has often done so in very mediocre fashion and by using bullying tactics.

Enzo Ferrari’s cars have not always delivered the goods and when they didn’t he always blamed the driver. The team were also renown for concentrating all their efforts on producing a powerful engine, which they usually did, but then neglecting the chassis in which it had to sit. The result was an often ill-handling car which the drivers struggled with but were still blamed for not winning races.

Ferrari himself was not a very nice man by all accounts. He played his drivers off against each other within the team, sometimes favouring one over another in order, he claimed, to get the most competitive spirit out of them. If they crashed, he was more concerned about whether the car could be repaired than if the hapless driver had lost his life.

He wasn't that nice really...

The team also developed a reputation for being a shambles. Latin temperament often got the better of good judgement and it wasn’t unusual to see them running around like headless chickens at a bungled pit-stop. But of course the driver got the blame.

During the 1980s and 90s they struggled. Until Michael Schumacher stepped up to the block, bringing with him the successful team that had guided him to two championships at Benetton, did things look up. When he claimed his first crown for the Scuderia in 2000, the previous Ferrari driver to take the title had been Jody Scheckter in 1979. That’s 19 long years without success. Schumacher then went on to win five more world driver’s championships for the team, but we have learnt recently that, during those years, Ferrari had an exclusive agreement with the FIA, allowing them to veto any rule changes they didn’t like. Or in other words, any which might favour their rivals over them.

These guys turned it all around

There had long been a belief within the F1 paddock that Ferrari was receiving preferential treatment of some sort. Now that has been confirmed. Stewards’ decisions always seemed to go in their favour, transgressions went unpunished and now we find out that they were receiving a greater slice of the prize fund than other teams, all in return for them supporting the FIA over any potentially controversial matter.

So how valid are those five titles of Schumacher’s? In my mind they will always be tainted.

And when Schumacher and the management team of Jean Todt, Ross Brawn and others left, the team reverted to its Keystone Cops routines. Witness some of this year’s decisions during qualifying when one of its drivers has failed to progress beyond the first session due to team incompetence.

2009 and a shambles

The team’s fans, the excitable Tifosi, have always remained faithful to their beloved Ferrari through thick and thin, and for that they should be commended. But it is my belief that no one team is bigger than the sport, even if they have been allowed to be so over the past few years. Ferrari has always produced good sports cars. Let it now return to sports car racing, in events such as the 24 hours of Le Mans, and leave Formula One behind. Because frankly, we can live without them.

The announcement comes following the company’s launch of its affiliate programme earlier this year.  The new agreement with Trade Doubler - Europe’s most extensive and successful affiliate network – is designed to extend the reach of the Carrentals.co.uk affiliate programme further to a growing range of businesses looking for new revenue streams.

Gareth Robinson, managing director of Carrentals.co.uk, says: “In the current market a growing number of British businesses are recognising the potential of becoming an affiliate to boost revenue from new sources.  Carrentals.co.uk is the UK’s most successful car hire price comparison site, with our sales converting at around 4% - three times higher than any of our competitors.

“The affiliate programme has proved increasingly popular since we launched, and the agreement with Trade Doubler will extend our reach to a wider audience.  With a 5% commission rate for partners, and an easy to integrate and track solution, becoming an affiliate has never been simpler.“

Carrentals.co.uk was voted Best Car Hire Website in the 2008 Travolution awards, and compares prices from leading rental providers including Alamo, Budget, Holiday Autos, and Thrifty.

Through an affiliate deal any business can now feature a Carrentals.co.uk banner on their website, which visitors click on to make their car hire booking.  All reservations are made through the Carrentals site, with clear tracking and reporting of booking figures and commission levels.

The affiliate programme will run on the Trade Doubler network and will be managed by award winning affiliate management agency, Arctic Sunrise.

Keith Budden of Arctic Sunrise adds: “Affiliate programmes offer businesses an extra element to their websites, but the key is to ensure they are easy to integrate and manage.  The quality of the Carrentals.co.uk affiliate product, combined with the broad market that car hire attracts and the 5% commission structure has resulted in a very strong proposition, and this will grow further with the new Trade Doubler agreement.”

It’s the biggest failure of an industrial company in US history and ranks as the third largest bankruptcy in the US, after Lehman Brothers and telecoms giant WorldCom. It also means that famous car names such as Pontiac, Hummer and Saab are under threat.

General Motors, or GM as it’s usually known, had been losing market share since the 1980s and made a loss of $30 billion last year.

Time to shut off the fountain

High production costs and the collapse in credit markets and consumer spending have been blamed, but industry analysts say that the company was slow to move away from big ‘gas-guzzlers’ such as Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs), when drivers wanted more fuel efficient vehicles.

Less fuel? That's un-American!

The company has filed for bankruptcy in the US under Chapter 11, which allows it to continue to trade while restructuring its finances, protected for the time being from its creditors. It had already received $30 billion in state aid from the US Government, which is to take a 60 per cent share in the company in order to prevent it from being broken up.

