The future of motoring

Image courtesy of businessinsider.com

Hello you, my name is Luca but you can call me Luca. So it's no secret that one day, the world will run out of oil, it's a sad fact that is unfortunately an inevitability, so like how this world will one day be sucked into the sun, it's time the people of this earth has to look ahead for a solution, which in the latter's case is looking for another planet. But we are not talking about that today, we are talking about what we will do once we are unable to utilise petrol.

It's easy to roll our eyes at all those who speak so strongly about electric cars, and I am guilty of this but not for the reason all of you may be guilty for. The appeal of these electric cars are very clear, you produce zero emissions, you don't pay road tax, you get money from the government and everyone sees you as some life saver. But at what cost?

I am writing this because France and the UK announced that by 2040, it will outlaw the selling of fuel for cars and cars powered by fuel if I'm not mistaken, and this is alarming to me because as it is 23 years away, it seems they are settled on the electric car. Which in a certain way isn't a bad thing but I only take issue with it if it is powered by batteries.

Being an avid viewer of the fully electric series Formula E, I appreciate it for what it is and I take pride in the fact that I attended the finale of the first season where I saw Nelson Piquet, Jr. become Formula E's equivalent of Giuseppe Farina, the inaugural champion. The series is incredible but I am seeing so many manufacturers flocking to it, as it was announced recently that Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are ditching DTM and WEC respectively in favour of Formula E, joining manufacturers who have committed to the all electric single seater championship such as Renault, Audi, BMW and Jaguar.

As a racing series, Formula E is a great watch, today and tomorrow are the final races of the 2016-17 season, the championship decider with a double header in Montréal so I'd say if you haven't seen Formula E beforehand, seek it out and be entertained. However as ever with the electric car concept, it is being pushed as a means to develop technology for the future and it very may well be doing so, but not for battery powered electric cars.

Internal combustion engine powered cars may be something that you take for granted but with the surge in popularity of electric cars, you have to sit back and wonder why. Any normal car can go for many miles before you have to pull into a petrol station, it takes mere minutes to bring it back to life, and if what follows is something that goes for slightly smaller amount of miles but takes upwards of 10 hours to bring back to life, we have gone backwards!

I'm all for saving the world, even if we have to sacrifice petrol cars which does break my heart, but we need to make advancements in the solution. Honda has made a major advancement, although be it still not widespread technology, powered by electricity but not from a battery, but instead an electricity generating station which takes form of a hydrogen fuel cell. This car being the FCX Clarity, which is only on sale in California where hydrogen is sold, and it works just like a fossil fuel powered car and it emits water instead of carbon dioxide.

In conversation with a friend regarding this, she did make me see that at least if we require to have to put up with battery powered electric cars if it meant we could then wait for an advancement in any other better solutions as appose to sticking with the fossil fuel cars and further damaging the environment. I saw where she was coming from, because we can have a chance at braving the storm of having the incapability of travelling long distance but we couldn't go back if the planet was dying and we were already in the year 2100 and we still did not have a good alternative to battery power.

If there's one thing I want to end on, it's that we as the human race need to now get our knuckles down and begin carving a path for the next generation. Because we are too late to explore the world, we are too early to explore the universe, but oh so conveniently we are in the middle ground that we can't really do anything. But if we begin laying the bread crumbs, we must because we aren't here forever, as a species as well since our planet is destined to flood and overheat, the sun will become a black hole and by that point, I would hope we have colonised other planets and have made integrated our society with other species out there.

Fucking hell, this is meant to be about motoring, I even said earlier that this whole conversation about going out into the stars was for another time but that's all that needs to be said about it really. But the sacrifices we have to make in our lifetime, as painful as they are, they must be made for a better tomorrow.

Thank you for reading, and as ever, @TheLucaFormat on Twitter if you want to stay connected, actually a few of you hit me up every once in a while, I'd like to hear your input on anything I've ever said, I had that recently regarding my last article. If you don't have Twitter, put your email into the Follow By Email option and you can have my articles sent straight to you.

Again, appreciate you lot taking the time to read this, I hope you choose to return. So until we meet again.

