Carman VI-Boys with toys!

Give me my “Matchbox”
Some things cannot be helped…
The following story is from when I was a little boy, and to be frank, I don’t remember it myself, I have been told about it much later on.
But I never doubted it for a minute to be true, because I still have… side-effects from it!
 
My Grandmother’s home was located at a place in Essen, the German town I was born in, with the peculiar name “Am Krausen Bäumchen” which literally means “At the Curly Little-Tree”. I did spend considerable time there, growing up and playing.
Close by, at a walking distance, there was a little toy store and whenever I entered it the air was full with the scent of paper, just like in a bookstore would smell, but uniquely different. This strange odor was coming from hundreds of little hard-paper boxes, which were a bit larger than a classic matchbox. Each of them contained a small iron replica car, nicely painted, with revolving wheels and accurate appearance, to the real cars they were representing.
No wonder why the company producing those little marvels was called “Matchbox”
 
Whenever I was taken to that store it was like entering some kind of… heaven, because I knew I could choose one little box, which the grown-up escorting me would buy for me, and then go home and play with it. The toy cars were displayed in a glass box, I just had to point at which one I would like to have and the salesman would pull out the equivalent little smelly box, from a shelf high above, and then place it in my trembling from ecstasy hands.
And I knew their names as well. Lotus, Jaguar, Volkswagen, Porsche, Lamborghini… Once out in the streets, I could tell a car-brand by heart and on the spot, the moment they would pass by. After all, Germany was always a place where you could see all possible cars which circulated on the market, and it still is…

Now, and to get to the story I was telling you, one day just like any other, I saw a little red car on the store’s window, but for some reason I was denied to have it.
I was a wreck immediately after… I did not talk to anybody and stayed in my room, where shortly after I also grew a fever that would not go away. They took me to the family doctor, who knew me well, and he gave me a thorough examination. He then stated that “physically there is nothing wrong with the boy, but I spoke with him, so why don’t you go buy him his little red car? Because I have never seen anything like it, but I suspect that he is causing his own fever!”
Guess what! I had my car… and the fever was gone in a heartbeat.
 
But as I told you in the beginning, the extreme love for cars as a boy left me a side-effect, because I never ever stopped buying Matchbox cars, regardless of conditions and age… When I spot them, I divert off my original course like hypnotized in order to have my routine check done.
Step one, is going as close as possible for a nose inspection. Due to their new synthetic wrapping they don’t smell as good anymore, but the habit is still there! Step two, the eye-roll act. Once I see the one I like best I lose control of my eyes’ stability, so they tend to… roll. Step three, physical contact. Once I have it in my hands I have to swallow the extra saliva that is gathering in my mouth…
Lately I have improved my act as well. I buy my Matchbox cars, under the huge grins of my girlfriend, and then I give it away as a gift to some of my students or friends with small children, thus proving that I have finally grown up!

I never remembered the brand of that car which gave me my fever, but a few years after that peculiar incident, and just at the edge of my teen years, I found myself flabbergasted once more by a another Matchbox car. But this time it was nothing you could ever meet on the streets, on the autobahn or at some rich collector’s garage…
It was Jimmy Clark’s Lotus Formula 1 car in British green! 
It was a car with a strikingly simplistic beauty that you rarely ever see, not only in a car, but in any kind of design.
I was so absorbed by looking at it, that I forgot to play with it…
And it was there, just as I entered my teenage years, that I became a Formula 1 spectator, and regardless of the thick and thin of the sport, I am still watching it…

My race-drivers of Formula 1
The first thing to do when you approach the world of Formula 1 is to identify the driver that you will support. Some choose a team instead, but me, I always had the notion that the race-driver is the one thing to look up to.
I chose “my driver” just like a boy of my age would do… with total absence of brain function, no knowledge whatsoever about the details of the sport, but with tons of eye-instinct. It amuses me even today, that in my ignorance I also had a specific method of preference, in selecting them.
They had to be cool-mannered, just like Clint Eastwood in his Leone cowboy films, since I never liked the loud, jump-around type, and good looking like Robert Redford and I would not go for anything less than that!

