Nico Boyce

Lydden Hill Easter

2026-04-19T00:00:00+01:00

Took three cameras to Lydden Hill. Fuji X-S20 with the Viltrox 9mm lens for the big bold pit lane stuff. Nikon D3300 with 70-300mm Nikkor for the fast track action. I also brought the Nikon F601 with three different film stocks to try stuff out, get the hang of longer exposures out in the dust.

It feels very extravagant to be shooting Ektar at the track. At one point I was stood between two shooters with Sony A9 or whatever they are, those ones that take a dozen frames per second with global shutter. They must have taken a few hundred shots each while I took two or three from that position.

Here are a few quick crops, straight off the SD card jpegs, plus some 35mm scans.

Quattro S1.

RS200.

Full send.

Purple E30.

Supercars into the dirt.

Talbot Sunbeam.

Crosscars airborne.

Drive it like you stole it.

Kent Movers Escort reeling one in.

Pug in the pits.

RX150.

Quattro rear end.

Wardle’s Swift.

Lydden Hill.

Does every dog bark?

2026-04-16T00:00:00+01:00

Not everyone loves this piece! My feeling is that this page of text is not exactly subtle use of imagery and makes it excessively clear there’s no literal cat or real sandwich and it’s about the way that information asymmetry is used to embed power imbalances in society. It’s okay to have feelings and sometimes those feelings might be uncomfortable.

Don’t ask me what I think about your pet. I am not interested. “Isn’t she a beautiful girl?” you say. I don’t know. You obviously feel that way. Do I have to agree with you?

The locals.

It’s not that I don’t like animals. We’re fortunate to live in an area that has lots of wildlife around the place. There’s deer, there’s various birds, I saw a hedgehog last night. What all of these things do when your dog comes crashing through is they scurry off and hide, so we don’t get to see them. Just see an endless string of identical Old English Sheepdogs or whatever the fashionable pet is.

I keep myself to myself. Honestly the lockdown in 2020 was the time of my life. People who know me now know only what I choose for them to know. No I’m not making that sentence better. It wasn’t always this way. There was a period where I had a desperate need to be seen, to be looked at. The dog that chased the cats. Buried deep down there’s the urge to be public and opinionated. I must be right and I must be loud, vicious and precise. For now I keep that animal restrained.

All the loudest voices are those who weaponise ignorance. Where are the socialist attack dogs? Sorry but kind and compassionate is never going to chase the fascist neanderthals back to their caves. It is my deep belief that someone needs to verbally rip these shouty white podcast bros to shreds and it’s hard to resist the thought that it should be me. Could I achieve something, will I stand up and find it’s too late?

Minding its own business.

I wrote this piece outdoors, walking some public spaces and being bothered by expensive pampered pets. Here’s the thing owners always say when they don’t control their dog: “Oh, don’t worry, he’s friendly.” Well, I’m not. So fuck off.

I find it hard to get into the mindset of people who have pets. Maybe it’s “well, things didn’t go so well with humans, but let’s try spaniels. Let’s see if I can build a relationship with one of those.” You’re giving up. That’s all well and good, and I don’t really care if it’s a fish or a hamster that you just keep to yourself. You can be more robust than this! It’s okay to feel isolated. I find a lot of joy in that peace. When a human gets a cat it’s a cry for help. “I’m not having fulfilling sex.” I think a dog says “no one listens to me, so I need something that has no alternative.” But what do you have to say?

There’s a lot of emphasis on the economy going up. Numbers need to be bigger. The big money knows how to earn either way though. The key is to know something other people don’t. Price in factors that aren’t understood generally. Place the bet when you have the exclusive knowledge, then distribute that info and bet the other way, lock in your profit. The casino doesn’t worry about your pile of chips. They worry you’ll pick the right moment to cash those out. It’s all about what I know now while you have no knowledge.

If your success is decoupled from the wider picture, there’s no reason for you to act in the general interest. Your profit is derived from knowledge asymmetry and the ultimate is becoming the decision maker. Do you have the expectation that leaders share your motivation? Who’s walking whom?

Here’s the way it should work with shit. I’ll keep my arse clean and you deal with yours, and we don’t need to discuss it or consider it further. I don’t love dealing with my own shit but I do. I don’t deal with your shit. One of the few things that I like about my friends is that they’re all capable of wiping their own arses and flushing their own shit. I don’t need to bring something into my life that can’t do that. But if you choose to, you can keep it the fuck out of my way.

Dog people, they wander around, don’t they? They walk around carrying bags of shit. You always see them carrying bags of shit, or picking up shit, but you never see them binning bags of shit. And you always see trees full of bags of shit. I’ve walked past a whole bunch on the way here.

There are more of us than there are of them. Such is the nature of the predator-prey relationship. If I do a day’s work, I can claim I created that value. If I manage a dozen people, I lay claim to some proportion of that effort. Even if you do a really huge job you’re not going to be creating six figures of value independently. If your tool devours the jobs of a hundred thousand minimum wage workers though, that’s when you’re really able to scale.

Collective negotiation works because it resolves the asymmetry of knowledge between employees and employer. So long as the boss keeps the workers divided he can maintain order. It’s not different if you’re running a shop to a country. So long as everyone on the ground level maintains a healthy mistrust of each other, the situation is stable. You remain the top dog and they can fight over scraps.

Here’s one. You’re at the beach or the park or something, you’re having a picnic with your family or your friends or what have you, and someone’s wet Labrador leaps its way through the middle of you, fucking up your lunch, fucking up your day. And the owner comes out: “Oh sorry, he probably just wants a sandwich.” Yeah. So did I. Dog owners believe that their right to take an animal with them trumps your right to sit and have a nice fucking time.

Head down.

I see plenty of birds and things like that killed by cats. Hedgehogs killed by cats. Why have you got a cat? Do you have a mouse problem? You don’t need to have a cat. Do you have a cat to entertain you? To make a friend? I’m not interested. Cats shit in my garden and when I catch one I’m gonna fucking eat it. I will put it in a sandwich, I’m gonna do that for fun, to show them who’s top of the fucking food chain.

Staring at your feet

2026-04-15T00:00:00+01:00

Do you ever feel like the news cycle is sapping your sense of proportion? I heard a bloke walking around saying “Has anyone caught the news? Did they open the strait?” We were in a campsite in Kent, not helming a Kuwaiti tanker. Stare hard enough into the distance and you trip over your own feet.

Getting older is what I hate. I don’t hate aging, my life is better every day than ever before. What I hate is mostly just the digits incrementing. The bullshit around it, messages from people just because it popped up in their calendar. Probably mostly it’s because I don’t have good relationships with my family.

I mention it because there was one such occasion which I’m still reeling from. It was my birthday and as is tradition my family had found a way to upset me. I don’t remember the details. It doesn’t matter now, because I took the right decision and cut that cancer right out.

Putting up walls, a tried and tested method.

Whatever it was, I put something vague and grouchy on the internet. On instagram, the place for such things. Not sure what I said, but it didn’t make me feel better.

It’s easy to be judgemental about other people’s choices. I see so many British people speak about Trump voters but they don’t see their own mental tangles. Someone was excited to see so many people march in these No Kings parades. Why don’t we have those here?

Britain has only Lesotho for company in the club of countries with hereditary positions in the legislature. It has only Iran for company in the club of countries with lawmakers appointed by the state religion.

Our relationship with the barons and dukes and the king and the archbishops is like that of the reality television viewer. It’s a distant drama and a curiosity, but hardly a day to day issue except in a watercooler sense. People voted for Rylan but it had no consequence. We don’t choose the lords or royals precisely because these things are important.

America does clearly have a very bad head of state. You know how he got there? Americans elected him. The guy here in the UK got the job when his mother died. One of the features of being able to vote is that you are free to vote badly. Maybe it’s just Boaty McBoatface all the way down.

Here is a super bad message to receive: “How dare you say that about my Jewish people?” It’s a notification that makes you spit out your tea, you can trust me on that one. I hadn’t said anything about Jewish people. I hadn’t said anything about anyone!

The message came from a friend, a former colleague. I think of him as a fairly close friend but the reality is I don’t have close friends and I’m optimistically a second or third tier friend for him. He’s Jewish, a Londoner who had recently been in Tel Aviv for a while. Evidently he had misunderstood my whinge about my mother.

It was October 7th, 2023. Hamas had killed and kidnapped people across various Israeli locations in the preceeding hours, but I hadn’t seen the news. I was out of the loop, upset with my shitty family, unaware of the horror everyone was now talking about. Sometimes you’re so busy staring at your own feet, you miss the setting of the sun.