Luca.

Rocket League - A crate mess

Image courtesy of www.gamespot.com

Hello you, my name is Luca but you can call me Luca. July 7th 2015, a mysterious game was released for free for all PlayStation Plus owners, and therefore began making the rounds all over the gaming scene. It perked my interest, and thanks to my friend Charlie encouraging me to download it, I have the only game that outside of pure racing games that can hold a candle to GTA.

If you wanted me to summarise this game into a simple sentence, it would be simply, car football. But that on its own doesn't do it justice, as the addictive game physics in regards to the jumping, the rocket boosting, the stadiums that you play in with how they're mapped out, and ever since the game was introduced, the countless variations of the regular matches.

I would highly recommend Rocket League to anyone looking for an addictive, fun and simple but above all else, easily accessible game that you can play with friends online, or friends sat in the same room, or both at the same actually. You can play it on PS4, Xbox One and PC, you can even cross platform, PC players can play with both Xbox One and PS4 players, but because of Sony's stubborn methods, they won't allow PS4 players to play with Xbox One players. Come on Sony, quit this act and allow us to do just that.

Oh whilst I'm on this, turns out that Rocket League is coming to the Nintendo Switch, though don't ask me if you'll be able to play that with your PC and console buddies, I'd hope you can but I don't know.

With all of this being said, a formality with the modern video game now, is DLC. Now, I have to say, having grown up in an environment that is used to that, I am of the stance that DLC can be a bad thing but not if handled correctly, and unfortunately in most cases, it is not.

You can have DLC like GTA, which advertises itself as being free but has in game currency that you can buy so Rockstar try and push for you to buy their Shark Cards by overpricing things. Next we have is a by chance crate system like on Call Of Duty where you have to pay to open Supply Drops to have a chance at getting the new items that will help you do better in matches. Finally you have most car games that I'm used to, spending a few quid on getting some new cars to drive.

As far as I'm concerned, my stance on video game DLC is that if I pay, I must be guaranteed whatever it is that I want, but if there's only a chance of getting something, I won't tolerate it. There is a grey area though when it comes to Rocket League, as it began with new battle-car bodies that you could buy for less than two pounds, but then evolved into this crate system that I have mixed feelings on.

By chance, you can earn any one of many different types of crate after a match that all consist of their own possible items, including battle-car bodies, rocket boosts, wheels, decals, toppers, antennas, goal explosions, trails, and for some reason since matches dictate you have to pick a blue or orange team colour scheme, paints. You have to buy keys to be able to open them, and thankfully for pretty much the most part, none of this actually has any knock on effect when it comes to making you any better in a game, a criticism that Call Of Duty constantly meets with this casino style system is that you have to spend so much money on the chance of getting a weapon that is so much better than the free weapons.

Another way that the Rocket League system is better is that you can perform trades with other players, and from the outset, it looks like a great idea. My friend Ahmed for example, he only uses the battle-car body Sweet Tooth (A PS4 exclusive body taken from the video game Twisted Metal) which can't carry any of the items that can be used to customise a vehicle so he just lets me have all his stuff, so thanks Ahmed, I appreciate that!

But in a fair trade, the items are so littered around that you can never perform a fair trade. I have two Candy Cane antenna items, I don't like having duplicates so I told this one guy in my game that I was willing to give away one of my Candy Cane antennas and we began trading. I offered my Candy Cane antenna and asked him to show what he would be willing to trade with me, but he kept being difficult and in the end, he left and we never ended up trading anything. If anyone wants a Candy Cane antenna if you're on PS4 or PC, message me.

Thankfully, I've never had many difficult experiences on Rocket League in regards to trading but I imagine a lot of people go through this everyday, because these mindless items for customisation are not categorised in such a way that I'm not sure as to what would constitute a fair deal.

The only reason I give a shit is because the two year anniversary for Rocket League rolled around and to celebrate, the developers released a new type of crate equipped with two battle-car bodies that really took my fancy, the Cento V17 and the Animus GP, which are visually based on a Le Mans Prototype and a Formula car respectively. I really wanted them, and apparently it was only last weekend that you could obtain these new crates so I did as much as I could.

