I'm afraid that many of those of us interested in car racing know well that Paul Newman is a serious racer, and has been for decades. He's a big deal in the racing community....almost Steve McQueen level.
What was a surprise to me was Patrick Dempsey going to Lemans in 2013, I had no idea he was a serious racer....

http://videosift.com/video/Patrick-Dempsey-Racing-Lemans-Mint-400

My Amiga 2000 is stashed away in a closet somewhere. Also had a 500 at one time but eventually sold that.

Shadow of the Beast was a classic and many other impressive games from Psygnosis...graphics and the music.

Lemmings, Out of this World, Monkey Island, Dune II, Stunt Car Racer...even liked the text based Infocom games like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and The Lurking Horror.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ybl9Al-vek for Rad Racer game.

Your video, Drag Boat Racers Create Wall Of Water In Their Wake, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

The Gist:

Guy in business suit looking thoughtfully out of window.
(Doubtful anyone who designs fine consumer goods, *actually designs consumer goods*, wears a suit). Maybe its supposed to be you! You avant-garde millionaire, you!

Person sketching watch designs. This is probably semi-close to reality, though they don’t show the hundreds of designs the visual designer creates that are dismissed at whim by the aforementioned, assumed (but inevitable even if not shown) suits.

People fiddling with plastic representations of what one would assume as the model for said watch design. Maybe realistic, though with the caveat that two people are sitting there going over said physical design, in any serious discussion concerning the actual physics of the end product. I can *not* imagine that nearly the entirety of this process today, both visual and mechanical design, are not done digitally.

Okay, there’s some CG. Because CG is the next step, rather than the first, least expensive step in any design process today. Who wants to quickly model everything in a matter of hours when you can fabricate expensive, physical material for iterative testing?

Holy shit, was that guy just looking at a wood cutout? I can’t even think of a shitty, sarcastic/realistic remark about that one. I might have misunderstood that shot.

Alright, now we’re machining shit. You can’t really fake that with a few grand for marketing. That’s the real stuff. (1.5m in)

No, they don’t sand/polish things by hand during the fabrication phase. That’s entirely too inaccurate and subjective to the assembler to leave up to human hands. (But hey: it’s a 2.5 million dollar piece of metal, so lets make those buyers feel good about their money spent).

Oh look: gemstones! (???) That's kingly.

More faux machining that is veritably inferior to quality mechanical assembly.

Oh shit, someone just turned a nob!

3.5 minutes in, and we see some actual hand-polished work that is legitimately viable to perform by hand.

Hey lets sand those nodules off the finished pieces, and micro-inspect those printed markings, because nothing about us says “accuracy” without a fallible human to do it. Also: what are they printing shit on there for? Was it pushing the price to $3mil to engrave the timestamps on the faces? That better be the highest quality electroplated coating, but even then I can't imagine that's superior than a tactile, physical representation.

Now they’re hand-engraving the sculpted ornamentation, but it’s one more point I can gladly give them because those kinds of human touches let you know at least some sort of artisan was involved. I can appreciate that, though realizing what I just said causes me to reflect on the inaccuracies of mass-production, and why we would take one over the other…

More microscopes. (Because if one notch is off, it’s back to the furnace for you!)

Awe shit, payday. A guy in a suit looking confident is walking towards your building!

Finally, the gear assembly. It certainly looks fantastic, photographically speaking. I can’t help but notice that all that detail is lost to hundreds of textural indentations or are due to stylized alternating polish/grinding. However, I’m confident that spending $2.5mil on this product would get me the absolute, most accurate, unnoticeable details (hand-made!) within a micro-millimeter of accuracy. Those indentations are like chrome on a street-racer in the 90’s: the more you have, the greater they perform.

@~8min, I’m pretty sure no one works like that at their desk. That posture would kill you in a month.

They know you can’t spin the head of a watch while it’s on your wrist, right?

Awe! It’s got 5 ringtones! That’s way more than any other watch I’ve even heard of! Except everything that doesn’t cost $2.5mil.


If I can take anything away from this that’s even remotely positive, it’s that at least millionaire shitheads are now being just as suckered as the rest of the consumer base. Let me sell ONE of those watches, and I would have enough money to overtake their business within a year, except for that I don't have the greed, dishonesty, and overall lack of morals that it would take to set up a quality factory, and trick such dickheads into buying (even superior BS) products.

Here's a counter theory by another racer:

"I haven't seen how Stewart handled the car preimpact. That said, those vehicles require speed for what little grip they have, as it's largely generated by the roof fin, and they don't really steer so much as surf. If you watch the cornering style it's a full on drift. That makes twitch steering pretty ineffective - you steer from the back which requires heavy throttle.

You don't see Stewart's approach ( at least on the vid I've seen ), and the fishtail post impact I would attribute to the impact itself. His approach does not seem consistent with trying to spray the other driver with dirt ; that would have to be a at a high angle relatively speaking and he seemed to come in straight.

It's possible that Stewart intended to kill, but I really think it's highly unlikely. When you're racing you have a lot to deal with, and whilst under a yellow flag undertaking is typically verboten and in theory you should be slowing down, but in reality you are always looking to get the drop as soon as the yellows disappear. To that end you're scanning the track looking for disabled vehicles.

