Congrats! I love seeing people act on their curiosities and give motorcycles a try.
I've ridden street bikes for about 10 years now, starting on a Kawasaki 600 Eliminator and owning various new and vintage bikes since then. Right now I have a Buell X1 Lightning that I love.
I'm always glad to see people starting out sensibly and getting a proper motorcycle to start with. I understand the "grow into it" argument to an extent, but seeing guys still on their permit in shorts and flip-flops on thrice-dropped GSXs just makes me cringe.
If you'll permit me to make a reading/purchasing suggestion, one of my friends told me he got a lot of great info and advice from this book. It seemed geared towards a fairly beginner level, and I'm not sure exactly where you are, but it may be worth a look.
Just remember, the more you ride, the better you get!
What about fighting Tantarian? I don't know how well that would mesh with a speed run though, considering you can't really "tack it on" like other sidequests.
It's been a while since I've seen the first one, but I feel like that one may be kind of a relic of its time and be a little offputting to someone just watching it right now, especially if you aren't into cars that much. I think that 5 and 6 are good for just coming in and looking for fun, good action movies to get acquainted to the characters with. 2 and Tokyo Drift are silly fun I think, but Tokyo Drift looks like it may be playing a bigger part in 7 so it might be worth watching if it strikes a chord. It might just be me, but I found the fourth to be the most skippable of them.
My biggest issue with scalping is that it's not even so much taking advantage of scarcity as it is generating it yourself. It's inserting oneself into the loop as a middleman where there doesn't need to be a middleman. Unlike in the case of, say, Under Armour where there would be a substantial barrier to purchasing that shirt at $12 from whatever factory produced it, generally what is creating the barrier is the scalpers themselves. I'm not going to make a value judgment on doing so, but I certainly wouldn't see it as a high ground.
@ewansuttie: It's not out of sight, but my setup for it is pretty lame right now. Just two of those wall-mounted bicycle hangers under the main element. I was thinking about making something much nicer looking though. I'm sketching up some design ideas.
@shindig: Yeah, I remember that too. I looked it up and apparantly it was Prost.
And yeah, watching vintage F1 cars is incredible. I've only gotten to see a few here and there, and none of the really special cars, but I highly recommend that everyone interested go to a vintage race at some point.
Hey guys, thanks to the increased interest in F1 on the site, I've been meaning to take some pictures of the Williams F1 wing that I have. I finally got around to doing so the other day after cleaning some of the dust off.
This is the rear wing of a 1993 Williams F1 car. I'm pretty sure this was made up for Damon Hill's car for the Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril, however the only evidence I have for that is the three skull and crossbones on the side correspond to three consecutive victories for Hill. At Estoril, Hill would finish third, scoring another podium, so it's hard to imagine them leaving stickers indicating a streak on past that.
The story behind how I got the wing is actually pretty interesting. My family has raced formula cars for years at the club level (formula fords and continentals mostly). So naturally some of the friends you make doing so would happen to have connections to professional teams. One of our good friends worked as a mechanic for Williams from the late 80s until the early 2000s. Now apparently for an F1 team, if it isn't completely new, it isn't used. So if someone in the garage wanted some equipment, they would just let them have it. Otherwise it was going to be discarded (this is also how we received a full set of pit radios).
Our friend was racing a Formula Atlantic at the time and needed to replace his rear wing, so he just asked for one of the spares they had around. He installed it on his car and ended up about 10 seconds a lap slower because even dialed back as much as it could go, it generated monstrous downforce. So naturally he took it off and left it in his garage for 10 years. Eventually he retired and enlisted my Dad and I to help him move out. We came across it while helping him and he said "Oh yeah, I don't need it. Go ahead and hang it in your garage if you like it." So thanks to him, I have what is one of the coolest things I can imagine as an avid fan of both motorsport and videogames.
Unfortunately, I don't have any evidence that it was raced or even put on the car for qualifying or practice. In fact the lack of the number and "Canon" lettering on the lower wing elements indicate it was probably held as a backup. However, the wing does show signs of more use than our friend's brief sojourn, and the lack of number might simply be because he scraped it off before installing it on his own car. I doubt most racing series let you run a car with two numbers.
Tying it back to videogames, I think this wing serves as a really cool time capsule for SEGA. Today SEGA is the butt of a lot of jokes, and frankly they deserve more than their fair share, but as a result it's easy to forget just how big they were in the early 90s. Between their home and their arcade divisions, they were a heck of a powerhouse, and the fact that they were able to sponsor a successful F1 team really shows just how big they were in that era. It serves as a stark reminder of just how far the giants of the industry can fall.
Log in to comment