You did not get hired (but it is not your fault)

2026-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

If you’re fed up of your job hunt, this is for you.

It’s tough out there. I think it’s mandatory to start any scribble about the job market with “it’s tough out there” but reading it a dozen times doesn’t make it less important to remember.

Some of my favourite CX sector writers have put out great stuff in this direction recently and so I would urge you to read Betts and Steph Lundberg for some great perspectives.

Job hunting is just work, work, work!

There are two ways this sort of writing goes from here. One option is the “don’t beat yourself up, keep going” type sentiment. The other is the “here’s how you hack it” where someone declares they have found the secret and that secret is some automated scattergun approach.

Here’s a third way. Yes, you need to be kind to yourself but it’s also essential to continually refine your approach. Don’t automate spamming out a CV to everything and anything but do actual science and have some sort of testing and measuring cycle. At the same time you need to put yourself in the context that gives you the motivation to build yourself up.

Let yourself off the hook

Let’s review a bunch of facts which you should remind yourself of if you’re feeling a bit glum about proceedings.

There probably isn’t really a job anyway

It’s completely mad but often a job advert is just a fishing expedition and there isn’t an empty seat at a desk with a pile of work building up they need someone to get stuck in to.

Jobs are listed for all sorts of reasons and we just don’t know what those reasons are for any given posting. I have known businesses list jobs so that they can get a sense of how accurate their salary benchmarking is. This sounds bad (because it is) but you have no way of knowing and nothing you can do about it so you might as well be angry about the moon.

Even if there is a job, they probably have someone in mind

We’ve definitely all seen a job advertised even though there’s already a preferred candidate. Got to follow the company process despite the decision being made some time ago.

The manager might well want to bring in a colleague from their old team or they have an internal promotion lined up but the policy says we advertise and so people apply for jobs somebody already got. It’s unreasonable to be upset about not getting a job that was never really available but we’re all unreasonable fleshy things.

The trick is to make the “somebody” you and we’ll come to that somewhere down the page.

You weren’t there in the other interviews

You’re really great! I’m sure of that. The other candidates are probably also pretty great. You probably don’t know them and that is another key item of the information asymmetry inherent in the recruitment process.

There was a gig I didn’t get a few years ago and I felt a bit hard done by. Some time later I got talking to an industry colleague who had become a good friend and I found out he was the other finalist for that gig and he’s a great and talented guy and I’m sure was the better choice for that piece of work. Turned out we had also been the final two for another gig which I got and he was grouchy about that one!

Stressed but iconic.

It’s very unusual to get that kind of closure but please feel free to imagine it for yourself going forwards.

Here are some things that won’t get you a job

People ask me all the time about how to get a job. They say “Can you take a look at my CV?” Of course I can but I shouldn’t. You probably don’t need a better CV right now. Sorry.

Sending out CVs and clicking through job application forms is a pointless waste of time.

Never send someone a CV until they actually ask for it. You need them to buy in to you before you reduce yourself to a sequential list of events. A really good CV is honestly a bit weird anyway.

Don’t cold apply for jobs at all.

I’m serious. The best case scenario is you end up being the person against whom they benchmark the preferred candidate. You need to be that preferred candidate! You do this by creating a relationship with the humans who will be making the decision. You do that and the rest follows.

It is not a numbers game.

I still see people sort of boast “I’ve sent out 500 job applications and had no interviews” and I can’t help but think “you’re doing it wrong then” but it’s bad manners to say that.

This assumes that successful job applications have some kind of statistical distribution like rolling dice and that just isn’t the case. You can definitely do a lot to give yourself an easier time of it and so you do have to do those things. That doesn’t mean that the world is fair and you’re not entitled to be upset about your job hunt. Feel free! But believing your time will come and your number is due is how people become gambling addicts.

Tailoring your CV is actually bad.

No one likes it when I say this! I actually go out of my way to make it clear I am not making a special CV for your job. Someone asks for a CV and I say “Well I have an old one which I can bring up to date and pop over quickly so we can get the next chat scheduled” and then their expectations are flipped. It changes the whole narrative of the process! I’ve rendered the CV part mere formality.

So what do you actually do

You see a job you want. Don’t you dare apply for it! Find out who you would be working with. The company is on LinkedIn, the team is on Linkedin. The hiring manager is almost certainly on Linkedin. Find them!

Now find the bridge person. Who do you know who knows someone there? You have more connections than you think and it only takes one and Linkedin will tell you who that is. A former colleague, a friend of a friend, someone you met at a conference three years ago. Find the common thread and use it to start a conversation.

Something like “Hey, you and I both worked with Liz, do you keep in touch with her? She’s a great engineer but she makes a weak cup of tea. I see you’re looking for a specialist in what I do over at your company. Would this role be in your team? It’d be good to have an informal chat about life over there. Would you have time for a quick chat tomorrow?”

I might well be that person for you and this role. Please feel free to pop me a message if so! Say to them “Hey, you and I both know Nico Boyce, did you work with him at X? Did he ever make you listen to his terrible music? He mentioned you were an expert in Y, I have been working as a junior Y…” and so on. The key phrases are “informal chat” and “life at company”. You are not asking for a job. You are having a conversation. It might turn out it’s not the thing for you but they know someone else. You might just make a friend! These are all good outcomes.

Help them want you before they actually evaluate anyone. By the time the process catches up you’re already the preferred candidate. Managers are human people who would rather work with someone they’ve had a nice chat with than a stranger from a spreadsheet, so you will beat someone of equivalent skills and experience who does run through the application process properly.

When they do ask for your CV

By this point you’re already winning. The CV is a box-ticking exercise for HR. So when someone asks for it I say “Well I have a CV which is a bit dated, I’ll pop the latest bits on and send it over” because their expectations are already set. But you should still make it decent. Don’t offer it! Only send a CV to someone who has asked to see one.

I’m not going to put my full list of CV tips here now but here’s one you can enjoy:

Make your name massive. This document is your tour poster. You are the Taylor Swift of this PDF. You are the star of the show for anyone reading it and the design should reflect that.

This can be true in your whole life

You are the hero of your story and you’re allowed to carry yourself in a manner that a hero deserves. You shouldn’t beat yourself up for having tough times. Tough times are an essential part of any good narrative structure! Now get out there and write your next chapter.

Ferrari had three chances to win in Melbourne and took none of them

2026-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

A couple of weeks ago I was in Maranello. As a kid I’d wanted to go and see the Ferrari factory but when my stepdad and I made the trip it turned out everything was closed for a public holiday. Life’s too short for unfinished business so on a recent Italian road trip I put that right with a visit to the Scuderia museum.

The museum itself is… fine. It’s nice to see the trophies, remember some of those races, see some properly great cars. But mostly it’s trying to put their recent stuff into the context of their historical greatness. There’s no universe in which a Purosangue deserves to be in a museum alongside Lauda trophies, Schumacher’s cars, or a 250 that won the Mille Miglia. I had a go at redesigning their new car a while back and offered my services but they haven’t called yet.

Maranello.

The real attraction in Maranello is Ristorante Montana. The walls are covered in amazing stuff and the pasta is great. We had been at the museum and then peeked over the wall into the Fiorano test circuit where a track car was doing some testing laps.

Fiorano.

Also spotted a heavily camouflaged road car on the streets, what I expect will end up being the run-out final edition of the current berlinetta model. And a camouflaged electric car! They’ve just announced the Lucce with the Jony Ive interior but no exterior shots yet, so this was a treat.

Oh, and the Ferrari boss himself, Fred Vasseur, was having lunch at Montana too.

If I’d had the chance I might have asked him about his strategy department. If you watched the race, you saw them just thrown away a win at the Australian Grand Prix. The numbers prove it!

The situation

George Russell qualified on pole for Mercedes with teammate Antonelli alongside him. Hadjar was third for Red Bull. Leclerc and Hamilton qualified fourth and seventh for Ferrari, both on medium tyres, with the Mercedes pair also on mediums. Piastri didn’t start, wrecking on the way to the grid in front of his home crowd. Ouch.

Both Ferraris got going well. By the end of lap 1, Leclerc was leading the race and Hamilton was third. Despite qualifying a row behind the Mercedes pair, Ferrari had a 1-3 on track within a few corners. Then on lap 11, Hadjar’s Red Bull engine expired.

Did the decisions the teams made at that point decide the race? Definitely.

Opportunity one: the Hadjar VSC

The virtual safety car was deployed on lap 12 and ran until lap 14. Under a VSC, all cars slow to a regulated delta time. This means a pit stop costs roughly half the time it normally would relative to the cars still on track. This is basic F1 strategy, known to literally every team. They are constantly recalculating the answer to “what do we do if there’s a safety car or virtual safety car this lap” and Ferrari just always get this wrong.

