The Friday E-Mail - General Election Titbit

And another Friday bites the dust. We only have one of these great days in school for a normal timetable run through, as we have a mere 9 days left at the place we’ve spent the last 7 or more years. You can’t help but feel the end of an era is getting ever closer, and there’s nothing we can do to stop that one. Let’s just enjoy these final days with coffee at 30p a mug, a table we all sit at in peace (mostly) and a place where we all met, had a brilliant laugh and even learnt the odd thing or two.

Nine days is not a long time, in fact, it’s a positively minute amount of time in relation to the time we’ve had, and it’s beginning to come to such an unnatural end. I’ve felt pretty empty over the past couple of days, and I can only see that emptiness growing in the foreseeable future.

Still, onto the week behind us, as, rather than look forward to the desperate future. There’s a joyous past to discuss over.

A three day weekend gave us some pleasant relief from the Monday to Friday weekday, even if it was filled with revision for orals for some, and just plain revision for others before a week crammed to bursting point with mocks.

There were a varying degree of success in the mocks, with some results yet to come out, but at least we can have a weekend of denial yet.

Congratulations to Mr C who passed his theory on the second attempt. Can’t help but question where he went wrong in the first one, and why he’s allowed on the roads none the less.

The elections took off. I’ve heard of three of them, each with a different winner.

At the Girls’ Div, it was a huge Lib Dem majority, with Labour getting less than 50 votes from the entire school.

At the Boys’ Div, a Tory landslide for Alex Fisher put the other candidates in the shade, but even without postal votes there were allegations of fixing and bribery from the Labour candidate.

In Great Britain though, there was only going to be one winner as Tony Blair notched up a historic third consecutive term for Labour. With failure in a host of marginal seats, Labour managed to keep hold of a (much reduced, admittedly) majority in the House of Commons, with about 64 MPs more than the Conservatives. Big gains for the Tories and the Lib Dems in seats they targeted, and key failures for big names like Veritas and Kilroy, with the BNP also failing to win a seat (which is always good to see!) A great turn out of over 60% (although how many postal voters did so twice will remain a secret) means that it’s a well voted Government, and without his usual sizeable majority after tactical voting from knowing voters in marginal seats, Tony’s (and to an extent, Brown’s) policies will have to be well thought out, and voted through by more than just the Labour MPs, as back benchers now have more sway than they have had in the past eight years. It’s just a pity that I wasn’t old enough to vote, really.

Anyway, I’ll leave it there for now, I think. We’ll see what gets added.

Bye for now

Paul

San Marino GP - Confusion Anyone?

Results from the San Marino GP: The story from flag to result.

Firstly, there was an incident in the pit lane involving Ralf Schumacher and Nick Heidfeld. Ralf was let out of his pit box in a very dangerous position, forcing Nick to brake hard and endanger the pit crews. This is not liked by the stewards of the race, and so a 25 second penalty was given to Ralf. This was contended after being given on the night of the race, but nothing came of it in the end, and Toyota accepted their punishment.

But, BAR’s Jenson Button was in far more trouble.

Tipped off by two former BAR employees, the stewards drained Button’s car of fuel after it initially passed the weighing test. Without fuel however, the car was more than 6kg under the minimum 600kg weight allowed and so he was under threat of disqualification for cheating. After a hearing at the track on the evening of the race, the car was deemed legal by the stewards and nothing was thought of it.

However, the FIA overruled this decision, and appealed the stewards’ decision. The hearing was set for the 4th May at a court in France and once again, BAR were defending their cars once again, after many a legal wrangling with the FIA in the past. This though, was far more serious. In their opening statement, the FIA asked the court, should they find BAR guilty of cheating, to exclude them from this year’s World Championship and fine them upwards of one million euros.

On this, BAR tried to defend themselves.

However, a secondary ‘storage’ fuel tank is never an easy thing to explain, especially when excluded by the regulations. (It is an ingenious way to get round the regulations though, as when this tank is empty, the car can run up to 10kg underweight, giving it a good advantage over it’s competitors. Then, in the final pit stop, you simply fill it up, so at the end of the race when the cars are weighed, you’re overweight again, and deemed fully legal.) BAR’s argument that they got no advantage from having this second tank (they said it was full for the entire race, so they were always racing a heavy enough car) was washed away by the fact they were using fuel as ballast, couldn’t supply the data needed to show the car was overweight for the entire race distance, and they tried to hide the fact they were doing this from the FIA. The judges could only rule against them, and so they were disqualified from the San Marino GP, and excluded from the two subsequent races, Barcelona and Monaco, seriously harming their championship challenge. This punishment, is deemed “lenient” by FIA President Max Mosley, especially after such a strong opening statement.

It'll dull down this weekend's race in Barcelona though, with a flailing Ferrari with surprisingly little place, a rested Montoya crashing on day 1 in practice and Webber not setting a time. You've got to be doubting the race qualities of this week, really.