ADDOD

I have a chronic problem. It’s called ADDOD. ADDOD is an abbreviation that stands for Attention Deficiency Dis… Ooooooooh Doggy! It effectively means that, at a race track, I’m perfectly capable of staying focused on the race cars and the track action, unless I catch sight of a dog, especially a tiny one. When I do, all my attention will irrevocably be drawn to the little furry friend with the cute tiny paws. It’s gotten so bad that in 2015 I almost missed a pass for the lead in an F3 race because somebody had sat down next to me with a Yorkie...

Unfortunately it seems that such moments of distraction will start happening more often in the future, as the number of (little) dogs present at race events is steadily rising. I’m not sure who started the trend or even when/where it began. I only know that until a few seasons ago it was only a handful of drivers, usually the ones that had a camper parked in the paddock, who had their dogs with them; but nowadays pretty much everyone is bringing pets. Particularly GT events tend to be overrun by Chihuahuas, Pomeranians, Bichons, Papillons, Pugs, Tibetans, and other kinds of arenttheycutes.

In the beginning I felt sorry for the little critters. Race-car engines are incredibly loud and I know from experience they can be damaging. Insufficient ear plug use at the start of my motorsport fan ‘career’ has left me with a damaged left ear and a slight case of noise deafness. So, logically, I figured that if I, as a human, could suffer such a serious decibel injury that easily, then the risk and potential physical hurt for dogs had to be ten times higher, given that their hearing is so much better than ours. The more you hear, the louder it sounds, the bigger the damage, right?

Apparently not. For reasons I’ll probably never understand, dogs never seem to be bothered by engine noise. I’ve never seen a single one looking scared during an active track session. Most of them simply tag after their owners through the paddock, wagging their tales and soaking up all the activity around them. On the grandstands they either lounge in the sun (provided there is any), sometimes looking up in annoyance when somebody stands in the way and casts a shadow, or they gaze in wonder at the wheeled things flying passed over the tarmac. I once saw an enthralled Pomeranian who was actually following the cars from left to right with its little head as they shot passed. I also once encountered a Pug with a dislike for HTP Mercedes. Every time an HTP-car passed by, it barked angrily.

I’ve actually only once seen a sad dog on a race track. It was a few weeks ago, at VLN1. Halfway through the race I noticed a tiny Terrier sitting on a plastic chair in the back of a team truck. It was crying, crying, CRYING. Immediately my old fear that it might be in pain returned. Nothing was further from the truth, however. The Terrier turned out to be hurting because of a human felony. Its owner had taken it off her lap, gotten up from the chair, climbed out of the truck, walked to the dustbin three meters away, dropped in a banana peel and had failed to do all that AND return to the chair within two nanoseconds. The Terrier was simply missing its cuddles. I guess I would’ve cried too if I’d been in its place. Wouldn’t you?

Error 404

Change is an inextricable part of motorsport. Nothing ever stays the same for long. Series appear and disappear. Teams are founded and die. Sponsor money comes and goes. And with that, drivers rise and fall. Because of these fluctuations, every winter break brings about shifts in the status quo. I’m used to that and can deal with it. I memorise the changes; I move on. However, last winter so many core elements of the motorsport machine shifted that even now, a month into the 2016 season, my head is still spinning. The changes are just too drastic and numerous to be memorised quickly. Every time I come across them, my head gives a 404 error as if to tell me “eh… no, just NO.”

Most of these errors are provoked by teams. First there was ROWE Racing who, after years of loyalty to Mercedes, suddenly announced it was switching to BMW. Whenever I see a ROWE car nowadays, my first response is “it had an accident HALF THE NOSE IS GONE oh wait.” Then there is C. Abt Racing, which made it known some months ago that it was leaving its family brand Audi for Bentley. The move has left me unable to even say the name of the Abt cars correctly. At best, I end up with “Abt Audley”. And finally there’s Car Collection, the team that moved from Mercedes to Audi and now employs an army of Audi drivers that my head utterly fails to associate with them. As a result I’m often unable – sometimes for minutes at a time – to remember what team their drivers race for.

But teams aren’t the only culprits. Drivers aren’t innocent either, not by a long shot. Over the last winter, a great number of them sneaked away from Porsche. It wasn’t obvious at first. The only inkling I got that something might be afoot was when Philipp Eng announced he was leaving Porsche for BMW. The true enormity of the Porsche exodus didn’t become clear until a few weeks ago, when the first entry lists were announced. Suddenly Christopher Zöchling was in a Lamborghini, Elia Erhart was in a Lamborghini, Gerhard Tweraser was in a Lamborghini, Rolf Ineichen was in a – you guessed it – Lamborghini, and Côme Ledogar was in a McLaren, probably because Lamborghini had run out of seats. The only driver who seems to be piloting a Porsche in 2016 is David Jahn, which is quite neat apart from the fact that I expected to see him in a Corvette this season and is therefore not helping the case at all.