Both Mercedes pitted on lap 12. So did almost every other car that needed to stop. Every car on medium or soft tyres came in except the two Ferraris.

The VSC ran until lap 14. Ferrari had two full laps under caution to pit at least one car and chose neither. The Ferrari pit crew came out on lap 13. Then they were told to stand down. No double-stack was required. The pit lane was empty. They just didn’t do it.

What it cost:

A pit stop under the VSC cost Russell roughly 11.6 seconds relative to the cars that stayed on track. Leclerc’s green flag pit stop on lap 25 cost roughly 18.2 seconds. That’s a 6.6 second penalty just for choosing to wait.

But it’s worse than that. From laps 15 to 25, Leclerc was lapping on worn medium tyres while Russell was on fresh hards:

Laps	Leclerc (old MEDIUM)	Russell (fresh HARD)	Delta
15-17	~83.4s	~82.8s	~0.6s/lap
21-25	~83.4s	~82.9s	~0.5s/lap

Over ten clean racing laps, that’s another five seconds gone. Add it to the pit stop penalty and you’re looking at roughly 12 seconds lost from one decision.

Leclerc lost the race by 15.5 seconds.

Opportunity two: Bottas breaks down

On lap 18, Valtteri Bottas ground to a halt in the pit entry. Everyone watching could see it was going to be at least a VSC. Anyone who has seen a car stop on a live circuit knew the pit lane would likely be closed shortly after.

Timeline from the race control data:

04:29:38 — Yellow flag, sector 20 (Bottas failing)
04:29:55 — VSC deployed (17 seconds later)
04:31:16 — Pit lane entry closed (81 seconds after VSC)

There was an 81-second window. Ferrari had live GPS data on every car. They could see Bottas was slowing before the yellow flag even appeared. The best teams react to the cause, not the flag.

Ferrari didn’t pit. The pit lane closed. Another cheap stop gone.

Opportunity three: the hare and tortoise

Even accepting that they missed both VSCs, Ferrari still had options. Hamilton was running second at this point, 28 laps into his medium stint, with Leclerc leading. They could have pitted Hamilton under the second VSC and split their strategies, but trying something different with the second car also wins every game theory scenario.

Hamilton on fresh hards would have been roughly 0.5 seconds per lap faster than the Mercedes pair on their six-lap-old hards. He could have closed in and pressured them, forcing Russell and Antonelli to push harder and degrade their rubber. Meanwhile Leclerc stays out front, extends the stint, builds the gap.

When Leclerc eventually pits under green, he comes out on fresh hards against Mercedes drivers whose tyres have been hammered by Hamilton’s pressure. The data shows Russell’s pace on 30+ lap hards was consistently 83.0 to 83.5 seconds. Hamilton on fresh hards was doing 82.4 to 82.7. Leclerc would have been hunting.

This didn’t require any luck. It didn’t require a safety car. It just required Ferrari to read the race and act.

The result

Russell — Mercedes — pitted under VSC (lap 12) — winner
Antonelli — Mercedes — pitted under VSC (lap 12) — +2.974s
Leclerc — Ferrari — pitted under green (lap 25) — +15.519s
Hamilton — Ferrari — pitted under green (lap 28) — +16.144s

Ferrari qualified 4-7 but had a 1-3 on track from the opening lap. They finished 3-4. Mercedes qualified 1-2, lost positions off the line, pitted under the VSC, and finished 1-2. The entire swing was manufactured by one strategic failure, repeated across two opportunities, with a third creative option left on the table.

Leclerc’s fastest lap was a 1:22.579 on lap 38. Hamilton’s was a 1:22.423 on lap 55. These are not the lap times of a team that lacked pace. Ferrari had the car to win this race. They needed their strategy team to not actively prevent it.

What makes it even more frustrating is that by mid-race, there was no risk from behind. Norris was fifth, over 50 seconds back. Verstappen sixth, nearly a minute adrift. Ferrari had a free pit stop available from third and fourth — they could have tried anything and the worst case scenario was finishing exactly where they did. Doing nothing guaranteed 3-4. Doing something could have won them the race. They chose nothing.

What were they thinking?

The argument for staying out is always “track position.” Leclerc had led since the opening lap and was still in front. Why give that up?

Because you’re going to give it up anyway. The mediums had to come off. The only question was when and at what cost. A VSC halves the cost. Staying out on old mediums against fresh hards is not protecting track position, it’s delaying the inevitable while making it more expensive.

The crew came out on lap 13. Someone on that pit wall knew it was the right call. Someone else overruled them.

Fred, if you’re reading this, the pasta at Montana was excellent. The strategy was not.

Shooting on film in Italy, '26

2026-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

I had been planning to do a little Italian coast to coast road trip for a long time. Four years ago I bought a paper map of the Emilia-Romagna region and surrounds and started planning a big trip.

In January we were feeling like we needed a break so we got some flights booked and went exploring.

We landed in Pisa at breakfast time, picked up our rental Fiat and headed to the beach for an espresso and croissant. Over the following days we had time in Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Imola, Venice.

Victor took about five hundred pictures on the Fujifilm camera while I pretty much stuck to 35mm. I’m using the Nikon F601 with the 75-300mm lens you see on the gear page and everything was developed by The Film Safe.

Here are some of my favourites of the film shots.

Venice revellers.

Imola castle.

Saucy mermaid.

Florence streets.

Carnival masks.

Pisa wall.

Grand canal.

Street detail.

Romulus remus wolf.

Bologna portico.

Quick text.

Venice bridges.

Imola decay.

Pink properties.

Carnival hat.

Headache statue.

Side street.

Ligurian sea.

Cactus window.

Florence evening.

Pisa marina.

You are welcome, Ferrari

2026-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

Have you seen this new Ferrari? It’s the 849 Testarossa (no idea why they are resurrecting that name) and apparently it’s good to drive.

I had a stab at making it prettier. What do you think?

Ferrari 849… the Beastie Boyce edition

I’ll be visiting Maranello in a couple of weeks so if you’re a Ferrari designer and you need help with future cars then do get in touch!

Incidentally, Affinity is pretty good!

Days, in 35mm slices

2026-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’m obviously not quite busy enough so why not revisit the problems of the past to make hobbies even more expensive and time consuming?

I’ve been using this pretty much exclusively for the last couple of months. It’s chunky and clunky and old. It’s opinionated about the way things should be done. It can be a bit frustrating and temperamental. It’s hard to know why I feel something for this tool.

Nikon F-601.

The camera gear situation is getting a bit silly here lately. I have sold some lenses and the Fuji X-H2 but it’s definitely excessive nevertheless. Here is some of the stuff.

Cameras.

Anyway more interesting probably is what’s coming out of the camera. I’ve used it for a range of photography and with a mix of Fuji and Kodak film. I’m getting everything developed by The Film Safe who are just delightful. Which are your favourite shots?

BH Truck.

Closed.

Crow.

Dawlish.

Portsdown.

Splash.

Track.

Yes, I have been rollerblading a lot

2026-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

now I’m going to talk about it

Rollerblading is a polarising thing to do. I can’t think of many other hobbies which draw so much comment from passers-by. If you like to keep a low profile, if you like to avoid talking to strangers, don’t do rollerblading.

By the sea.

I used to love rolling around as a kid. It was interrupted by injuries (I broke my arm twice when I was nine) and other interests came along at 12. We’re talking Magic the Gathering, Quake 3, Terry Pratchett. Oh also I learned to ride a bike about that time. Before 12 though, there were about four years where being outside meant being on tiny wheels.

By the end I was pretty good! I could skate backwards pretty much as quick as forwards, I got picked for a roller hockey team, I had plenty of good times on my blades. It’s okay to grow up.

Now it turns out being grown isn’t all great

I think I’m doing pretty well at being an adult. I do a job I enjoy and it funds doing plenty of fun stuff. I’ve got nice adult toys (no not in that sense, you sleaze) like guitars and camping kit and photography gear and the BMW. On the other hand, I’m only getting older! No amount of sim racing gear or guitar pedals will slow that.

So why not treat myself and take up skating again, with the kind of set-up I would have loved as a kid?

There’s no reason, the question was rhetorical

So I grabbed some from a charity shop (which happened to be the same boots as the ones I had as a kid! Obviously a tad bigger now) but it turns out I’m a bit more sophisticated (and heavy) than I was at that age and I needed something better.

Here’s what I’m rolling on lately:

Skates.

They are a pretty great ride!

This is all fun and games but I’m only here for the tech specs

I’m rolling on Roces M12 UFS Lo with some modifications.

