Monday, March 07, 2011

Tom Paulin on the 2011 F1 grid

I leiked the McLaren. It spoke to me of an audacious and extravagant spirit. The sidepods made me think of Joyce at his finest, a willingness to find stark beauty in bleak alphabetic form. It has a wonderful anarchy to it. It's operatic, lyrical, and poetic; I mean it's complete nonsense, but none the worse for it.

The Ferrari, however, I saw as insipid and cliched in comparison, as if the team had asked themselves a series of questions so dull that they'd fallen into a narcoleptic coma before completing the design.

The Lotus-Renault is simply delightful and extraordinary, like it's been hewn from a block of polished obsidian. At times, I felt like it was some sort of blind, dark, repressed Freudian urge, which had been hauled out of the deep unconscious by a psychoanalytical trawler, and thrust naked into physical form.

The Red Bull is a very confident design. It's subtle, marvellous, brilliant and powerful. Its curves have a restless rhythm to them. It feels no need to be showy or flashy, or self-consciously radical, yet it exudes a quiet sense of sublime perfection.

The Hispania is provincial and amateurish. It's pure sawdust and glue. In fact I don't think I've ever seen anything so rotten, degenerate, and downright awful in my entire leif.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Amazing, I didn't know Tom Paulin liked F1.