I opened these crates and as ever is my luck, I got some shitty decals that I'll never end up using, some of which were for a battle-car body that I don't even have.. it pissed me off because on two of the three crates that contained these two new cars, the item I got was one above the Cento V17. But what pisses me off even more, if you have five items from the same crate and of the same level of value, you can trade them in for an item of the next level of value and because of that, I cannot trade it up with the game and get something further up.

All this would be completely negated if I got crates more often, I wouldn't mind having to pay for the keys since they don't cost much at all. But when there's that slight chance of getting a crate, then a chance of getting a certain thing, you may as well pick five numbers to submit in to the National Lottery Jackpot because you surely have better odds.

We can't get these crates that often, at least I don't know if there's a system that comes with it like you play one match, you get a random guaranteed item, then five means the lowest type of crate, you see where I'm going. As far as I am aware, it is a random system.

Then you have the duplicate items. I know I said earlier I have two Candy Cane antennas but that's because Ahmed gave me his to get rid of his items and I could use it to trade since according to my friend Matthew, they're highly sought after. But I have had friends who get two of the same decals multiple times, and I hate that rigged system.

My friend Matthew who I just mentioned, he's into Yu-Gi-Oh and he buys those card packs that are deliberately sealed off so you don't know what's in there. I get the appeal there because at least after the developers release those to the world, they can't tinker the results afterwards, they can't change a high statistic Red Eyes White Dragon for a sub-par Dark Warlock or whatever the fuck they're called.

The reason why I am bringing this up, is because with gaming, surely the developers are ensuring the odds are so low that you can't get anything of proper value. In Call Of Duty, the odds of getting any of the 'new' weapons in a DLC, are apparently below 0.1% and it is just a thoughtless exploit and abusing of the system as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not in any way saying Psyonix or Activision are scamming people like those CS:GO sites that Syndicate, TMarTn, FaZe clan etc. all owned and never disclosed when playing on it. But it does give off that uneasy vibe that they're accessing the backlog and making sure the items we want are never given to us and in return, we have to make do with a decal for a car we don't have because the game didn't allow us to have it.

Having brought up those CS:GO sites, these highly sought after items have prompted people to sell them on Ebay and all these other selling sites and again, that just screams scam to me. Not the fault of the developers for people who will scam you, just the fact that this incentivises them to do so and have that ability to take advantage, honestly I hate to say this but that part IS on the developers, for allowing such a system to be in place.

I love Rocket League, and it certainly a lot better when it comes to its crate system than something like Call Of Duty and FIFA, but this is like saying Chlamydia is worse than AIDS. I still strongly disapprove of the system of having to pay to have a chance at getting something, but I know for a fact that the game companies of the world aren't going to form an emergency meeting because some blogger from Britain was like "I don't like it".

So whilst I'm not out of touch and very much aware that it's not like this way of doing things is illegal, I do think it's exploitive and wrong. I'm still of the mind-set that you should pay for the certainty of getting something as far as video games go, but as long as these corporate companies get money for what they do, it won't change.

I guess what I'm saying is, pay for what you know you will get in video games, as long as you get enjoyment out of it. I always pay for Shark Cards on GTA because it's worth it for me, and it's the only game that requires a lot of money from me. Rocket League will continue to be a game that I will play and enjoy a lot, it has revolutionised the gaming experience to the point now where I can sit here and hope that one day, all major gaming platforms can play the same games at the same time. I hate how I can't play with my friends who have an Xbox, still the case of course with Rocket League with me being on PlayStation 4 but it is a step in the right direction.

Whilst I am talking about that, my best friend Nadine doesn't play Rocket League but her boyfriend Bas does on his PC, and we managed to arrange a few matches which was awesome. I mean, he handed my arse to me as he is way too good, but I put on my headset to talk to Nadine as she was wearing his headset too, we couldn't hear each other for some reason. Maybe we weren't pressing the push to talk button? I'd hope that was the case and we weren't able to talk to each other, someone who knows the game help us out please.

