• Top Gear! - Top Gear is back on television! One of the best shows on TV anywhere, it started its new season last night. Really funny, and just lots of fun to watch.

  This also allows me to bring up a HUGE pet peeve of mine with British TV. They do a HORRIBLE job of promoting new seasons of shows. With American TV, new shows debut around the same times of year (September, January, etc.) and the channels promote that the shows will be starting soon. On the BBC, I have NEVER heard that the new Top Gear season will be starting, even though I was checking their website every few weeks!

  For a show that makes a tremendous profit for the BBC, you’d think they would try to make sure that people are actually… you know… WATCHING IT?

• Lewis Hamilton - Well done to Lewis Hamilton and the rest of the McLaren team. (Though I doubt he’s reading, congrats Oli!)

  If you don’t follow Formula 1 (far too many Americans, unfortunately), Lewis Hamilton just won the Drivers Championship yesterday in one of the most thrilling and nail-biting races I’ve ever seen or heard of! Coming into the last race (Brazilian Grand Prix), Lewis Hamilton was leading in number of points, but his only competition (Felippe Massa) has always dominated in Brazil, his home country. Even if Massa won, as long as Hamilton placed fifth or better he would become Formula 1 champion.

  The race was crazy. Rain at the start delayed the race and forced teams to upend their strategy as they changed tires to Wets. Hamilton stayed in fourth or fifth for the majority of the race and seemed to be playing it safe in order to win the championship. But on the final ten laps of the race, rain came out again, forcing teams to choose to either leave “slick” tires on and hope it didn’t rain hard or go into the pits and get their “wet” tires.

  On the second to last lap, Hamilton was in fifth place but passed! He drove like crazy trying to catch up, but didn’t, and the championship slipped out of his grasp… Massa crossed the finish line in first place. But out of nowhere, Lewis Hamilton passed the car that had been in third place! It hadn’t pitted to get new tires, and was slow on the wet track. Hamilton caught up and passed him just seconds before crossing the finish line… in fifth place!

  It was an amazing race. Lewis Hamilton became the youngest person to win the Formula 1 World Championship, and the first black man to win the Formula 1 World Championship. Britain hasn’t had a driver win the championship in twelve years, so the country is deservedly celebrating!

• Barack Obama - Is Lewis Hamilton’s victory a portent of things to come in tomorrow’s election? I certainly hope so. According to fivethirtyeight.com, he’s heavily favored… winning >95% of the simulations.
• Prototype - The prototype for my new venture is nearing completion. While it is FAR from perfect, I will be launching it within my MBA class here at Judge Business School soon to start getting feedback from real users. The U/I in particular is rather crude (my fault), but I’ve been talking to a really talented guy (a fellow Jesus College grad student) who’s going to be helping me out on the coding/design end of things.

  I do promise to write more about this soon, but that post will take longer to write than I have today!

I just saw this video via the Times Online (the F1 blog) and had to share it. It’s a hilarious parody advert for the McLaren F1 racing team. Apparently the team is getting ready in a rather novel way for the race in Singapore this weekend; the first F1 race to ever take place at night.

Cool stuff like this is why I really love London.

Photo of one run here…

Congratulations to the University of Michigan Solar Car Team!  They just won the teams’ fifth national championship, beating thirteen other teams from Austin, TX to Calgary, Canada.  The team is the winningist team in the United States, having won five of the nine national championships.  This year’s margin was the biggest ever, just under ten hours!  (And that was after ~90 minutes in penalties the team chose not to contest.)

As I’ve mentioned before (here and here), the Solar Car Team was a foundational experience for me.  I spent four years on the team, working on the 1997 Wolverine and 1999 MaizeBlaze teams.  The two years I spent as Project Manager for the 1999 MaizeBlaze team is something I’ll always be proud of; it was two years that taught me more about leadership and management than I ever could have believed.  That I was in charge of a 100+ member team with a budget in excess of $1million at age 20/21 is almost unbelievable in hindsight!  Though we didn’t quite meet our goals, we developed a fantastic team, and I’m very proud that so many of them stuck around to win in 2001.

This years’ team was a re-vamping of the car that raced across Australia in the fall of 2007.  I personally think they had a really great shot at winning the World Solar Challenge with some extremely innovative technology.  Unfortunately they were in an accident in the first few miles of the race as a result of some maneuvering with/around the Stanford University entry.  Despite the crash, they worked through the night and back through the field to still have a very respectable finish.

The team has been through a lot in the past few years, and I’m really happy that they had such a resounding win this year.

GO BLUE!

Back at University I spent virtually all my time working on and leading the University of Michigan Solar Car Team. It was a fascinating experience, and I raced our cars across the US in Sunrayce 97 and Sunrayce 99, as well as across Australia in the World Solar Challenge 99. I wrote a bit about this before here.

My old team is currently racing in the North American Solar Challenge, from Austin, Texas to Calgary, Canada. That’s 2400 miles! Wired has a half-decent article here on the race, with a GREAT photo of the University of Michigan car (in the wind tunnel).

Good luck to the team! (A few days late.) So far, they’re already in Canada and leading. Of the eight races in the US that have been run since 1990, the team has won four of them so a win here would put them in the majority. GO BLUE!