2001 Marlboro Brazilian Grand Prix

04/04/2001

The unthinkable has happened. Our favourite South American bard was not only dissatisfied, he was, and to quote the literary great himself, "!..disappointed". Over the past season and a bit, we have suspected the congenial Argentinian was almost impossible to annoy. We suspected that Gaston could have gone out and lapped in a clapped out (are there any other kind?) Robin Reliant and still returned to the pits with a measure of satisfaction. What we (and for that matter Gaston) hadn't counted on was how truly awful the Prost-Acer is. Despite Honest Enzo's penultimate best used powerplants, the Prost is still a pig-truck (apologies to the descendants of credible pig-truck makers who in all reality, produced better fare than Prost). Worse yet, it is a pig-truck that has "disappointed" our beloved Gaston. Shame on you Alain, shame. You have achieved the seemingly impossible.

Mainstream F1 scribes have it pretty easy these days. They are fed a steady diet of press releases and rumours which they embellish and interpret. On the whole you are hardly left with the impression that they are out there going through people's rubbish to hunt up the hitherto unknown in the manner of their glorious predecessors to produce a genuine, original theme. The last F1 Journo who provoked our tiny minds and refused to parrot sanitised pooh was AC-HQ idol, the late Denis Jenkinson. Have you read a grand prix weekend report lately that is likely to win a Pulitzer Prize?

On the other hand, once a fortnight we at the Alternative Championship Headquarters (AC-HQ) are forced to lay down our shandies, sober up and do some really, reeeeeaally hard work. We scrutinise every second of broadcast footage. We voraciously trawl every website and print story. We crank up the technical resources of the AC-HQ and peek into every corner of the globe. We bribe every PR officer of every F1 team. Failing that, we resort to blackmail, to bring you, our loyal readers, the most alternative view of the sport we can muster. And we do it for the most noble and laudable of reasons; cheap laughs!

Sometimes this is hard going. Sometimes we go without sleep for days at a time. Sometimes we even make stuff up. Not so this week. Frankly we've barely deviated from our normal shandies, crisps and nighty-nights routine. This weekend, the alternative world came to us. Every little thing we encountered from the Brazilian GP was positively pyrite (alternative gold to you). It's as if, for a few short days, the F1 world was marching to an Alternative Antipodean arrhythmic beat. Our beat.

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