Roces have apparently existed since 1952. I wasn’t around then but I will take their word for it. The M12 boot was launched in 1996, so it was the latest and greatest when I was starting! I would have loved some then. I love these now instead!

UFS is the Universal Frame System. Yes, the rollerskate companies agreed on some basic compatibility long before anyone even dared to ask Apple to make any effort to co-operate with other PC manufacturers. It just specifies a couple of mount points on the sole and the dimensions of the frame, which is the piece the wheels are mounted in.

Lo on the Roces means that the cuff and the liner don’t go so high up your calf at the back. This is a preference thing. The liner in these boots is a basic one from Loco Skates.

The stock Roces frame is probably great if you’re under 40kg but I had two issues with it. The middle wheels are “antirocker” types, which means they are actually just spacers really. They don’t roll and don’t have bearings in them. Again, this is probably fine for kids and people who are very serious about rollerblading but I’m a busy dad who eats too many biscuits.

Additionally, the stock frame is quite flexible. I think it’s made of nylon and I didn’t have much confidence on it.

A word on configurations

Antirocker wheels are called that because your first and fourth wheel on each boot wear down much quicker and so if you have equal wheels (flat configuration) then you end up with a bit of a rocking sensation as your foot seesaws over the middle wheels. This feels bad, so antirocker exists.

Antirocker.

If you want a flat setup (i.e. four equal wheels) then you need to periodically swap the positions of your wheels around to prevent it becoming a rocker.

You can also get a “freestyle” configuration where you just take out the middle wheels and so have two wheels on each boot. This is lighter but you lose grip on tight turns or hard stops.

Some people do ride a rocker setup apparently. Weirdos.

Modifications

I added a foam insole of some sort to help my weird feet. Plastic boots need plenty of padding whoever you are though.

The laces are now these really classy yellow ones. They match…all of my things. A great style upgrade.

Laces.

The stock wheels (though not the inside wheels remember) were Revolver branded. I think they are 64mm and 88a hardness rated. They have a very round profile. It felt to me like I was on stilts and there wasn’t much rubber on the road. I switched them for some Iqon wheels which were 55mm 85a and have a square profile, so a large contact patch. These are indoor wheels really, so they have super high rolling resistance and you feel every molecule of imperfection in the road.

I’ve now swapped the frames for 50-50 Prime frames. Rosie got me these for a present and I am very happy with them. Each boot is a little heavier but the frame has an aluminium structure and feels absolutely rock solid. It has given me the confidence to put the Revolver wheels on the front and back and the Iqon wheels in the middle positions, which honestly feels so great!

Skating time.

I’m rolling on Bones bearings and they are okay but honestly I hoped for more from them. Fancy ABEC 9 bearings on the outside wheels at least would be the next thing to do.

In a straight line, there’s much less rolling resistance so it is less difficult to get moving. On a turn, the middle wheels with their softer rubber and flatter profile really help bite into the tarmac and turn me around.

So what?

Hey, this is my website and I’ll talk about rollerskating if I want to. And if that makes you want to throw things at me, well I’m still laughing because I’ve got this classy helmet!

Helmet.

2025 is over

2025-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

wow that was a time wasn’t it

So yes today is the LAST DAY OF THE YEAR and so here are some thoughts which I have had on various topics. Do you agree? Do you disagree? That’s okay!

Music, sounds, etc

I guess for a lot of people 2025 was about waiting in virtual queues hoping to get tickets to big stadium shows from lowest common denominator pop acts. I’m not mad at you if you are in to that, I’m just disappointed and let’s not speak about it further.

We saw some really great stuff. Have A Nice Life. Divide And Dissolve. Earth. The Beta Band! High On Fire (plus incredible supports including Castle Rat) and I’m sure I’m forgetting so many excellent other bands. Queens of the Stone Age a couple of times.

I’ve heard people say don’t meet your heroes. They need to choose their heroes better. I’ve met pretty much all of my musical idols and they were almost all absolutely lovely.

Dylan Carlson of Earth.

How about new music?

So 2025 was a year where artists whose work I had been enjoying over the last few years released records which made me go “oh okay, that’s a shame.”

Here are some of those:

Earl Sweatshirt
Simz
Ikonika
FKA Twigs
JPEGMAFIA
Divide And Dissolve
Princess Nokia
Yaya Bey
Masters of Reality

None of these were bad! They were all fine but just not super great.

Anyone who had Eusexua on their best-of lists honestly probably just hasn’t recently revisited the best stuff Madonna and Bjork did in the 1990s.

While collating this list I made a note that I need to put some more time in to the newest Clipping and Kae Tempest records.

My favourite new record this year was PinkPanteress mixtape Fancy That and my favourite new song of the year was Music by Underscores and nothing else really came close to those choices for me.

Finally I’ve got to say “go and listen to Esdeekid” if you’re not yet in on that thing.

Live highlights?

My favourite performance I got to experience this year is a bit more tough. I’m going to pick individual songs from shows, why not.

The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull by Earth at the Electric Ballroom was like the whole world was revolving around the incredible patience of drummer Adrienne. Teased out over what felt like hours, this rendition of this track was so powerful I don’t know how we made it home afterwards.

Queens of the Stone Age, Long Slow Goodbye at the Royal Albert Hall. I didn’t have Josh Homme waving a hatchett around and Matt Berry pulling out all the stops on the monstrous RAH organ on my bingo card for the year.

The Beta Band, Dry the Rain. This was at the Roundhouse. It felt like a strange moment in my life. The two decades since their last shows, one of the first proper gigs I made it to, all of that seemed forgiven in that moment.

TV, cinema, audiovisual media

I am always saying I don’t feel like film is a great way to tell a story. Nothing in 2025 has changed my view on that. I have really struggled (and I have failed) to think of anything new I didn’t hate.

Films (i.e. long form storytelling)

The M word for films makes me feel a bit nauseous, like people get about words like “touch” and “moist” so I don’t say it. I think it might be because it sounds like something a toddler would say if they didn’t know the right word? Anyway, I hate it.

I’m a big motorsports fan and I think women are people so of course I watched and loathed that F1 film. It was painful to endure and I don’t understand why through the editing process no one said “this is embarrassing and we need to make this better” but I’m sure it earned plenty of cash.

The live action remake of Lilo and Stitch was unneccesary but basically fine and I thought the performance of the little girl was great. Shame not to get Ving Rames and I’m not sure why they added the portal gun from the Portal games but I like the Portal games and it was fun.

The other day we saw the Spongebob film and there were things about it which were pretty alright. I expected that to be a miserable couple of hours for me sat there but the nods to Greek myths and Mark Hamill was enough to keep me engaged.

I’m sure I saw some other new films but I don’t remember them. Honestly I don’t really care about films (outside of Takeshi Kitano gangster films) and if you want film recommendations then probably ask someone else.

Something positive though

There is some incredible work going on by people who don’t have the BBC or Netflix funding them but they just have something to say. I’m thinking of people like Josh Johnson, whose output has been just incredible through the year. Television and cinema are basically over but we don’t need the gatekeepers, just a camera and some time.

Motorsport

I felt like 2025 was quite a sad year for motorsport in general. The FIA and NASCAR organisations have their reputations absolutely in the toilet now. This doesn’t take away from some amazing performances by drivers and teams though.

British Truck Racing Championship. Brands Hatch.

Go and see some motorsport near you. It’s a great day out!

Single seaters

McLaren muddled over the line but the drivers need to tell the team that the perception of fairness is not as important as winning. At times it felt like Mac strategy was designed to give Max a chance!

Indycar never looked particularly close this year. I didn’t much like Will Buxton on the coverage. I’m glad Penske had such rotten results but otherwise there was little to be excited about.

Formula 2 was a mixed bag. There were some fun races but apart from the champ Fornaroli the whole field had such inconsistent performance that I can’t see any of these guys being world champions of the future. Dunne really faded but an absolute shocker was Gabriele Minì. F3 was much the same. I wonder if it’s because the costs are so high and the seasons so long.

I didn’t really follow British F4 this year or regional F3/F4 championships.

Endurance, sports cars, etc.

IMSA was great this year, full of excitement and great coverage. I am super into the AO Racing team with their dinosaur themed cars and getting the kids excited, making great merch and then throwing everything at the performances. The Vasser Sullivan team gets my respect too, turning up year after year with that ancient Lexus GT3 (that car was launched in 2014!) and achieving great things.

As a bonus IMSA has the best support series on the planet, the MX-5 cup, as well as the best commentary team in John and Shea.

It’s a great time to get into enduros as Verstappen draws attention to the Nurburgring and more manufacturers join the WEC.