In my first attempt to locate my hero it was no trouble spotting out a French pilot by the name François Cevert, but before I could even learn to spell his name correctly, he died in a horrible crash while racing… I was devastated, and all that remained for me to do, was looking at this small poster of him on the wall. Soon I realized that it was going to get worse with this new sport-entertainment of mine, since pilots were falling like flies. So, I tried to keep up, by finding a new hero each time, but as in the years later on Ronnie Peterson died too, I was face to face with the fact that watching car racing was nothing like any of the other sports that most of my classmates followed. 
But I kept at it… and the naïve young boy, who once was looking after a cool driver to look up to, grew up learning the lesson of life and death… Among all those losses, many years since I was a boy, one race-Sunday the wonderful Brazilian pilot Ayrton Senna hit the wall of the racetrack with about 300kilometers per hour. Watching this live on my TV I whispered that “maybe it was better for him to die that way. It was a genuine pilot’s death”
Not that I didn’t cry for him…  

Despite everything, racing for me, was and still is, a kind of joyous sunshine day. But there always will be a little shadow on the track, the shadow which casts the Reaper. Didn’t you know? He is a Formula 1 spectator, too!

The puppets and the puppeteers in the same game
Formula 1 is primarily business... and much after that it is a sport.
It is amazing how that form of racing has survived that long, while other forms of racing, which were much more humane, elegant and fair, have not. Maybe it has to do exactly with the fact that Formula 1 is anything but fair. Sometimes you cannot but think, that people prefer to support something where to cheat and be cheated is the rule, than let something idealistic to prosper…
Much before being a sport, Formula 1 is about the advertising beast… It is about the sponsors… It is about betting money on the winner… It is about drivers who pay to get a seat in a team’s car… It is about teams who are accepting this to happen… It is about changing the rule-makers who change the rules constantly… It is about changing the same rules back and forth and then back and forth, and on it goes… It is about manipulating and deceiving the rules... It is about being blind on crystal clear misbehavior of certain pilots… It is about unfair punishment of some other pilots, who are crystal clear themselves! It’s about bribery and fraud... It is about sad, abandoned circuits, because they were built with no consideration, but only profit in mind…

It is about much more than that, before anything is left to be called a sport. Anyone who has been watching it for as long as I have, knows that to be true, because all this has happened, it is data not opinion and it still continues to happen…
 
So, it is only normal to ask, if Formula 1 is so unfair, why have you kept at it for so long?
Well, there are some reasons… To begin with, I like the “show” of it. A Formula 1 weekend is a fiesta, a happy gathering from people around the world who are coming just for this event. Then, it is the cool guys who drive those cars, and the beautiful girls around them, which are a delight to see. And of course, it is the cars themselves, their mechanical architecture and their aero-dynamics. Their design, which is sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly and sometimes preposterous in appearance… It is the race itself, where mistakes, overtakes, malfunctions happen and much more…

Wise men say that things constantly change, and who am I to disagree?! But also while things change, they come around back to where they once were. So, things change, but somehow they also remain the same.
It’s hard to believe, even for me, that I still pick my favorite drivers by their cool manners and their good looks… but I do!
But now there is one more thing, that I added in order to make my choosing, and it only makes things more complicated than they already are. My pilot must also have the “magic hand” in driving style and ability, because not all drivers are the same…
In effect, when I am asked nowadays who my favorite driver is, people scratch their heads in query with my preferences. Because I point out at someone who is the usual cool, handsome, but also a cunning driver, but who also, unfortunately, straggles from the back of the grid to fight for a position. But I don’t care about his wins and defeats… It is fine by me to enjoy his driving style, even if that means that he will be coming from as far back from the grid as possible, forgotten like oblivion. Since every now and then it will rain and, to my enjoyment, that type of driver will be fighting his way up to the front…

Wishing is not something that one will hear from me, but with each start of a race I find myself whispering the wish “stay alive my boy”
And not that they do…

I have learned the hard way… I have learned that like many things in life, Formula 1 is not fair. And I also learned, with some difficulty I admit, to smile at unfairness from time to time… I find it to be a good lesson, to see what is wrong, and still not get upset about it…
Nevertheless, being fair is maybe one of the most important of moral conducts, which I hold dear. If I am successful in applying it myself, is not for me to say.

But I cannot see how one can be good at anything without being fair… Fair, and at the same time polite, even at the face of unfairness…
In relationships, in driving, and bottom line, in Aikido!

January 13, 2016