The Ride

I attended an F1-party yesterday courtesy of one of our main vendors to the company. It started at 1pm but I came only at near-3pm since that was the start of the race (plus the missus and I had to go to our usual Sunday Bah-Kut-Teh + Cendol lunch ---rapsa).

There was this F1-race simulator in the party-venue where you sit inside a 1:1 scaled model of the front-half of the McLaren car, with steering-wheel and gear-pads behind, plus gas and brake pedals. This was the closest I could get into F1-racing. Apparently there was a prize to be awarded to the guy with the fastest time on the simulated Malaysia-F1 track in Sepang.

I felt an eagerness to play it since I know the track well: I've been "racing" on the whole F1-circuit via the same EA-Sports F1 Game at home on my laptop. This should be a cinch, I thought.

Well I had to get used to the gears since I only play auto gear-change on my laptop. The time to beat was 2 minutes and 3 seconds. I only managed 2 minutes 8 seconds since I spun off twice in the track. Until now those spins keep playing on my mind since I am fairly certain that I would have lapped under 2mins if it weren't for those mishaps. Oh well, hope there's another F1-party next year (if I'm still here, of course).

Anyway the compensation was that I was able to ride the Mercedes 2005 SLK-series car that the vendor brought in to treat us for a free ride in the highway. The ride, as those characters in "Dude Where's My Car" would say, was SWEET! We were flying at 160kmh on the national highway but the drive was all smooth. Damn, I should buy one of those when I become CEO, or something like that. Hehe.

Here's the ride, but the one I rode yesterday was in black.