Even if you like Final Fantasy, I think we can all agree that last week's notes went off the deep end. Well, I'm nothing if not a trend follower, so this week I'm going to write way too much about my own thing.

I was never much of a sports guy. I liked playing them just fine — tennis and soccer all through elementary and high school — but I never really enjoyed watching them. I'd much rather be out there doing them than sitting around. At the same time, I always liked cars as a combination of industrial design and mechanical engineering, two sides of the same coin that each have to bend to serve the other. But I was never a gearhead, either.

So no one was more surprised than me to find out how much I cared about Formula 1.

Imagine you're a driver of the fastest vehicle in the world, in a cockpit about ten inches from the ground. There is no windshield. The only thing separating you from the asphalt is a quarter inch of carbon fiber. Behind you sits an engine so finely tuned for speed that if you slow down too much, it bursts into flame from the lack of cooling air. In the pursuit of maximum speed, your car shapes the air rushing around it at 200 miles per hour so that your car is glued to the track with so much force that if you drove up the wall of a tunnel, you could stick to the ceiling. They're called "wings," and if you turned them upside down, you could fly. Sometimes cars do.

The difference between scoring something and nothing is fractional seconds. If you're in fourth, you might as well have not raced at all, even though the guy who got third might just be three one-hundreths of a second ahead of you — literally faster than the blink of an eye. Enter a corner ten inches too far to the left or get on the throttle a little too slow and suddenly your perfect lap becomes a worthless one.

You're surrounded by nineteen other cars just like yours, and all of you are the size of an Escalade. Everyone is watching for a tiny mistake to capitalize on. Blow an exit and watch as three drivers blow past you like you're not even there. The only way to get ahead is to be as aggressive as you can: hit the brake later than the other guy, force him wide so you can get the better line, trick him into passing where you're weak so you can return the favor where you're strong.

Great, that was lap one. Now do it 70 more times.

Covered this episode:

Star Trek: Voyager S04E11 — Concerning Flight

Adventure Time S05E43 — Root Beer Guy

Adventure Time S05E44 — Apple Wedding

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