We welcome back Dave after an extended break, well deserved I might add. In fact, it is me Dave and I haven't been on holiday. The truth is I got a little bored with guitars and racing cars through 2019. It was dull for guitar news and dull for car racing. Guitars were out of control, well in the big league Fender and Gibson anyway. More Strat's and Tele's as they fill their containers with short runs of yet more flavours. Gibson were equally inventive with Les Paul's hitting an all time high in the variety of Les Paul models.
Cars, what were V8 Supercars had a name change to simply 'Supercars'. I think at one time, the thought was to leave things open to non V8 turbo powered machines. Thankfully this didn't happen and we only had to put up with homologating the Mustang look-a-like that took young Kiwi driver, everybody's favourite, Scotty Mac to a championship. Oh, not to be confused with Scotty from marketing. I don't remember a race last series he didn't win. No doubt he did have a couple of looses, clipping the wall in Newcastle giving himself a DNF I remember well, he probably does too. We saw the reintroduction of the big-bangers, the resurrected Formula 5000's. This IMO was a bit of a disaster. A field of twelve? managed a few laps at Sandown before someone took out the safety fence and the umm, race was declared. We were to see them again at The Bend Motorsport Park in South Australia in another lack lustre event. They may have built a dozen cars but they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for drivers. And.. oh no!! Somehow 'they' have found themselves, the 5000's, in the supports for the Aus GP in a couple of weeks. The other new thing in 2019 was the introduction of the TCR fart boxes. These little turbo 4's put on a pretty good show. It may be a world recognised class but it's going to take a while to build a fan base here. I think our Aussie race fans are really only interested in the noise of the Supercars even if it is only the Mustang doing it for the Fordies.
Speedway, well that was pretty much same old same old. It's our J-Mac we followed a few years back that has done quite a bit of the winning in Luch Monte's #17 sprintcar. James won the annual Warrnambool Classic a few weeks back, not a bad feat in a field of 107 entries. Noticeably absent in the sprintcars this year was the usual number of American visitors. Perhaps this is due to the quality of the machinery available to our local drivers these days. Long gone are the days of the car on a trailer and a rack of tyres. These teams are hauling around more gear than Pink Floyd.
So it's good to be back into some writing in this new decade. Let's hope the Ferrari's and the Red Bull's can take it to the Mercedes this season and Scotty slows down and lets the Holden's have a win occasionally. The World Series Sprintcars only have three races left of their tour in the West with J-Mac leading the points chase with Kerry Madsen a close second, a series win is still up for grabs. Supercars hit the track in Adelaide for their first shake-up and F1 is dues to annoy the neighbours here in a couple of weeks.
Let's hope it's a better year for both electric guitars and racing cars and I don't have to take another sabaticale.
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