Just got back from a lecture held at the most excellent venue of the IET in Savoy Place just off Embankment tube station where Christian Horner, the team principal of Red Bull Racing gave a pretty good little lecture surrounding F1 in general, his experiences amongst other things.

For me, this was actually the first time I’d ever been to one of the lectures held by the IET. In the past there have been a couple of lectures that I would have wanted to go to but ultimately didn’t have additional interest around me to motivate me to go. It’s like going to watch a movie on your own in many respects. I’ve never been to the movies on my own but I’ve been to lectures or conferences, as it’s usually for something that of my friends I’m the only one that’s mildly interested. Thankfully several other Arupians (he or she who works at Arup) where also pretty keen on hearing what the man had to say.

Of interest is the fact that it takes them 55 lorries to move all their crap across Europe, for the motor home and all the other things. I really enjoyed Horner’s sense of humour which was very well timed, even though he did have a dig at Williams at one point claiming that the team got very lucky for the result in Australia. An interesting thing that came out was you definitely got that feeling that he felt that BMW was the second best team on the track after Ferrari. Another great little story was the fact that Adrian Newey still has the same drawing board he had at Williams and then at Mclaren, which I thought was very cool, much in the same way I use the same pencil that I started drawing with 10 years ago. It was cheap as chips but i can’t work with any other pencil apart from that (I’ve tried, something to do with the overall weight distribution).

Unfortunately there was not that much talk about the cross pollination of technologies between F1 and commercial car manufacturing which was a bit annoying. There was a lot of cynicism (and rightly so) with respect to the bullshit proposals that the FIA have in place to get F1 to become more ‘green’. Yeah whatever the fuck that means in a sport that requires cars to go around a track 56 times burning 2.5kg of fuel every lap (and don’t forget the 55 lorries).

I’ll definitely be on the look out for future lectures. The one that I would have loved to go to was the one held with Jeremy Rushton (the main guy that created Tiddlywiki) something I personally use on a daily basis.