It is thought that around 20,000 workers in the US could lose their jobs under the restructuring, which will see around 11 factories in the US and Canada closed down and another three mothballed. It is thought that 30 per cent of US dealerships could lose their franchises as well.

The Chapter 11 will affect a lot of showrooms and workers

GM was founded in 1908 by William C Durant who combined the Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac and Pontiac companies, eventually adding Chevrolet as well. In the 1920s the company bought Vauxhall and Opel under its wing as well and during the 70s and 80s it bought stakes in Isuzu and Suzuki. It also acquired British sports car company Lotus and formed a partnership with Toyota. In the 90s it added Swedish car manufacturer Saab to its stable.

The European arm of GM, which includes Vauxhall and Opel but not Saab, is not included in the bankruptcy proceedings, however. It was acquired over the weekend by Canadian car parts maker Magna International, and has stated that it is continuing operating as normal. Even so, jobs may still be lost at Vauxhall plants at Luton and Ellesmere Port in the UK, although workers may have to wait up to two months before they find out whether or not their jobs are secure.

Vauxhall's future is safe, but all of their workers may not be

Magma is paying 700 million Euros for a 55 per cent stake of the company and GM Europe has secured approval for a 1.5 billion Euro bridging agreement with the German government based on the partnership with Magna. With this available, the European operations are isolated from any financial impact by GM’s situation in the US.

GM is the second US car manufacturer to file for bankruptcy in a short time after Chrysler went through the same process. At the end of last week another US bankruptcy court approved the sale of Chrysler to Italian motor giant Fiat. The company will be 20 per cent owned by Fiat, 68 per cent by a union trust while the US and Canadian governments will jointly own 12 per cent.

Chrysler went first

The US government is hoping that the complete restructuring of GM can be completed within three months.
Meanwhile, Honda workers in the UK returned to the production line at Swindon after a two month shut down.

These are dark and difficult times indeed for everyone involved in the car industry.

Chas's favourite GP venue - wonder why?

I expect Jenson Button’s pretty fond of the place as well. He absolutely dominated the race, just as he has in four of the other five Grands Prix held so far this year, but Monaco was just a bit special. It doesn’t matter how good your car is here, you’ve still got to be absolutely fully concentrated and committed to put in fast lap times and yet keep it out of the barriers. Witness Lewis Hamilton’s costly error in qualifying. But for that one mistake, he could have been on the podium at the end.

Happy Jenson!

Instead, it was another Brawn one-two and if Rubens Barrichello is still wondering why it’s his team-mate who’s doing all the winning, he only has to look at how Button preserved his super-soft set of tyres during the opening phase of the race, while the Brazilian rooted his and had Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari all over the back of him as a result.

Can Rubens nurse tyres? Well this was just his hire car!

And one of the things that Monaco showed was that Ferrari and McLaren are slowly catching up with Brawn and Red Bull, the early season pace-setters. It also showed that Toyota and Williams, who both showed early season promise, have not been able to capitalise on that and have lost their initial advantage. Toyota was on the front row in Bahrain. In Monaco it was at the back. As for the BMW-Saubers, they seem to have just completely lost direction.

BMW will be digging out their old car at this rate...

And talking of direction, we still don’t know which way Formula One will be headed next season. Despite a series of high-level talks between the teams and the FIA, the sport’s governing body, as I write this there is still no sign of an agreement. The FIA, or should I say Max Mosley, wants to introduce a budget cap to drive costs down. Whilst agreeing that costs do need to be reduced, the teams are united in their condemnation of the way in which it is being forced upon them and the governance of the sport in general. So how, and why, has all this come about? Formula One used to be populated by private teams, mostly using the same Cosworth V8 engine, the exception being Ferrari, which was also a motor manufacturer and ran glorious-sounding V12s.

The good old days will be the new good days?

Gradually, other manufacturers started taking an interest in the sport until we got to point we are at today where it is dominated by them. The only private teams are Brawn, Williams, Red Bull, Torro Rosso and Force India, with McLaren somewhere in the middle – a private team but part-owned by Mercedes.

And it was the manufacturers who drove up the cost of F1 to the point where it is now almost unsustainable. There has long been the fear though that any, or all of them, could pull out of the sport at short notice, leaving a massive gap, because F1 is not their core business, it is merely a way of promoting their road cars.
With this in mind, it seems that Max Mosley has decided to drive the manufacturers out of the sport and replace them with privateer teams by forcing through cost-capping regulations which he knows the manufacturers will find unacceptable.

F1's new budget

What Mosley wants instead is for privately-run teams to move up from categories like GP2 or Formula Three into F1, while at the same time have completely new teams, such as the recently-announced USF1, arrive on the scene. This might make sense from the point of view of returning the sport to its roots, but there are lots of doubts as to whether all of the hopefuls can really raise the funding required in these difficult financial times.

Anyone need an aerodynamicist?

