Alt+F1: 16 - 07/02/2014 - Smithereens Galore

time to turn up the alt f fun!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

New podcast!

At least make it a pun, or some clever wordplay...

"Time to Alt F4 your troubles away, because Alt F1 is here to stay!"

Congrats to Giant Bomb's new Senior F1 Editor, Danny O'Dwyer!

Nyoooooom. Time for my weekly injection of an Irishman and Drew talking about fast cars.

Accents are fascinating. I grew up in New Zealand with a dad from Belfast so I've always been hyper-aware of my accent and how awful it sounds. I can pick up an accent after a few weeks of exposure to it now.

Weirdly enough, despite being at the air show where this happened back when I was a kid in 1993, I still find air shows fascinating (for those worried of gruesome images, as there tends to be in accidents like these, nobody was killed in this accident, as far as I know only one person was injured):

Following the accident they banned all air shows over the Stockholm metropolitan area.

You know what racing is?

It's still racing.

Drew, you are a handsome man of many talents, but accents is not one of them.

What a load of pants.

Did you record this yesterday? Because if so you actually recorded this on Canada Day. I'm so disappointed in you Drew.

Sweet, my favorite racists are here.

Er, racemen? Race-ologists?

I Love Queen. I dont just love Queen, I actively hate all other bands that are not Queen.

Spent time in Ireland about a decade ago. First, it was the best part of my Europe trip and second, the people I met there were the best and most friendly I met by far in all my travels back then. Stayed mostly in Dublin, but we strayed into the country around there to play golf. So damn gorgeous there. So desperately wanna go back.

Anyway, if you hang out there, and we were near Trinity College so the bar in the hotel was a mix of Irish and Northern Irish(even thicker and harder to get), and those accents just grow on you like moss. Such good memories being there.

Drew, just go there, you'll fall helplessly in love, that and Guinness!

Sorry, back to F1!

Thanks, sir. You've made my day before I even started listening to the podcast. :)

Thats DisgRACEful you better retRACE that ;)

@csl316: The correct term is 'men of race'.

When my band toured England a few years back, when we first arrived the other group we were touring with kept on asking us if we needed any "kip" and we were SO confused. We kept asking each other, "what the hell is kip? are they trying to give us kip? Do we even want kip?"

Turns out they were just asking if we needed to take a nap...Where the hell do you get "kip" from "sleep!"

Canada has a confederation day, it was July 1st!

We waited 100 years after the Americans and then asked England nicely for independence and they were like, yeah sure

Love the podcast, especially the real casual nature of the opening, so this site will let you hear a whole bunch of local British accents. For reference my accent should be close to that from North Elmham but outside of a few words its flattened out considerably.

www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/

hey guys, climate change, as bad as it may be, will not end humanity. 20k years ago sea level was about 120 meters lower than it is today and the earth was kinda cold. Mankind survived. Animals may die, the earth may get hot, the ocean may get higher, but in the world we live in today man can adapt faster than any other species in history (especially with the advent of technology). I'm hoping it was just hyperbole, but it bugs me when people are actually legitimately fearful that global warming is the end of times.

Well Danny's thoughts on the end of humanity certainly made this a special Alt+F1.

yeah, hurray for Alt F1. Also F the Euro Dutch bills had way better/dumber designs for our bills before we were forced to switch.

Seeing Boris Johnson on BBC Always makes me think of this:

Also the 84th Assen TT was pretty awesome (rain managed to shake things up and produce some interesting results) here's to the 85th edition.

Anyway Thanx for another great podcast and F petrol/electric hybrides I'm waiting on Hydrogen fuelcell's.

This Formula 1 podcast got weird.

Alt F1 turned into a lifestyle podcast so gradually I didn't even notice! :-)

I agree with Danny, ya we beat the British its been 200 years move on. Now the gaining independence thing that is still good to celebrate.

We have a similar day in Norway (17th of May, "The Constitution Day", after we said fuck off to the Danes in 1814!), so I can't criticise!

I love this podcast so much. Definitely my new favorite.

And don't worry about falling off topic a little, makes the convo seem more natural. Anyway, great show this week!

@fisk0: That pilot had already crashed a Gripen in '89.. maybe he shouldn't have been flying over all those people.

I too was just a kid when this happened, but my grandpa was at the airshow. He apparently said "Wow, can they do that?", the seconds before he ejected. "I guess not."

