From the fine design website Oobject comes their take on formula 1 user interfaces, or, as us gear heads would say, steering wheels.

Stirling Moss said, “All cars have five wheels: the four road wheels and the steering wheel, and the steering wheel is the most important.

If you doubt that, just look at the offerings here.

At the moment, the current BMW wheel is the most popular. I can understand that, and I think a lot of people are drawn to it’s biomorphic design. Personally, I’m drawn to the current Ferrari model (big shock, huh), even though it’s simpler and not as ‘wow’ as the the BMW.

Note all the toggles and dials and LED displays … the amount of control a driver has is just staggering. Diff settings, engine mapping, auto-nutral in case of a spin, air-to-fuel, pit lane speed limiters, a full spectrum of control is literally at their fingertips. Everything but break biasing, which, the rules state, must be under mechanical control (i.e. a cable). Everyone seems puzzled as to why that is, and darn if I got an answer.

I know what your thinking … “Boy, that sure would look cool in my car.”

You’re right, it would.

But, like all things racing (and especially in F1), it’ll cost you. A lot. As in tens of thousands of Euros.

So, as Graham Hill said, “Speed equals money sir. How fast would you care to go?”

First let’s get the obvious out of the way: Gumpert is pretty funny name, and the Apollo is not the most esthetically pleasing of cars

OK, now that that’s done, seems that the fine folk at Gumpert have added a hybrid drive train to their already prodigiously powered Apollo and are going to race the darn thing at this year’s Nurburgring 24 hour race.

Good for them.

Racing is the best way to prove an engineering concept. It’s also the best way to get the bugs worked out of an engineering concept. And not only that, it’s a great way to sell new engineering concepts to the general public.

I know, hybrids have been more or less accepted by the public at large (except for the knuckle-draggers that believe global warming is some sort of a scam), but what the general public does not see hybrids as is fun or the least bit performance oriented.

The best way to cure that: Racing.

And a good way to go about that is to add a hybrid system to a car that already cranks out 630hp from its twin-turbo V8, put it in the very capable hands of former F1 driver Heinz-Harald Frentzen & longtime DTM racer Dirk Muller and let the beast out on the Nurburgring .

It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out, and not just results-wise.

Well whata-ya know, Danica Patrick finally won an Indy car race.

I know this because I read it on the internet-tubes. Normally I would have known this because I obsessively watch Indy car races (as well as all F1 races and the 24 hours Le Mans) but this time I missed it.

For starters, the race was at Motegi Japan, meaning there are dateline issues to deal with (i.e. it ends up on the TV on a Saturday rather than Sunday). Then the race was rained out, and I had no idea when it was going to be rescheduled … turns out it was the equivalent of 3 in the morning for my local.

Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, since I get up around then for F1 races anyway … but no one saw fit to tell me about it, so I missed out.

So there you have it … Danica finally breaks through, and once all the slack-jawed knuckle-draggers stop the ignorant complaining (my favorite misogynist comment so far: “SHE ONLY WON BECAUSE OF LUCKY PIT STRATEGY. … I can tell you it had very little to do with skill and everything to do with luck. … Sure it doesn’t matter where you were for anything but the final lap but SHE WAS MID-PACK ALL RACE.” (Boy, the world is going to be a hard place for dorks like him, huh?)) Danica can get on with being a racer instead of a girl-racer.

Now if she starts winning a bunch and really starts scaring the boys, we can elevate her into Michele Mouton territory.

Well, what have we here?

Ferrari have been rumored to be working on a radical new nose for their F1 car, and a few days ago, they let it out of the R & D dept. and onto the track at Spain.

To me, it seems pretty obvious what Ferrari is trying to accomplish with this new nose.

Essentially, if you have the duct in the nose situated just aft of the trailing edge of the front wing, it will perform two tasks:

1 - it will relieve air pressure from the top surface of the wing, where the trailing edge of the wing and the underside of the nose start to meet, and

2 - by passing air streaming off the wing itself out the vent, it will create a low pressure area just aft of the effective surface of the wing.

This low pressure area will act like a cliff at a waterfall, it will draw more and more into it, and exhaust it through the vent on the top of the nose.

The more lower pressure generated just aft of the front wing will help pull more air under the wing.

The more air that flows under the front wing, the more down force it will produce.

The nose vent, working in conjunction with the way air is drawn through, and expelled out the front brake fairings (the disc on the outside of each front wheel) as a whole serve to generate a low pressure area just aft of the trailing edge of the front wing.

Air flows from high pressure towards low, like water flowing down a hill.

What Ferrari have done is effectively increase the slope of that hill.

Very clever.

Congratulations are in order for Graham Rahal when he won the St. Petersburg Indy car race this past Sunday.

It was a race that fell into “outright crazy” category, especially at the start. The first street race of the newly combined series started under a torrential tropical downpour.

Rain always make for tricky conditions in a race, and in this case, only made things VERY tricky.

For starters, all of the former Champcar drivers had dozens of street races under their belts, while the IRL regulars had 6 or 8 total. The same can also be said concerning the rain, since the last time the Champ guys ran in ran was a few months ago, whereas the last time for the IRL guys was … years? never? Hell, it’s been so long even I can’t remember.

And so, things started off under a safety car for 8 or 10 laps, and THEN they threw the green flag … spins, slides, near misses with other cars, near misses with large concrete barriers, near misses with large concrete barriers AND other cars … hectic hectic crazy hectic.

And, by the time the checker flew, who was on top?

Young Graham Rahal, that’s who.

Son of Indy 500 winner and three-time CART champion Bobby Rahal, Graham has the genetic makeup, and he had shown great promise last year as Sebastian Bourdais’ teammate, and just two races into this year’s season (the first season of the combined open wheel series) Graham made good on those promises.

Craziness, passing, high speed wheel to wheel action, The Indy 500 on the horizon and young American talent on the rise?

This is going to be good.

Racing fans seem to fracture at one level or another. For example, if yo ask us about our favorite race, some will say Daytona, some will say Indy, and for a lot of F1 fans, Monaco is their most favored.

My brother LOVES the Monaco Grand Prix … collects tapes and artifacts and old magazine articles, he just can’t get enough of it.

There’s a lot of odd things about Monaco though. One thing that I’ve noticed is that you hear a lot of people saying, “Modern cars are just too fast and too sophisticated to race at Monaco anymore.” Maybe that’s true, I’m not sure … and years ago, I remember Nelson Piquet saying “it’s like flying a helicopter around your living room,” and THAT seems pretty accurate.

But I also remember reading reports from the race in the 30s where people were saying more or less the same thing … Grand Prix of the 30s were too fast, and Grand Prix cars of 2008 are STILL too fast.

That’s what makes it so interesting.

Look at that painting at the top of the post … coming that close to crashing seems to be the common denominator, regardless of era.

That is of course Tazio Nuvolari, one of the best, if not the best racing driver of all time. You can learn about his efforts at Monaco (there’s a real good story about him splitting a fuel rail coming out of the tunnel and STILL making it across the finish line, hanging out the side of the car to see around and avoid the flames roaring back at him) by checking out this really well done site called The Monaco Grand Prix Library.