Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Tempus fu**it: Pole position

It was a little over twenty years ago that I developed a mild addiction for televised motorsport. At the time I ran a business based on a perceived niche ‘window of opportunity’: commercial television had finally come to Germany and channels needed overvoiced German versions of the various magazine and factual entertainment program packages they bought on the international content market.

Of course, back in those pre-internet days nobody called it content.

Anyway, one of the series we Germanized for a couple of seasons covered the race action on Nascar’s tracks. I learned about the Brickyard and all the other venues redolent in high-octane, quintessentially American and, in those days certainly, beer-amusingly bellied Redneck culture.

Eventually I realized that watching muscle cars going round and round the oval speedways, even if they did spectacularly fly from time to time over the retaining walls, was monotonous. And so when my client broadcaster changed its programming policy and I no longer had the Nascar series to deal with, I migrated as a television viewer to Formula One.

Thus in my years in Germany I spent many Sunday afternoons watching Schumi evolve from newcomer to World Champion. And by the time his annual triumphs became as repetitive as the Nascar merry-go-round I’d left Germany to become a Sandlander.

How strange, therefore, to find myself on Whitsunday again watching a Grand Prix on RTL, on the newly connected television set in my already rudimentarily furnished quarters.

How appropriate, somehow, and of course only on an indulgent self-referential level, that two of the drivers on the podium wore caps like the one pictured at the top of this post.

1 comment:

nzm said...

A wheel coming full circle moment?