Alt+F1: 09 - 05/06/2014 - Google Machines

Eurovision is such comedy gold. I would definitely listen to a Eurovision centric podcast!

Eurovision podcast please gents!

How in the hell has no one responded to Drew's "Donde esta la bibliotheca?" with "Me llamo T-Bone la aranja discotecha"?

I think the weirdest Doge themed thing I've seen so far is the ads for the Stockholm summer travel card that are currently plastered all over Stockholm, Sweden:

The best eurovision song.

@skip124: Yeah, I don't know where the line is, but you can definitely make changes to the car. We all remember one of the beefs between Webber and Vettel being that new nosecone that was taken off Webber's car and put straight onto Vettel's.

Then there was the case of the double diffusers. Brawn (and others) had it at the start of the season and racked up tonnes of points. Other teams copied it and incorporated it into their cars, but by then it was too late and Brawn had enough points in the bank.

@willboweird: So as a premium subscriber, I should subscribe to both the premium and non-premium feeds in case there is an ad-free bombcast that week? I didn't read up on how the feeds work so I'm probably missing something, but I'd think that a lot of users would expect the premium podcast to have all of the podcasts. Up until a few weeks ago I did subscribe to both assuming there would be times when they weren't in sync, but then I unsubscribed from the non-premium feed. It's not a big deal, but I think the better user experience would for the premium feed to have all the bombcasts regardless if they had ads that week or not.

JChenderson your right.. germany used to have a euro grand prix also german grand prix used to take it in turns to host it between 2 track hockenhim its all spelt wrong and nurburgring. Also they can change i think pretty much anything on the car except for the engine block but parts they can change can lower the weight which one of the teams is doing this week maybe Lotus? but aero can be changed also. if they cant change things on the car the season would be a status quo

Changing the car: For the last few years there's a restriction on number of engines they can use in a season, too, so you're very limited in how many different ones you can use. The letter of the rule is that you cannot improve the performance of the engine in-season; HOWEVER, if you apply to make changes on the grounds of reliability and it also happens to improve performance, well, fair play, your performance just increased. It's believed that Renault did this after the first race (hence Red Bull jumping up closer to pace) and throughout the year, Ferrari might have as well.

Aerodynamics are also allowed to change, and hell, that's half the fun of F1 -- since the first four races are "flyaway rounds" (re: outside of Europe), most teams bring their first bundle of new parts to this first European round. It'll be interesting to see what aero changes happen for this round.

Because of this, Spain can be a shake-up in the order of things. However, because Barcelona's also a really common test track, people know it waaaaaay too well to allow for interesting racing.

Old Memories of Racing Death: I'm about the same age as Danny, and though I don't remember watching a lot of F1 live as a young kid (I lived on the west coast, you're about to find out why for yourself!) I loved auto racing of all forms and I do remember watching what must have been ESPN's re-run of the 1994 San Marino GP because I remember Senna's crash. I remember being really shocked but since I was in the U.S., it was surprising to hear about it on the evening news. However, it didn't impact me until later, once I learned more about Senna and how great of a racer he was.

What I have much more vivid memories of was Dale Earnhardt's death at Daytona. That was 2001, so I was in high school and still a massive NASCAR fan. NASCAR was still great at the time -- great characters, lots of money, and interesting racing. Daytona and Talladega (where the Dogecoin car made its debut last weekend) have since the late 1980s run with "restrictor plates," which limit the amount of air that the car can take in. This means all the cars at these two tracks are basically floored the whole way around and race in packs -- and that there's the inevitable massive crash, colloquially known as "The Big One." In Earnhardt's final race, "The Big One" claimed 18 of the 43 drivers in the race in one fell swoop. This pack racing encourages the sort of crashes that lead to impacts like the one that claimed Earnhardt's life, but in terms of improving safety in the wake of the accident, it's a major reason why the Head and Neck Supports that almost all drivers use were adopted.

In the years since then, NASCAR has tried to improve their tracks and cars -- and it's a reason their current cars look and are the way they are.

Dan Wheldon's accident a couple years ago (at the end of the season where he won an absolute miracle of an Indianapolis 500 race) absolutely crushed me. Thanks to time zones, I read about it and saw the unfortunate highlights on Monday morning before work here in Japan, and was an absolutely stunned zombie for the entirety of the day. I hadn't been that upset in a long, long time. It's a horrible wreck and one of the reasons why the current IndyCar chassis has covers behind the rear wheels, to prevent cars from getting launched.

Dario Franchiti's wreck was at Houston last year, and it really is a miracle he walked away too. American open-wheel racing has seen a fair number of horrible accidents in recent years, though fortunately fewer and fewer of them are proving fatal. Before Wheldon, the most impactful were the deaths of Gonzalo Rodriguez at Laguna Seca and of Canadian ace Greg Moore at California Speedway within six weeks of each other in 1999.

I think it goes without saying that all of these accidents (plus a load from the IRL during its era) are pretty horrible to watch. Be warned.

Also, because Wheldon did a lot of test driving for the new (now current) IndyCar chassis, it's been named the Dallara DW-12 (for Dan Wheldon).

This may have been posted before, but I cant listen to one of these without thinking of this:

Hands-down my favourite ever Eurovision entry. It's the only time I've ever actually voted for a song, and they were unlucky to end up in the year that featured Lordi. That said, I was still pretty okay with Lordi winning - and Danny how can you refer to that magnificence as a "joke entry", Lordi are serious business!

EDIT: Also if we somehow got a football/soccer podcast out of you guys that would be incredible. Even if it ended up having to be only for the World Cup or something as a Premier League focused show might be a bit odd for an American-based website.

It's weird that he doesn't seem to realize that the Swedish guy he's commenting on actually is a comedy act. He was at the time the most popular comedian in Sweden, so he got to do a bunch of dumb sketches during the national melody festival (in which the nation's entry for Eurovision is chosen).

I obviously don't expect that you or any of the non-Swedish viewers would know that, but I'd expect that the host/commentators would - at least Swedish commentators always seem to be up to date with who are famous comedians or media personalities in the various participating countries - because unlike what Danny and Drew said during the podcast - not even most of the participants take it seriously. Most countries put some of their popular comedians to do their "this is what our country voted for" thing, and try to do pull some awkward jokes that are only understood by their own viewers in there.

That last part of the Riverdance thing is awsome, and I don‘t care who knows I said it.

theres a good documentary about how shady bernie ecclestone is on last week bbc1 panorama , lies bribes and formula 1

As a Lithuanian I loved the Eurovision bit! The whole thing is so incredibly silly.

@y2ken: thanks for posting that, I don't think we'll ever achieve something so glorious again.

A Dual! a fucking Dual! fuck

Here's a video about how tires are made

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVySTjmd0lM

@dannyodwyer: Thanks Danny, I've never actually seen Riverdance before and I'm glad to see that it was awesome as you made it sound

Fuck yea indeed!