People ask me how you enjoy endurance racing. It’s a strange thing to get in to! Basically you pop it up on a screen and get on with what you’re doing, looking over when you hear some excitement, tuning in and out as you please. It’s like test cricket a bit. You can sit and take in an hour here and there but you don’t sit and stare for the full event. Maybe I’ll write a full essay about how to enjoy enduros but that’s the gist. Daytona soon!

Rally, rallycross

The WRC was really hot this year. I’ve never been a big fan of watching rallies. They are great to drive in but they aren’t made for television. The WRC was great this year. I’m worried about next year with two of the top drivers quitting.

Rallycross had such a terrible year. It’s my favourite racing format but there just seems to be no way of making it sustainable. I don’t understand how no one makes a success of it, because RX is perfect for TV and really fun for more casual fans. RIP to WorldRX, Nitrocross, Extreme E.

But let’s not worry about that right now. Just make sure you’re watching the British RX and also RallyX.

Now the W2RC is the craziest thing in the world I’m sure and I am still in shock at Nassar losing the title over a timing technicality. The Dakar is coming up and you need to make sure you’re catching those daily highlights.

Random car bits

I was glad Tom Ingram got it done in the BTCC. One of the nicest racing drivers I’ve met, so much time for everyone. I remember when he was posting on his Facebook every week trying desperately to get helo funding the next weekend of racing.

The British Hillclimbing has been great fun. You’ve got to get to an event near you, it’s so much fun in person. The commentary team on youtube are excellent too.

I guess read this if you haven’t: Racing worth watching

Stop reading here

This is the end of the article (I might start putting this on everything I write)

Nico vanity shots of 2025

2025-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

BMX.

Cold.

Como.

Conference.

Geckoboard. Watch us here

London.

Photography.

Shorn.

Brands Hatch camera showdown

2025-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

We took a bunch of photography gear to Brands Hatch. One of the cameras was my current favourite toy, this F601 with 75-300mm.

Snap snap!

Representing modernity we had a Fuji XS20, Sigma 16-300mm. In the middle we had a Nikon D3300, 70-300mm. Can you guess which photo was taken with which camera?

TCRs struggle for grip at Druids.

Tasty TCR.

Greasy conditions and front wheel drive means endless understeer.

Saxo appeal.

Heavy metal.

If you’re looking to get some film developed, give The Film Safe a go. Top people and great results.

Top straight white guy jobs in '25

2025-09-23T00:00:00+01:00

or How to unleash that secret talent you’re sure you have somewhere, big guy

Doing things is hard. Making new things requires understanding existing things. Skills take time to develop, tools need to be mastered, creativity requires imagination. Who can be arsed? Certainly not the straight white guys of the internet!

Here are some things they can fall upwards into, despite everything about them.

Looking at things

This is a great place to start because the barrier to entry is almost zero. You’re probably reading this on a thing which can take photos, so that saves any initial expenditure. Later you will need a Leica for the little red circle on the front. The process:

See somthing
Point the camera at it
Write a vague caption not related to the image “Sometimes the first step is the hardest” or “When the real enemy is within” etc
Buy gear.

What a poseur.

There’s no point where money is likely to fall out but if you grow your hair a bit floppy and tell a lot of people you are a photographer, maybe someone dumb and pretty will let you look at them through a lens. This is literally the dream of every white guy with a Leica, to become a pornographer without having to learn anything or hire sex workers.

Listening to things

Music reviews used to be useful in 1999 when CDs were like £15 (which is probably £40 in 2025 sterling) and your pocket money covered maybe one or two a month. But it’s not 1999 now and everyone has access to basically all of the music basically all of the time. No one needs to read reviews to decide whether they’ll listen to Showbiz or Performance and Cocktails or Californication. You can quickly flick through all three and be judgemental (overwrought juvenile psuedointellectualism, unimaginitive and unambitious, overproduced overwritten earache, respectively) in a shorter time than it would take to find the right issues of NME.

Nevertheless that guy Anthony Fantano is over there and Rick Beato is that way and Christgau still exists (why?) and you could join them if you can bitch your way into a position of presumed authority on a form of media which essentially exists as a utility rather than luxury now.

See also: that guy booted from comedy rock one hit wonders the Darkness. Youtube suggests him all the time but I never click it. Will it learn?

Playing video games

Remember how you were always being told to get off your arse and do something because playing video games doesn’t pay the bills? But now she has gone and you watch people you don’t know play games and people give them cash all day! Repeat after me: Fuck you Michelle, you’ll soon see, just as soon as I get some LED triangles for my wall and get good at Rocket League.

Literally just whinge about stuff

Podcasts are back again, again, though now no one has ipods or uses rss but who cares, grab a mic and make sounds!

Talking.

You can combine this with anything else (or nothing) so long as you’re talking. Someone is bound to want to listen!

Visit to Museo della Seta di Como

2025-08-23T00:00:00+01:00

Structures

2025-08-23T00:00:00+01:00

Lecco.

Balconies.

Wedge.

Towers.

Italian animals

2025-08-23T00:00:00+01:00

Halo.

Tucked.

Egret.

Classy travellers

2025-08-23T00:00:00+01:00

Teeth.

Chunk.

Decision time, brown

2025-08-15T00:00:00+01:00

Lando has more than double the grand prix experience of Oscar but fewer wins. I like Lando. I saw him race at Brands Hatch in the Ginetta Juniors a few years back. He’s a quick boy and it doesn’t hurt that he has boy band looks and good marketing people making the most of that. He needs to spend some of that cash getting his head together.

Until Lando sorts out the mental stuff there’s no chance they’ll be engraving his name on the fancy pot at the end of the year. Mac need to throw their full support behind Oscar and kill off the prospect of a Red Bull resurgence.

Racing worth watching

2025-08-10T00:00:00+01:00

If you’re looking to be entertained by cars driven fast, here’s what I enjoy.

In the UK

British Hillclimb (see you at Prescott!)
British Rallycross especially the buggies at Lydden Hill and the 2wd retro cars, always fun
VSCC Lakeland Trial and honestly any vintage hillclimbs/trials/sprints are excellent
750 Motor Club
BTCC but I’m sure you know that
BRSCC which is always a great value day out

International

IMSA, particularly the MX-5 cup. John and Shea might be the best commentary duo in motorsport.
Nitrocross formerly Nitro Rallycross. I think this series folded but it’s well worth a watch, especially the 2021 season. Coley and Jared are also great commentators.
Hillclimb Monsters is not a series per se but all the craziest hillclimb builds you could want
K4 Movies film all the craziest off road events in Europe, from ATVs to 8x8 trucks.
Formula Offroad Iceland, also broadcast by Jakob Cecil, is just nuts and commentator Kristian is fantastic.

Let me know what I have missed, via hello@nicoboyce.com

Horner had it coming

2025-07-11T00:00:00+01:00

Ecclestone said (I’m paraphrasing) people will put up with you being difficult so long as you’re winning, but the moment that ends then the knives are out.

No one wants to bump into someone they know from work when they are on holiday but it looks like Toto and Max picked the same spot off of Sardinia to anchor their yachts. Awkward!

With Max at Merc and Horner potentially a free agent eventually (though likely he has to buy out his RBR contract to 2030) we’re faced with the delicious prospect of Horner and Hamilton in red versus Max and Toto in grey. Given how these guys obsess over each other, my money would be on Piastri being a double world champ come the end of ‘26.

I’ve written further nonsense here

Christian's tough day

2025-07-11T00:00:00+01:00

We’ve all had bad days. Sometimes the problems are of our own making.

I’ve been thinking about this meeting which took place earlier in the week. I think it probably went something like this.

Hey Christian, thanks for coming in. Did they offer you a fizzy drink? Okay great, let’s jump into it.

We just came off of a conference call with Mercedes lawyers and Max Verstappen’s management and they have triggered an exit clause. I couldn’t hear too well, the signal isn’t great from the harbour in Sardinia. He’ll be leaving at the end of the season. He’s the one with the number 1 on his car, is that right?

Well anyway it seems we had a big release fee in there so that’ll help balance the books. In the mean time you can look at where you’re putting each of your drivers. I’m sure you’ve planned for this eventuality so we just need to stick to that process. Just like your ongoing court case! Oh sorry, yes, superinjunction, I’ll shush. Scratch that from the minutes!

Oh you’re not sure what the plan is now? That’s okay, I was looking over the notes from last year’s general meeting and you had that Australian chap, right? The one with the big grin and somehow got a win in a McLaren. That team seemed pretty useless last time I came to a race!

Red Bull car in the paddock at the Thruxton Historic.