Anyway that's all I have to say. Again I reiterate, pick up Rocket League on whatever platform you're on whether that be PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC or even Nintendo Switch later this year and I'd suggest you avoid the crate system or at least getting too suckered into it.

Thank you all for reading, hope you decide to come back for more in which case, I'd recommend you go to the 'Follow By Email' option if you're on desktop or following me on Twitter @TheLucaFormat. Hope to see you all back here soon.

So until we meet again,
Luca.

Women in motorsport

Image courtesy of www.tumblr.com

Hello you, my name is Luca but you can call me Luca. So it has not been too long since I wrote an article called 'Women in film' and now I'm doing 'Women in motorsport', but before you ask, no I'm not one of those extremists who call themselves feminists and hides themselves in an echo chamber and calls everyone who disagrees with me a sexist, misogynist pig. Sorry, bit of topic but I'll continue.

I've always wanted to talk about this but it was only today as I am writing this that I have a reason, which I will get to near the end. But to talk about the history of women in motorsport, since this is mostly centred on Formula One, how many women do you think may have been in F1? Baring in mind, F1 has officially been around since 1950, so any guesses? Well whatever it is, not sure how close you were, it's five. Only two have started a race, and one of those two who scored half a point in a shortened 1975 Spanish Grand Prix being Lella Lombardi.

In other forms of motorsport, there are many other levels of success for women. The most successful woman in an FIA championship being 1982 World Rally Championship runner-up Michèle Mouton and in junior formulae there is many names that have come on through with a lot of great performances in their own right.

Firstly, someone I rate very highly is Alice Powell, who became the first woman to score points in GP3 and won the 2010 Formula Renault BARC and the 2014 Asian Formula Renault Series. I personally believe that Alice belongs in the British Touring Car Championship, I think a load of sponsors would pay handsomely for a leading lady to race in such a highly televised British championship like the BTCC.

Then we have former Red Bull junior driver and ADAC Formel Masters race winner Beitske Visser who is now a BMW junior driver, there's also 2015 BritCar Silverstone 24 hour winner and GT4 British GT championship Jamie Chadwick who now races in British F3, and finally Simona de Silvestro who used to be affiliated with Sauber F1 and has a wide variety of championships that she has competed in such as IndyCar, Formula E and now the Australian Supercars championship. That is just to name a few.

All of them have had varying levels of success but none have ever jumped out to the point where I'd like to think that they could one day, become a Formula One driver. But there is a major issue that would come with being a woman in a male dominated sport, is exactly that, being a woman in a male dominated sport.

Having mentioned some of the examples, nobody as of yet has ever stood out massively and despite how some have impressed me, I can't help but think that they wouldn't impress me had they been male drivers, or 'the norm' if you will. Both de Silvestro and Tatiana Calderón (F3 and GP3 driver in recent years) were signed up to be a part of Sauber and whilst they've had strong results in the championships that they have competed in, it has never been an overwhelmingly strong record that would warrant their signings.

Despite this though, it isn't enough to stop the criticism that they only got their place because they were women, and whilst I can't sit here and say that's completely true, I can't say it's false either, I know it played a part as ever with this push for a woman to get to F1. So much so, that my worst fear has come to fruition from a few years back.

Back in 2012 when Alice Powell was in GP3, she was joined by two women, one of which was Vicky Piria who I really liked but another woman who, well, let me elaborate.

You may have seen her face whenever the F1 broadcast would pan inside the Renault F1 garage, her name is Carmen Jordá and I can't mince my words, she is absolutely terrible. Having known her from GP3 - where they use all the same car - and well, she was so slow to the point where it seems like a comedy TV show.

For example, qualifying in GP3 at Spa-Francorchamps in 2012, the driver on pole position was Mitch Evans with a 2:10.513 and second to last place qualifier John Wartique did a 2:13.478, a gap of 2.965 seconds, pretty bad by GP3 standards but we then go to Jordá in last place with a time of 2:18.719, which is a further 5.241 seconds adrift of the driver ahead of her. That is inexcusably atrocious, and I'm not trying to remove any context or pin this one instance on her whole career, she's set a qualifying time so slow that she was unable to qualify for a round that same year.