It is also rather unsavoury to see the big manufacturer teams who have done much to raise the public profile of the sport be forced out in this way. If they withdraw, or even continue but with dramatically reduced budgets, there are going to be an awful lot of people out of a job as a result.
Whereas a sound compromise solution could probably be found if just one person left their current job…

How would you recover a flying car??

There’s a reason that flying cars have not, so to speak, taken off: they’re rubbish. For starters, think of the theory test. Where would you begin? Check out this multiple choice brain noodler, which surely would have to be a must for any self-respecting flying car driving school:

‘You encounter a broken-down flying car. Do you:
a) Watch it plummet through the air until it explodes like John Woo’s wet dream on the tarmac below;
b) Witness the passengers inside desperately fumbling with parachutes which don’t work properly because they bought a Fiat;
c) Continue on your journey towards the oncoming flock of pigeons?’

So you’ve passed your test, and your false leg is working fine after a slight collision with a Fox News helicopter on your first driving lesson. You’re out in the garden on a summer’s day, enjoying a nice glass of Tropicana, or maybe a beer. A small black dot appears in the sky above, like a hover fly, getting bigger and bigger and bigger until the outline is incontrovertibly that of a flying car. The learner inside has stalled and his driving instructor is now reading them the last rites as they whistle through the air into your garden. Bang, there goes your other leg.

What's that in the sky?

Humankind is simply not ready for the flying car. Our metaphors for driving are too hackneyed to extend into a third dimension. One thing you can be sure of on a road is that if you stop, you will not die. This is an incredibly important aspect of driving that no one has really attempted to adapt in flight. If things are going wrong, pull over and stop, turn the engine off, you’re fine. Now try turning off the engine of a helicopter, or stopping a plane in mid-air. Both actions will result in almost instant death. I say instant because you will have just enough time to realise what’s going on and spend the remaining few seconds of your life in mortal terror, cursing the day you bought a Fiat.

Worse still, our skies are already busy enough. It is highly unlikely that flying cars would cruise at the same altitudes as a standard commerical airliner, but as those planes came into land they would start to take up precious airborne real estate. The mind’s eye now renders the I75 as a tapestry of death, an outline of carnage around Atlanta as it turns into a Michael Bay dream of broken things. JFK would become known by some media-coined nickname like ‘St. Nick’s arsehole’ as Jumbo Jets rammed Fiats full-on, creating giant fireballs that make the end of Con-Air look like a textbook landing.

Then there’s the noise. An airplane after take-off generates enough racket to drown out your TV from a couple of miles away. Now imagine thousands of mini-planes taking off everyday. Rush hour would cause catastrophic hearing damage. TV would have to sound like a Who concert. Chavs would be able to fit massive vibrating fake exhausts to the engines of their second-hand Vauxhall Flybys, a sound akin to hugging the takeoff outlets of a Harrier Jump Jet. All of this before anyone has even got in the air.

Once you’re in the air, things just keep getting tougher. Imagine being stuck in a mid-air traffic jam, your arse suspended from certain death by a couple of inches of Italian-made spit and polish, a new kind of stress that you would never really become accustomed to. Now think what it means to run out of petrol in mid-air. On the road, someone in front of you hits their hazard lights and you might sigh or swear and pull out into the next lane to continue with your journey. In an equivalent flying-car scenario you would be sitting in the queue minding your own business when the bloke in front of you plummets to the ground like a dart, perhaps falling silently the whole way like Wile E. Coyote as his Fiat eats tarmac, maybe in some delicious twist of fate crushing the Fiat of some poor sod on the road below who thought flying cars were a bad idea. How could you possibly continue with your journey? You would have to pull over and turn your engine off for a bit, just to chill out, at which point you’d realise you’d turned your engine off in mid-air and you too would plunge to a fateless death.

It’s extraordinary that the idea of the flying car still appeals to so many people. Perhaps the concept could exist as a recreational pursuit, established within the boundaries of a theme park. A winner-takes-all flying dodgems would be the most extreme form of thrill-seeking imaginable, a nihilistic pursuit where the aim is to be the last flying dodgem not exploded or on fire. You’d have to worry about a lot more than losing a tooth on that ride. It would kick seven shits out of Universal Studios too. And if you got stuck in the air, an inbred carny would jetpack his way over to you to push you back into open play. Now that’s an idea.

Wonder why people have looked up and thought of a flying car?

We accept car crashes and fatalities. They are so subconscious as to be invisible. We have had a century to become accustomed to the car and its sometimes tragic consequences. Unless there is a truly collossal accident on our roads, it goes unreported. It’s unlikely the same nonchalance would be afforded to the first flying car accident. It would be like the Hindenburg all over again, except the news would be a rolling report about how nobody had seen anything yet and they weren’t sure whether anyone was going to be able to tell anyone else anything more but, be damned, they were going to keep reporting the fact. To any of you still enamoured with the idea, good luck to you. If the utopian vision ever comes to fruition, I will be tunnelling everywhere.