McLaren are the current champions? I thought that was us. Never mind. And we fired the Aussie guy? Seems like we wasted that cash bringing him back but okay. Well who’s next in line then, we’ve still got the Mexican fellow, the one with the big backing?

Ah okay well if he wasn’t doing the job then of course he had to go. Shame to lose the sponsorship but at least we’re not paying his salary now! His contract was up at the end of the year as I recall.

We’re still paying him even though we sacked him? That seems a bit…expensive. Isn’t there a spending cap? We gave him a new contract? To encourage him to do better? I don’t pay people more if they get worse, I get someone else! I’m sure we can learn from this. So who else is on the books? Did you ever try out the blonde guy? You said it was worth us funding his F3 and F2 entries.

Didn’t work out, swapped him for Tsunoda, okay it’s a bit cruel but that makes sense. Hey, it’s like the thing you did with your first wife and the Spice Girl! How is she lately? Only talking through the lawyers? Well that’s all good practice for the rest of the season with Max.

I presume Tsunoda has racked up the points, kept Max honest this year. Sounds like we’ll be alright there then, so long as Adrian Newey builds another of those rocketships! How is Adrian by the way, I didn’t see him at the Monaco dinner. He has gone too?

Christian I’m just going to pop out for a minute, I’ve got to check in with the board. Can we get you another fizzy drink?

Car photo dump, no logic

2025-06-15T00:00:00+01:00

Petrol with Plato

Limited edition Lambo

on the tank course

F4 rivals

Michael Andretti McLaren

Marlborough

Thruxton test day

purple NA

Breakfast club Alfa

NB drifter

tyres

fezza

alpine

big mac

scoob

japanuary

fiat

grubby nissan

concours

triumph

mog

brute

pop

route 66

cortina

rosie

evo

rocket

deployment

jdm

pop

yellow fire

tent

launch

Tingram

it’s on

turbo

torslander

after you

action

yuk

he ain’t heavy

rivals

watcher

battle mr2

relics

venom

beem

robo

spitfire

safari

rx150

lap

tour

doom

vetted

wagon

scimitar

patina

angles

rx monster

minis

mean lean

stanley

rarity

badge

champ

cheek

star time

session

doran

transporter

vip

victory

pressure

chicanery

saxo

warp

apex

peeking

If it saves just one life

2025-05-06T00:00:00+01:00

There’s talk about death and some might say I am insensitive here and if you don’t fancy that then please read something which will make you happy

I’ve heard this phrase come up a few times recently, I think mostly on Radio 4.

If it saves just one life, isn’t it worth doing?

For some reason the presenter didn’t dare give the correct answer to this question:

No it fucking isn’t.

Here’s why.

Everyone has to die.

All of us. Me, you, your accountant, your pet. If it lives, it dies.

What happens when a human person dies in most societies is they establish what the cause was and they write that on a piece of paper and someone has to sign it and then that’s that done.

There are a range of causes which have varying probability across demographics. If you smoke a lot of tobacco, you can reasonably expect that to be mentioned. Otherwise you pretty much get what you get.

Some things are safer than others.

If you’re super into wrestling crocodiles or motorcycle stunts or maybe you’re that guy who sneaks into building sites and climbs cranes then you probably know you’re tempting fate. If you eat a lot of kale and wear sunscreen and read fanfiction all day then there’s less danger there.

In between, there are things we deem to be necessary or important where people take a calculated risk. Firefighters. Train drivers. X-ray technicians. These people do important work which I would imagine comes with a likely reduced lifespan.

Nico Boyce. Car driver. Risk taker.

There are things we all do every day which are statistically more hazardous to life. Walking down stairs. Driving a car. Cooking meat. Taking a shower.

Which of those are you going to quit to marginally increase your lifespan expectation value?

Being riskier is not in itself sufficient justification to ban something.

I think we can all agree that knowing the risk alone isn’t enough information to end the argument. Here are some examples:

Driving is one of the most dangerous things we do day to day, but we live with that (well, mostly we live) because sometimes people and/or things need to be in other places.
Alcohol is super bad for your health, but it is enjoyable and it enables us to tolerate our loved ones and make business deals and it keeps a lot of people employed.
Medical trials can be risky for the participants but the net value of improving medical science justifies this in most people’s minds.

Oh the other hand there are things where banning has won the argument. This is usually because the risk outweighs the value generated. For example, handguns are banned in the UK. Shooting clubs can use rifles, farmers stick to shotguns, we didn’t see the value in keeping handguns following the Dunblane massacre. I would argue we should be looking to ban tobacco on a similar basis.

The two items I heard this “If it saves just one life, isn’t it worth doing?” question come up were relating to younger drivers and to internet filtering. Someone whose son died in a car accident wanted young drivers banned from taking more than one passenger. Someone whose daughter took her own life after diving into some dark corners of the web wanted a whitelisting approach to web access in the UK.

I do understand if you have suffered a recent bereavement you might look to find a crusade.

On the other hand, could we bring in people with a more objective view to temper the impulse to ban things? Perhaps this role in these conversations could have been fulfilled by the journalists of the BBC?

The conclusion I have is that we in Britain are increasingly unwilling to challenge other viewpoints. This is how you end up with people like Farage.

Rational people need to stand up and say “This reasoning is not good and I think your proposal is flawed” and “Let’s see the data and consider the pros and cons” but also call it out when ridiculous arguments are being deployed with the sole intention of dividing people, such as targeting trans people or other cultures.

For a time I worried about speaking up because I was concerned about the risk of upsetting people. Now I think there’s value in being unafraid to be vocal regarding values and rationality.

I’m going to appropriate slogans of irrationalists. Make risk great again. You can have my car key when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Releasing music for drecks

2025-04-22T00:00:00+01:00

some decisions and why I made them

We have made a new album. Listen on Bandcamp, Tidal, Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Music.

The Fighting Mongooses — Instrumental Driving Music for Drecks.

We’ve pretty much used all the toys on this one. There’s some samples and some layers of ambient noise we recorded. I think I play each of the guitars on the rack at some point. There’s some upright bass and plenty of synth and also both physical and software drum machines. Most of the effects are hardware units, right down to the tape simulation and pitch shifting.

There are specific moments which are nods to many of our favourite artists. There are some chords on one track which are a tip of the hat to Mark Lanegan, specifically the Scraps at Midnight record. There’s a song with a rhythm that comes from Brant Bjork and the Operators. A couple of seconds of drums are a wink at Hag Me by the Melvins. Like everything of this type, it’s a stack of things we have learned from other records. HIRS and jpegMafia and 100 Gecs and Mr Oizo and Troy Van Leeuwen’s Enemy showed us the way too.

Guitars.

The title is a salute to the Desert Sessions but with a Cornish flavour. The photo is one I took on a driving holiday around Cumbria after thrashing the old Mazda up that hill on a Forza Horizon 4 mission, so it remembers the old podcast we did in 2020. The lettering hints at a future instalment in this series, which has more straight-up desert rock leanings via Fu Manchu.

There’s two things which were a bit more of a decision this time around. Here are those decisions and why I made them.

Yes, we are using a band name now

Previous releases just said “Nico Boyce” on the cover. I’m okay with the name Nico Boyce because it is who I am and a name I mostly chose. On the other hand, I am building a great reputation as a Zendesk specialist (see Deltastring.com for more on that) and I didn’t want these things colliding so much. It would be a particular problem on Youtube where we have a Deltastring channel now.

My name is Nico.

There’s some talk on the Nico logo here and the Deltastring logo here.

The Fighting Mongooses is a cool team name, as Fry says. We’re big Futurama fans. There’s not a lot more to it.

Also releasing music under my name doesn’t show that it’s a team effort. Rosie shouldn’t be letting me take all the credit!

The Fighting Mongooses.

No, this isn’t on streaming services (yet) okay it is now

I’ll probably put this on most of the streaming services eventually, but I’m going to hold out as long as I can.

Our previous music is on (deep breath) Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Instagram/Facebook, TikTok & other ByteDance stores, YouTube Music, Amazon, Pandora, Deezer, Tidal, iHeartRadio, Claro Música, Saavn, Anghami, KKBox, NetEase, Tencent, MediaNet, Boomplay, Adaptr, Flo, Joox, Kuack Media, Qobuz, Snapchat most of which I have never heard of.

Spotify have stopped paying smaller creators our pennies per month and almost all of these other services have never really played us. Apple and Youtube have contributed a tiny amount but not enough to make it worth the effort right now.

It’s not about the cash, because there isn’t any, but I feel like robbing small new artists to better fund Taylor Swift isn’t something I want to support.

This one might be a Bandcamp exclusive forever but it’s not set in stone. I’m looking at having some nice physical copies made just for vanity.