You're not scanning for drivers standing in the middle of the track - the assumption would be that the driver stays safely secured in the car, or they hop the barrier. If that can't happen for some reason, it's the job of race control to red flag the race.

My personal theory, based on incomplete footage - I'd like to see in car footage from Stewart ideally - is that Stewart just didn't see him in time to make any effective attempt to miss. It's a night race, and Stewart would have been concentrating on the disabled vehicle to his right. There's not much about Ward's outfit that would attract attention - from Stewart's perspective, black helmet, black racesuit, against a dark dirt background. These vehicles don't use headlights, so there's nothing to offset the glare of the spotlights.

In a perfect world Stewart would have seen and avoided, but ultimately Ward put himself in a fucking stupid position and paid the price. I'm not surprised to see lack of remorse on Stewart's part ; Ward shouldn't have been there, plain and simple.

Anyhow, that's my thinking on this - I don't know or follow anyone in that type of series, so I'm claiming to be bias free here. Racers know that motorsport is dangerous, so you do what you can to mitigate risk, not increase it by orders of magnitude.

Edit : Looking at it a few more times, it's also possible that Stewart was trying to rotate the car around Ward - throttling up and steering right would have pushed the back away from Ward, which might have made the outcome different. I still say it's a Darwin."

As an ex racer I will say this is disturbing and should definitely be investigated as a criminal act.
First, watching the initial incident closely, Stewart definitely turns into Ward intentionally putting him in the wall. That's likely not criminal, but it should get him thrown out of the circuit, and watched closely by any other circuit he drives in.
Second, the point made in the description is quite valid but understated. He DID know that hitting the throttle would send the whole car, and especially the rear end, sliding to the outside of the turn. Any attempt to claim otherwise is completely ridiculous, he's a professional driver and he knows that. That means even if Stewart didn't intend to hit Ward, he did intend to drive dangerously close to him at unsafe speed wile sliding partially out of control. It seems likely he only intended to spray him with the dirt roost and/or scare him but burped the throttle too soon...that is not an excuse or absolution in any way.
Being on a track doesn't absolve you from behaving safely, or from responsibility for your deliberately unsafe actions. Killing Ward may have been accidental, but acting dangerously irresponsibly was not. An accident that happens when you are acting unsafely is 100% your fault and responsibility, it's exactly why we have the charge of manslaughter and not only murder. Hitting and killing him when you unsafely accelerate at him in a dirt corner was foreseeable by any reasonable person....I would almost certainly convict him.

Not so impressed, without the theme in the background I doubt I could have figured out what it was.
...but...
upvote for speed racer!

Great stuff. This brought back many memories.
But...
Speed Buggy but no Speed Racer? And where is Kimba the white lion?

BTW I loved Land of the lost. Sleestaks!

came for the speed racer song dub-over. oh well.

Here's a point to promote Speed Racer.....

It could also potentially be the non supercharged RR "Meteor" version they made for tanks. In fact it's quite likely as they are easier to get hold of these days, Merlins are like rocking horse shit to find now as they are so iconic and sough after (air racers are partly to blame).

Griffons are noticeably longer but it's hard to say without a size reference or a shot of the naked engine. I'm inclined to agree and say no though, if nothing else a good Griffon is probably even harder to find than a Merlin.

Whichever version it's still about the most fking awesome engine ever made! Nothing sounds quite like them, even the top German stuff. Such a shame they can't/won't make them anymore, I'm sure there's a big market .

Motorcycles seldom kill car drivers, usually the other way 'round, but I think living with the fact someone died because they hit you is bad enough. The biker won't care any more, he's dead.

Personally, I don't see any reason for motorbikes on public streets. Litre for litre (gallon for gallon) they pollute more than a car. You can take the exhaust of any motorbike, hook it up to the intake of any modern car, and the resulting exhaust will be far less toxic than the bike alone. They are not environmentally conscious in any way beyond miles per gallon, so here's a preemptive "shut up" about that.

Bike riders fall into two categories, wannabe racers and wannabe Hell's Angels. They either get off on zigzag'ing high acceleration/deceleration or they think it makes them look badass. Anything else said is just an excuse and self-delusion.

Quick research reveals some stuff about wingsuit flying over snow.

Those wingsuit skydivers are probably traveling about 60-100 mph. During that near miss, when the one skydiver flairs his suit, he probably dropped down to as little as 40 mph.

Ski racers can travel around 50-100 mph. We see crashes at those speeds all the time in snow and the skiier is generally uninjured.

The fastest skiiers, in the aerodynamic suits, are travelling 120-150 mph. Those crashes are obivously survivable, although catastrophic injury happens.

So, it stands to reason that a serious accident involving a wingsuit flyer over snow is very survivable. With some time to flare, there's no reason they couldn't walk away with little more than bruises. In fact, I suspect it's only a matter of time before we finally see a wingsuit pilot land without a parachute. Maybe over snow first, eventually over water and ultimately...why shouldn't we see someone with the skill to land on solid ground. With appropriate advances in equipment.