July 31st, 2009 at 10:55am Under Racing
The first 24 hours of the Second Coming of Michael Schumacher are over.
Take a breadth, Schumi fans. And, for good measure, one more.
Settled down yet? OK, great.
The question now to ponder is straight-forward: Can Schumacher win?
Andrew Benson at the BBC parses through the news and ends with this…
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July 31st, 2009 at 10:55am Under Racing
Polish driver Robert Kubica is looking for a home. A ride in F1. A place to get excited about. After struggling mid-way through the 2009 season, Kubica was met with a shock announcement that the BMW team would not return to F1 after 2009. This leave Kubica in a real fix [...]
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July 31st, 2009 at 10:55am Under Racing
The FIA has been busty this week. They’ve had to set the date for the Renault appeal, which is going to be on August 17th, and they have had to throw cow dung at the teams over the BMW quit announcement.
Renault were penalized for allowing Fernando Alonso’s car to enter the track with an [...]
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July 31st, 2009 at 09:30am Under Motorbikes
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This has got to stop. These Iranian motorcycle cops are giving us serious riders a bad name…
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July 31st, 2009 at 09:00am Under Racing
The Benetton B196 TV chef James Martin will drive at Monaco
Celebrity news is not normally my thing, but I like “Saturday Kitchen” and I like F1 cars (you may have noticed) so this story squeaks in.
TV chef James Martin is to indulge his passion for cars by driving a 1996 Benetton B196 in the Monaco Historic Grand Prix next year. The event for historic F1 cars takes place on the Monte-Carlo circuit.
Martin has been driver coached by former British Touring Car Champion Jason Plato. Plato is also a TV presenter for Channel Five’s Fifth Gear.
He tested the car for the first time on Silverstone’s Stowe Circuit. You can see a video of the test here.
A keen car collector, Martin previously drove an ex-Stirling Moss Gullwing Mercedes in the Mille Miglia historic race.
The ex-Gerhard Berger car is owned by Cars International. Here’s what they had to say about the car:
Benetton entered the 1996 F1 World Championship with the quite reasonable expectation to win a third title in succesion, as they had in 1994 and especially in1995 utilising the now legendary relationship between Ross Brawn and Michael Schumacher in a team led by Flavio Briatore, resulted in 11 wins of the 16 rounds - a crushing defeat for the other teams.
So It was no coincidence then, that the launch of the Mild Seven B196, the first Benetton to race under Italian Nationality, was the most lavish in the team’s history, Benetton took over the Hill top town of Taormina in Sicily where 700 guests and journalists were present to hear Flavio emphasise Benetton were as strong as ever and ‘life without Michael’ would have no serious effect on their performance for 1996. Sadly this proved not to be the case as the 2 new drivers for 96, Jean Alesi and Gerhard Berger, failed to deliver, not in quality but in quantity, added to which they had both come from Ferrari with the fixed methods that entailed and Benetton duly paid the price.
‘Strangely enough’ said Ross Brawn, ‘we have made a lot of progress with the B196 because of the position we found ourselves in, we had to review certain aspects of the car which in the Schumacher era we did not have to as we were performing’.
Overall the B196 was a logical development of the World Championship winning B195 to accommodate the latest technical and safety regulations, but distinguished by a new 7-speed gearbox.
Whilst the team produced no wins in 96, nearly without exception they qualified in the top 6, set fastest laps and went on to lead races, most notably Alesi for 21 laps at Monaco, 25 laps in Italy and Berger for 31 Laps in Germany, culminating in the B196 finishing 3rd in the constructors championship with 68 points, only 2 behind Ferrari and Alesi 4th in the Drivers Championship with 47 points. Our chassis #04 was used in Japan by Berger to good effect qualifying and finishing 4th and was on hand as a spare car at all other rounds.
B196 #04 was retired in 1997 and was sold by the team to a well-known collector and enthusiastic historic F1 driver who we recently purchased the car from along with all equipment to run and maintain it in the foreseeable future.
A fully documented rebuild has just taken place in house, by our own recent Ex F1 engineers, to current GP standards including crack test certifications; it remains in original livery and retains all the original features including the 7-speed gearbox and paddle shift.
Eminently suitable as an entry into FV10 ownership which would include a guaranteed re-purchase scheme and value to upgrade to a post 2000 Cosworth powered car or is just as at home as a front runner in the EuroBOSS series.
More pictures: Pictures: 2008 Monaco Historic GP
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July 31st, 2009 at 07:55am Under Computers
Asus P6X58 Premium motherboard (click to enlarge)
As the world’s first motherboard featuring support for SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0, Asus P6X58 Premium Motherboard which was showcased at ComputeX 2009 has made many headlines. Unfortunately, Asus has actually decided to cancel it.
Yes, you’re reading this right. Asus informs INQ that it has cancelled its P6X58 USB 3.0 [...]
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July 31st, 2009 at 07:55am Under Computers
Intel DX58SO motherboard
Intel has recently claimed that it’s preparing the release of an updated version of the X58-powered DX58SO motherboard.
According to tcmagazine, the main changes are the adoption of the B3 stepping X58 chip instead of the B2 silicon, and the BIOS update (from P3435 to P4196).
The board is also coming with a new PCIe connector, a [...]
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July 31st, 2009 at 07:55am Under Computers
Bill Dally
NVIDIA’s Chief Scientist Bill Dally, said at the Design Automation Conference that computing is entering a world where performance increases are derived from parallelism and efficiency is determined by locality.
“Chip designers will need tool and techniques to optimize power, interconnect and locality. We are really looking to EDA (Electric Design Automation) to give us power [...]
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July 30th, 2009 at 06:56pm Under Computers
Maintaining your PC at high levels of performance is no longer a laborious task that requires brain-busting decisions and documentation. Also, the launch of suites that contain a great part of what you need for the job has eliminated the use of multiple individual software that more than often would clot the registry before cleaning it, giving the intended operation a late start and slow progress at the beginning.
Raxco, one of the leaders on the file defragmentation market, has recently launched a new product, specially designed to clean your registry, reclaim free space by deleting temporary data and web browser cache, securely remove sensitive information and tweak the operating system.
PerfectSpeed’s regular price is $29.99, but it can be purchased with a $10 cutoff all through July 31st, as an introductory offer. A higher discount is offered to owners of Windows Live OneCare, who can trade up the soon-to-be-discontinued product for PerfectSpeed at a $9.99 price. The application can be tested freely and with all its features and options active for a period of 15 days, sufficient time to notice the performance improvements.
With Raxco’s new product you’ll benefit from five modules and a task scheduler to completely automatize the maintenance process. The interface is very similar to PerfectDisk’s and those … (read more)
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July 30th, 2009 at 06:56pm Under Computers
Trace elimination
If you want to hide your traces after using the computer or simply delete some data without the possibility to recover its content, this module is up for the task. The Erase Traces section makes available options for clearing all computer browsing history and the most recently used files.
For the web browsing activity, PerfectSpeed can make go away the trails left behind by Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Mind that only the web browsers installed on your system will be available under the Internet Browser box. The elements it can eliminate are cache, cookies and browsing history. For any of these the application requires a computer reboot/user logoff, which is a bit too much for this kind of action, considering that most browser trace elimination software requires a simple restart of the web browser affected.
In our case the process of getting rid of these tracking elements took quite a small amount of time to complete and it seems that PerfectSpeed is perfectly capable of eliminating them without rebooting the entire computer. On the same note, it looks like when you select only the web browser data to be deleted the app does not ask for a reboot.
The file shredder integrated in this module permits deleting files beyond recovery – but files and files … (read more)
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