Allow me to hammer home this point, if she was a guy, I'd say these points if Jordá was a man but it just so happens that she's this terrible and a woman, it isn't because she's a woman that she is this terrible. Honestly though, this would be harmless if she had remained off the radar and disappeared like all drivers who churn out such awful results, then I wouldn't batter an eyelid. But.. remember how I said earlier that we would see her in the Renault F1 garage on the broadcast?

Yes that's right, the Enstone based team hired her as a 'development driver' and I remember reading this on Twitter back in 2015 when it was still known as Lotus, I thought it was a joke. A lot of her fellow competitors chiming in saying how it wasn't deserved, and the fair few coming to her defence saying how everyone was jealous and sexist, that of course is a conversation in and of itself but I'll tell you why I was annoyed with this.

F1 is a global sport, I'd say less than 10% of the F1 viewers stick around to watch any of the junior formulae so that's why I said having her drive around nearly seven seconds off the pace is somewhat harmless when nobody outside of a motorsport fanatic is watching you. But when you couple on the casual viewer of F1 who turns up to watch the race in this day and age, if Jordá was ever given a chance to race, her performance isn't put down to her as an individual in the casual F1 viewer's eyes, it's down to the fact that she's a woman.

The difference being that if she was running around at the equivalent pace in an F1 car, in front of the casual F1 fans who don't see some actually somewhat decent driver who just so happens to be a woman in that car, what they see is what all women would do when in an F1 car. This is something that all women who want to be an F1 driver will have to face unfortunately, the inescapable tokenism that would come with being a woman in a male dominated sport.

Which is why we can't just stop at being allowed to make it in F1, we need to find a woman who could become a race winner, or championship contender, and a few days ago, we found just that.


Image courtesy of Noda Racing Academy

Meet 11-year old Juju Noda, daughter of former F1, IndyCar, A1GP and endurance driver Hideki Noda but judging by the way things are going, we will be saying Hideki is Juju's father rather than Juju is Hideki's daughter.
Noda tested an FIA grade Formula 4 car at the Okayama Circuit in her native Japan, and apparently has the lap record in that tier of racing car by over a second, with people of age to race an FIA sanctioned championship F4 car to compare against her times. Everyone is talking up this young lady as being a once in a many lifetimes type of talent, and I am rooting for her more than you can believe. Though I have to say one thing.

We have to ensure that she isn't rushed. Thankfully, she legally isn't allowed to race in FIA single seater commissioned championship races until she's 16 so already, she has about five years to develop. I mean, with that already being the case and the fact that she is decimating the competition already and according to her father, she is incredibly determined and willing to work in order to earn her place in motorsport, we still can't forget that we shouldn't put too much pressure on her shoulders. She's just a child.

The great tragedy is, I feel she will be watched upon very slowly and pushed, and we have seen countless examples of people who could have been great at what they did but they fell out of love with it. Noda will undoubtedly be greeted with the typical criticisms of being a woman in a man dominated sport, but should she be able to consistently put in great performances then she will feel the weight of representing women in motorsport.

Then we have the idea of rushing her. Red Bull Racing driver Max Verstappen is one of the few examples of someone leaping up the racing ladder, in which he did one season of car racing between his final year in karts and then taking a seat in F1, and we see how successful he is. My fear is with Noda being tipped as possibly the first woman to win a Grand Prix and maybe even a championship, that they'll do a Verstappen with her. Let her go at her own pace because we cannot afford to lose this alleged incredible talent.

We need a woman in F1 but not there just to act like a media dream, to make F1 come across as well meaning and all including, but make an absolute mess of it when greeted with the possibility of being able to race. I know I may be jumping the gun on Juju Noda but I've heard how good she is at 11, it might be well over 10 years from now that Noda enters F1 but when she's ready, she will give girls of her age now, an inspiration.

These are my words on women in motorsport, I hope you enjoyed what I had to say. If you want to stick around for anything more I have to say, put your email address in the Follow By Email option at the right of your screen (If you're on laptop that is) and/or follow me on Twitter @TheLucaFormat.

So until we meet again.
Luca.