It’s probably better when we don’t even get started on the mess that has become singleseater racing. For the first time in almost as long as I can remember, Formula 3 is a Felix Rosenqvist-free zone. There’s a hole there now that no Maximilian Günther or Charles LeClerc (oh wait, blast, he moved to GP3; sorry!) can fill. Furthermore, the names Schumacher, Alesi, Newey, and Delétraz are on everyone’s tongues, but they never refer to the people I think they are referring to. And why oh why is Pascal Wehrlein driving an F1 car now? And WHO made Esteban Ocon wear Renault yellow? AND WHY IS BEN BARNICOAT CALLED BEN BARNICOAT?

Overload.

Overload.

Overload.

404

Fluffy Fluffy Fluffy Fluffy

It’s not easy being a journalist. For one thing, you’re expected to do interviews. Every time you do that you’ll find yourself battling the spoken-written word differential gap. The what?! The gap that separates the spoken and written word, and makes them fundamentally different. Many people don’t realise this, but speech rarely comes out of our mouths the way it is printed in magazines.

 

When speaking, we use fillers like “ehm” and “well” to verbally fill the time we need to think about what we’re going to say next. We also use stop words. These are words that we repeat often, usually without realising it. I think motorsport’s most common stop words are “obviously” and the dreaded “for sure”. Most importantly, when producing live speech we don’t always finish our sentences. We tend to cut out words or just cut off the entire sentence half-way through. Because of this, it’s common to hear something like “know what we should do, let’s eh… really wanna go get frites”. Weird as the formulation may be, your brain’ll understand the message.  It’ll fill in the information holes with such ease that under normal circumstances you don’t even notice anything’s off.

 

Unless of course you’re a journalist who has interviewed someone, recorded the entire thing, and then sat down to type up the conversation for publication. All of a sudden every cut-off sentence, every stop word, every filler stands out. Sometimes the transcription of a perfectly coherent spoken conversation can prove to be perfectly illegible on paper. The journalist is then forced to take the verbal mess and edit it into something  readable. This is a tricky process that takes years to perfect and that, even then, can cause you trouble. How often haven’t we heard a celebrity complain about a magazine publishing something they didn’t say “like that”?

 

I’ve always felt that converting spoken to written words is especially difficult in sports. After all, as a sports journalist you’re not only facing the differences between speech and writing, you’re also confronted with strong emotions. I’ll give you an example. I learned long ago that at a circuit drivers are the best sources of information. So when an Audi mysteriously retired from last year’s Blancpain GT feature race in Zandvoort, I decided to ask the driver what had happened. I got a pretty clear answer.

 

“It’s fluffy unbelievable. He eh… we just got fluffy hit at the fluffy start! From fluffy behind! Some people fluffy terrible. Don’t have fluffy brains. Really… I’m so fluffy pissed. I was in a fluffy good place. He was behind me, should have stayed there. But no. He fluffy didn’t break and fluffy smashed into me. Broke the fluffy car. They ruined the entire fluffy weekend! It’s all just fluffied up. Really really fluffy, this.”**

 

While hearing these words, I felt relieved I wasn’t there as a motorsports journalist. I wouldn’t have known what to do with such a high-spirited quote. I don’t think literal publication would have been an option due to lack of family-friendliness. But if not that, is it possible to normalise this type of speech? And if yes, would the written text still have any relation to the original words? How big would the risk be of publishing something that no longer has roots in reality? Is that desirable? Or admissible? Maybe the safest route would’ve been a paraphrase: “Driver X made it known he wasn’t happy.” It’s probably best if we leave this conundrum for the professionals to solve.

 

**He didn’t actually say ‘fluffy’.  I just used ‘fluffy’ to replace another (ruder) stop word.

One Word

Last Wednesday I was sitting by myself in a stuffy copy room. I was bored. Beyond bored, really. There are few things on this planet more mind-numbing than waiting for an excruciatingly slow photocopier to finish your massive 300-page print order. In an attempt to defy the boredom, I went on social media to read my latest updates. I was scrolling through Facebook when I suddenly saw it. It was the tiniest of little press releases, barely noticeable amongst all the much more flashy motorsport news on my timeline. Ninety-nine percent of the press release’s text was in perfect order… but then I caught sight of that one word. It was only ten letters long, but my boredom was instantly forgotten. I was breathing fire.