Go and listen to it and let me know what you think

People are really bad at supporting their friends when they create things. Give this a listen and also do let me know what you’ve created lately! I would enjoy experiencing it.

Prescott, BHC round 1

2025-04-20T00:00:00+01:00

green

gold

blue

orange

red

chrome

black

Top day out.

On the street

2025-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Lancia.

Fisheye and I.

Miata NA.

Chevy.

Volvo.

Lambo.

Fords.

Chevy at Brands.

Granada.

Jeep.

Scoobs.

The F1 thing was embarrassing

2025-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Guys the superbowl was a week ago and people were buzzing. F1 gathered all the teams to the millenium dome to unveil show cars with maybe a couple new minor sponsors.

If this is what F1 is (and it is but it’s not nice to admit that) then honestly I’m going to start trying even harder to kick the habit. I could live with the greediness if it was at least entertaining.

Dakar 25 showed the big dogs their weaknesses

2025-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

In case you missed it, M-Sport turned up at Dakar with a new Ford and some not-so-quiet confidence and established big names Ekstrom and Sainz. Prodrive were positively bragging about the tech in their Dacia and brought Loeb and Al-Attiyah, the statistally greatest ever rally driver and rally-raid driver, along with Gutierrez who is up and coming and basically there in a support role with a mechanic in her co-driver’s seat.

Meanwhile, with no fanfare at all, Toyota machinery dominated the event and the eventual winner was in a privateer Hilux entry. Toyota have developed that car year after year and Team Overdrive driver Al-Rajhi is a Saudi local who navigates the Empty Quarter for fun.

Check out the Dakar channel on youtube and see how it was won.

Bike rebuild

2025-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Grabbed a bargain jump bike and it needed some customisation. Popped on a super narrow and sharp looking Cinelli handlebar, a comfy GT saddle, some sick ODI x Vans grips and DMR pedals. I need to take some proper pics.

Purples.

DJ bike.

Italy snaps

2025-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

Mount Vesuvius.

Is this the minimum viable scooter? I saw some with fewer parts but they looked dumped.

A lane, just about wide enough for two Fiat drivers to exchange paint.

Handsome Suzuki lurking in a hotel entrance.

Garden murder

2025-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

Garden murder.

In the garden.

Laser tag in the woods

2025-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

Trees. Laser tag in the woods.

Mushrooms.

Eastney promenade

2025-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Eastney.

Enter.

Prom.

Space.

Mixed snaps - January batch

2025-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

Moon.

Old.

Trees.

Robin.

Bath.

Cycle.

Cremyll.

Scope.

Wall.

Miata.

Sprout.

Bird friends

2025-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

Angry robin.

Feather.

Prey.

Caw.

Gull.

Twit.

Peak.

In and around water

2025-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Wash.

Oar.

Creep.

Splish.

Painting - silly stuff

2025-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Some silly stuff

Victor.

Frug.

fin.

Fast track

2024-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Forget team Max or team Lando. My driver of 2024 has to be Connor Zilisch. Youtube is over there if you need to catch up with this guy.

Jag marketers are the cat's whiskers

2024-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

All they needed to do is make one clumsy and dated video dragging them in to the 21st century and they have suddenly ceased to be the brand of golfists and top gear culture warriors. Okay so John Prescott showed you can spend your life standing up for workers and still enjoy a comfortable commute. But now they have set fire to all that in search of something interesting.

Eddie Irvine told Clive James that Jaguar was the one brand that could find that sexiness of the likes of Ferrari. Maybe at last they have got it right. Regardless, people are talking about Jag in a way that no one has since the second E Type was driven overnight from Birmingham to Geneva. I’m backing it.

Enjoy the interval

2024-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

having a break from big dumb power chords

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut. We can all get happy staying in our comfort zones. I’ve been struggling to write music lately just because I haven’t been trying to do anything beyond the basics.

My son Victor is finding his own way with music at the moment and has developed huge love for those chunky but rich sounds from British indie pop of the ’90s. We’ve had a lot of Radiohead, Blur, Elastica, Supergrass, PJ Harvey and others.

Twang.

I’ve had Brant Bjork and the Operators on repeat in the car (since my Duna CD was found) and found some similarities in the songwriting with Victor’s playlists.

Something you’ll hear in Song 2 or in Connection by Elastica or My Ghettoblaster by Brant Bjork is using that root and fourth interval in place of the so-called powerchord of root and fifth.

This is great with a Rat style distortion and an underbiased fuzz face circuit as it takes on a synth-like quality. The gated signal and square wave tone from the fuzz but with the treble filter of the Rat combine with the slight dissonance of the fourth in the 12 tone equal temperment scale to create a sound similar to the frequency modulation on an 80s analog.

Essentially I’m barring myself from the powerchord and instead aiming to write a series of songs built around showcasing different intervals. I guess time will tell if this helps break out of that rut!

Pimped my bmx

2024-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

Bmx.

Tyre.

Chain.

Park.

Macau F3 GP

2024-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

Macau is crazy but not such a great circuit to actually race, they should reinvent it as a time trial. Nevertheless that was a mighty performance from Ugo, who nailed every restart to confirm what plenty of us have been saying for a while. This kid is the real deal. We were there at Brands Hatch when he won his first car race and now the sky is the limit. Full feature race on the youtube but be prepared to fast forward…

Mac and cheese

2024-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been a McLaren fan since Coulthard joined the Woking squad and as such I have always considered Ferraris to be tacky and poorly assembled and the Scuderia to be a bunch of cry babies leaning on their history to try and get preferential treatment. Ferrari are the Manchester United of F1, the idiot’s choice, the team who are more likely to license their logo for keyrings and pencil sharpeners than string a series of good performances together.

But I’ve been looking over the more affordable end of the silly cars on Autotrader lately and there’s no way I would spend money on a Mac when you put them up against the equivalent Ferrari (or even Aston or Lambo to be honest) even if I could make sense of their model lineup.

I don’t know what’s a 575 or a 620 or an Artura (why does that one get a name?) and honestly I don’t care. They have all the personality (from an onlooker’s perspective) of a household appliance and I would rather walk.

Criticise this!

2024-10-17T00:00:00+01:00

or perhaps Learn to Shut Up

Everyone fancies themself as a critic. Everyone who can’t do a thing but reckons if they did do it then it would be better than you could do it. Music, film-making, art, whatever.

Art. Load of old rubbish.

It’s the premise of half the internet now. Imdb or Yelp or Glassdoor or wherever you go. What do you think? Feel important, share your feelings.

Time was you could go to YouTube to learn how to do something. You could change your oil filter or wire a plug or tie a bow tie or write an application in Fortran. Now it’s wall to wall feelings and opinions. Skills are so gauche. Have a shout about something instead.

Everyone is in on it. I open the Guardian to find something to get angry at and I find that in amongst the unchallenged opinions of TERFs or crude justifications for the latest human rights violation of an ally, the editors are begging me personally to have feelings about yesterday’s celebrity death or big screen comic book adaptation. Come on, I’m busy. Ask Adrian Chiles.

Speaking of Adrian Chiles, there’s a great genre of feelings on the internet where ignorance is seen as a kind of virtuous purity. You’ve probably seen them. Person new to X picks their favourite tool for X. I don’t want the headphones someone who doesn’t like music prefers. They don’t know what they are talking about. Japanese chefs choose the best Cornish pasty. Okay great.

This phenomenon is literally the premise of Emily in Paris. Knowing nothing is a superpower, not a liability. Education is holding you back. In the land of the idiots, the person with one idea is king.

Did you even watch the new Joker film if you haven’t told someone else they are stupid for liking it or hating it or not really caring about it? Everything is “underrated” or “overrated” which is just some guy saying “I like this” or “I don’t like this” but with a bonus slice of “other people are wrong” except that it’s something pointless anyway like Call of Duty or Metallica or a Porsche.

Totally overrated probably.

Let’s be honest. There’s a segment of the population who have never been told that their opinions aren’t interesting. They are the people who have never considered it but if asked would say that they are well above average at both driving and sex.

It’s the premise of the modern world. It’s Simon Cowell or it’s Top Gear or it’s Pitchfork or it’s Roger Ebert. Who wants to waste time creating anything real when you can come up with a witty way to put down someone else’s effort?

It’s the straight white male dream. The zero effort route to validation. Your hate itself is your true value. Knowing anything was always going to be a waste of time. When that guy on Reddit mentions Gamestop again you’ll be the one who gets a Lambo.

Need a target for your hate? Try something that isn’t aimed at you. Laugh at the obvious deficiencies of the latest pop singer or teen drama. The lazier the better. You know what I hate? That “brat” green colour.