ANECDOTES!

Operation: Mincemeat

Yes, it is st.maartin where the planes landing almost land on the beach full of tourists.

On a certain part of the beach behind the runway the planes taking off create a mini sandstorm.

Do you launch fireworks and walk around saying 'orway all day?

@amyggen: I guess it's pretty canadian to celebrate our independence on tuesday where we didn't actually battle anyone for it. :)

I went to an airshow once. It was fun! Also, at one point I think there was a bomb scare, but there wasn't actually a bomb and everyone was okay.

I haven't been to one since.

Haha, not exactly, but we have huge parades . So if anything, it's more nationalistic than 4th of July. Here's a picture from Oslo on the 17th of May. We go around singing the national anthem all day, wave our flag, dress up in different versions of the traditional national costume of Norway (different parts of the country have different versions) etc.

Well, huge surprise that a podcast on this site goes off topic a lot. Who'd a thought?

Anyways great podcast as always. Silverstone is gonna be fun.

This is one gorgeous piece of podcast

Just real quick on electric cars, even if the energy comes from a coal plant they're still far better than an internal combustion engine because an electric engine is far more efficient at using energy. internal combustion engines typically have efficiency ranges in the teens to 20's, electric engines are in the 75% to 90% range.

On top of that, and this is the real key to why most car manufacturer's don't like electric and fight it tooth and nail, they're far more reliable and have very few moving parts. This means very few points of failure. By comparison an internal combustion engine has 100's of small and large individual parts and moving pieces that can break and parts is where manufacturer's actually make most of their money.

The real red herring is hybrids, they're worse overall than driving a small internal combustion car or electric car. You're lugging around two engines, most of the time for no real reason, reducing all the efficiency gains given by the electric engine.

My father had done his service at the F16 airbase in Uppsala, so pretty much the moment the Gripen stalled he grabbed me and my brother and started running to the car.

On the note of national celebration days, constitution days, independence days and all that, I think most Swedes are just happy to have a day off at June 6th, but despite the governments best efforts to try to make it some kind of celebration, the day most Swedes actually celebrate is Midsummer's Eve a couple of weeks later.

Thank you for making this really amazing silly podcast! Topics for next week include cashews and watches as well as first contact.

Air shows are awesome. I used to go to the Biggin Hill air show every year and loved it. Even got to see a F117 one year which was rad. (I did also miss a fatal crash one year by about 5 minuets)

Fun fact, The Biggin Hill air show was cancelled because the owner (one Mr Bernie Ecclestone wanted to develop houses right next to the airport.)

It's also where the F1 TV production crew is based.

First footage of a Formula E standing start confirms that the cars will sound totally rad.

Are you accounting for electric engines and batteries being heavier and having to be refueled more often and for longer times and also drasticly loose capacity over only a couple of years?

I believe @pirsig was purely talking about the efficiency of electric vs. internal combustion engines, and his points are totally valid. At best only around a quarter of the energy used by an internal combustion engine goes to the wheels. The rest gets lost through heat, sound and so on. An electric engine on the other hand has very little waste through friction, heat or noise so it's able to transfer most of the energy to the wheels.

And to your point concerning the weight and refueling of electric cars. Modern electric cars are actually not that heavy. A Tesla Model S for example weights about the same as an Audi A5 depending on how much gas you have in the tank of the Audi. Refueling and the loss of battery capacity are real problems, but they have little to do with efficiency.

Also it's true that the production of batteries has a sizable environmental impact from mining the minerals needed to manufacturing and shipping the batteries. But it would be hard to argue that the impact is worse than that in the massive chain of production of petrol. Even if the electricity in electric cars were to come from an oil plant for example, they still manage to cut out the costly steps of refining and transporting the fuel.

This brought me right back to playing with my remote control monster truck when I was 13. Awesome.

Hell yes, Brad Friedel. <3

The biggest problem with electric cars is modern batteries unfortunately kinda suck. Think about how much production you have ever lost out of a portable electronic device, now imagine that device was the size of a car and had way more batteries. Not to mention how long they take to charge. It may be the better product in the long run but history is full of better products that lose out because of cost or convenience.

You guys should do a whole Podcast on the etymology of phrases.

Yeah, sounds like hard science to me. I feel better.