 

The press release was written by someone at Aust Motorsport, presumably a PR employee. Aust will compete in the GT Masters championship this year and with the press release it wanted to announce its four new drivers for this season: Xavier Maassen, Lukas Schreier, Marco Bonanomi, and Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky. It’s not necessarily easy to write a PR-text like that. What you want to do in such a text is share some interesting key facts about your drivers to engage the audience. What you don’t want is write four full driver biographies that’ll bore that same audience to death. You need to keep your descriptions short and to-the-point. You must make your mark straight away, in no more than one or two words tops. The best way to do this is by using a noun or an adjective, possibly a combination of the two. It’s a fool-proof method to show the reader in one glance what a driver’s focal characteristic is.

 

Aust’s PR department knows this technique and has applied it extensively in the press release, for all four drivers. What do they really want us to know about Xavier Maassen? He’s Dutch. (Helloooo, Aust sponsors from the Netherlands! Greetings also from the marketing department!) What do they really want us to know about Lukas Schreier? He’s an ADAC-supported driver. (Woohoo! Massive young talent!) What do they really want us to know about Marco Bonanomi? He’s an Audi factory driver. (Seriously-proper-driver alert!) And what is the adjective they chose to sum up the main asset of Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky, their only girl driver?

 

Attractive.

 

Where the male racers receive a description referring to their personal achievements, Mikaela has to make do with a banal reference to her looks. I struggle to understand what Aust’s PR department is trying to achieve with this description. What could be the advantage for them in suggesting that Mikaela brings nothing more to the team than a pretty face? What benefits do they reap from insinuating that Mikaela’s entire worth as an athlete can be measured by her exterior? Moreover, what makes it good for them to ignore her entire sporting resume as a source for a description? There are so many great character tags on there. Up-and-coming racer. FIA Women In Motorsport representative. Volkswagen Scirocco R-Cup race winner. Audi TT Cup graduate. What could possibly have been the reason for ignoring all of that and instead choosing ‘attractive’, the one word that renders everything she’s ever done in motorsport mute?

 

I’ll give Aust’s PR department the benefit of the doubt here and assume their choice of words is nothing more than unfortunate and not thought through properly. But just in case it’s not: dear Mikaela, fight hard this season and prove them wrong.

 



A translation of the Aust press release.

Say ‘I’m Not Sure but Maybe Yes’ to the Dress

“That’s an interesting dress.”
“I like it. That flower pattern’s nice.”
“I’m not sure. It is a bit crowded.”
“Really? Why?”
“Well, the leaves are rather big – and a very bright shade of green. In combination with one, two, three… four different colours of roses, it might be a bit much. You’d have to be very careful with the accessories if you wear a dress like this.”
“Accessories? You mean bracelets and stuff?”
“Yes.”
“I never wear many anyways. I used to have this beaded bracelet, but it got caught on the door handle. I swear, the beads were literally everywhere. Never buy bracelets like that.”
“Beads wouldn’t do well with this dress anyway. You need something classy. Silver maybe.”
“I might have something like that. I’d have to check.”
“And what shoes would you wear with this?!”
“I’ve got some white ballerinas. They might do.”
“Mmm. I think heels would be better. White ones. Or green, to match those flowers.”
“I can’t walk in heels! I’d have an ankle injury before I’d even reach the kitchen!”
“Yes, but that’s you. I can walk in heels.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot you had that superpower.”
“Haha, it just takes practice.”
“Then I refuse any form of practice. Flat shoes for the win.”
“Well, I still think this dress would look pretty with heels.”
“Pretty? I thought you said you didn’t like it.”
“No, I didn’t! I said you’d have to be careful with how finish it off.”
“I’ll tell you what. You do NOT finish it off well with a Sauber. Those roses clash dramatically with the blue-yellow of that livery.”
“Oh, definitely. If you work for Sauber, you can NOT wear that dress. It would be a crime to combine the two. If that ever happens, I insist the team is disqualified from the championship for crimes committed against eye sight.”

 

At this point it might be a useful to mention that this conversation took place while a friend and I were browsing the formula 1-section of a motorsport website (which was full of Sauber pictures), when suddenly Google Ads decided to insert a picture of a dress as a personalised advertisement. When you’re me, that happens. Surprisingly often too, if you must know.