Go and do something. Put it out there or keep it in your bedroom. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll pretend I don’t hate it. You can shut up.

Lydden Hill snaps

2024-10-15T00:00:00+01:00

Pack scrap.

Doran.

Bennett.

Crosscar.

Ford.

Launch.

Roof.

The fireworks were way better than most displays where they are the main event. Of course at Lydden it’s all about the horsepower. Top class RX cars will beat an F1 car off the line up to about 100mph. They can race on any surface and take jumps you wouldn’t believe possible. The UK is the birthplace of rallycross and it’s a great format for families and people new to motorsport. Get to Lydden Hill when you can. Also make sure you get some of that mayo from the paddock cafe when you’re there. Watch the final on the youtube

E30 M25 - birthday present

2024-09-01T00:00:00+01:00

Got myself a birthday present.

Hired a trailer.

At Fleet, paying our respects to Scott Mills.

BMW at home.

Victor gets comfortable.

Plenty of work needed to get it all ready for action but isn’t it a great piece of kit?

Rethinking product pricing.

2024-08-27T00:00:00+01:00

or Why traditional SaaS pricing models fail and what I’m going to do about it

Selling stuff is super hard. You need people to take a punt on what you’ve made, usually by lowering the sense of risk for them. You need their feedback to improve your design and also to advocate for your item.

But then you need to make some actual cash so you hike the prices and don’t worry about letting your early advocates churn because new customers will make up for it. It’s rough but it’s the system we’ve got.

Well I’m going to do something new.

Firstly, the product

It’ll be announced soon over at Deltastring.com but basically further to the book launch will be some software bringing additional capability to your Zendesk admin life. If you work in the Zendesk world, keep an eye out, but if you don’t, the answer is basically “business software” okay?

The Zendesk Cookbook, coming soon from Nico

Let’s not get bogged down in the detail there for now.

Alrighty what is the magic?

You’ve probably got a bunch of subscription direct debits for various things. I’ve got Tidal, Disney, Xbox, a couple others. Isn’t it exhausting each month to see which one has hiked the price this time? It doesn’t feel fair.

In the world of business applications, just ten months after you finally get that purchase approved to get the tool you’ve been needing, you have to haggle again with the provider. Their costs have increased, they have new features. Great, but your budget doesn’t automatically grow! You might have to drop the thing you are now used to using. Why?

At the same time, the software company providing the tool have to remember to come back ten months after each deal is done so that they can try and squeeze more cash out of customers. A reliably consistent percentage of the time the customer will cancel and this will feel bad for everyone. Also someone has to pay for the weeks of work in haggling the new contract and all this nonsense.

I’m not really interested in doing any of that.

Here’s how it’s going to work. I’m going to put my software on sale. It’s a subscription, because it will need to be updated regularly. Paying a subscription means I can commit to doing that.

It’s going to go on sale at a simply crazy £1 per month, then the price increases by £1 for every new subscriber. The hundredth buyer will pay £100 per month. If there’s a thousand, they will pay £1000 per month for the tool.

As long as your subscription remains active, your price will never change.

There isn’t enough value placed on loyalty in this world. You stick with me and I’ll stick with you. I don’t want to waste time, money, energy, and goodwill by haggling with my customers every year.

The early purchasers may have to deal with a product which isn’t fully realised. It’ll be missing features they would want. It’s not going to be perfect version one. They will be the people to help me make this the best it can be. They deserve reward for that.

Here are some questions and answers

If you have a question which isn’t answered here you can email me and I’ll get back to you and update this page.

Won’t this eventually price out any sales?

It sure will. I’m not looking to be Amazon where everyone has an account. I’d rather support a sensible number of users than let it grow unchecked. Of course, I’m not looking to deny anyone who wants this tool regardless of cost.

What if some competitor goes crazy and buys all the early subscriptions and then cancels it and then the price is too expensive for other buyers?

I’m not in any way tied in to doing this. I’ll just take their money and then reset the pricing.

Could someone skip a month and keep the same pricing?

Nope, every price is a one time deal. I need reliable and predictable income! I have a family.

Will you be doing free trials? This sounds interesting but we’d need a month to evaluate.

No. You can buy a month. If you can’t buy a month to try it out then you were never going to be able to raise the budget to pay for the tool in the first place. Free trials are bad for everyone. Plus, you get the price earlier, therefore cheaper.

Enough already, show me the thing

Be patient!

Meanwhile, in ancient Rome

2024-08-18T00:00:00+01:00

We went to Pompeii and it was a lot.

Pompeii and Vesuvius

My partner and I are both reformed history geeks. We’re not so occupied with the past these days but I think either of us would have said that we were pretty knowledgable on Pompeii for people who hadn’t been there in person. We’d know to look in the hortus if we couldn’t find Caecilius.

Pompeii is properly crazy though.

Pompeii is super big

I don’t think we were ready for the scale of the area you can walk around. It’s probably the size of your local small town, except that when you are there you probably don’t look in everyone’s house, each shop, the churches, whatever they have there. With Pompeii, you do explore in that way so it is a big old site.

This means it breaks through the buffers in your head saying it’s an open air museum or recreation or something. It just is a Roman town where people were busy doing their Roman stuff.

Life in the area basically hasn’t changed

There are deep gashes in the cobbles from where cart wheels repeatedly dug in to the surface as traders rushed around. Get a taxi at the local airport and see how that ride goes.

Excavations have revealed seventy fast food joints. Big stone counters with clay pots of local fish and veg and such. Head into Naples and walk along Via Foria and see how far you can get without buying a snack.

The Romans loved drawing dicks everywhere. Dicks are funny and stupid. This is still true today.

The whole volcano thing

Pompeii isn’t as close to Vesuvius as I thought. Really a lot of people live much closer now, and the same was true in AD79. It’s big and imposing but probably if you live there you don’t stare at it so much.

That there Vesuvius

It’s pretty hefty though. The crater is bigger than the quarry we used to sneak into back in Cornwall. Also it starts at basically the sea, so you get the full effect of the height. If you go to Scafell then you’re probably already starting most of the way up.

Prescott hillclimb - classic day out

2024-08-15T00:00:00+01:00

We went to Prescott (which is the Bugatti Owners Club place in Gloucestershire) for the British Hillclimb Championship which is all on the youtube if you want to see it in a video format here

We looked like this

This is us.

Here are some of the cars:

Can you spot which were taken with the Nikon D3300 and which were taken with the Fujifilm X-H2?

It was one of the best motorsport events I’ve been to, a really great day out. Looking forward to next year.

Naples car culture

2024-07-20T00:00:00+01:00

Naples had a weird car thing going on. I loved seeing the Lancia and Dacia stuff that never made it to the UK and the splutter of air cooled Fiats is pleasing to me.

In Naples you leave your door open and your handbrake off. If someone is determined to enter or move your car, just let them.

I’ve got to get me something like this.

In Bloom (or maybe Come As You Are)

2024-05-28T00:00:00+01:00

I am not much of a gardener. Sometimes I will get out there and do some hacking and chopping and digging and pruning, but only for theraputic reasons. It feels nice to me when I can impress my will upon the hectic growth.

Nevertheless if I just left it to do what it wanted then the landlord and neighbours would be bothered by this. I feel like the garden and I have this unstable equilibrium where we gently push against each other until a reaction is provoked.

My ideal garden

I am no Capability Brown, as you are gathering. For me the ideal garden has sufficient space for me to do my things but also is low effort, in keeping with the location, encouraging to the local animals. Here we have kites, a kestral, barn and tawny owls, squirrels, muntjac and roe deer. Plenty of hares and rabbits come by, as well as the odd weasel or stoat (I don’t know the differences) and really a lot of butterflies and birds.

A beetle in the garden.

It’s also nice to have something useful in the garden. I do wish we had a bay tree, but we’re well equipped for chives and some other basic edible leaves. There’s an apple tree too, so we have nice cox apples annually.

A flower. I don’t really know about flowers.

A grassy lawn framed by neat beds is really the antithesis of fun in my mind. While it is useful to have some green space for outdoor activities, I like a much more diverse setting.

The garden we have

Since this is a temporary home for us, with maybe another six months or year before we vacate, I’ve not made a huge effort to transform the space. There are plenty of plants that I would rip straight out if I knew I would be here in the summer of 2025, but as it stands I can live with them for now.

Another flower. These are all straight-off-the-camera crops.

Apparently these roses are ornamental types grafted onto a hardier rose variety. This, I am told, means you get a fancy flower but without all the care needed. This makes sense since I have provided zero care.

Some of these plants seem like odd decisions. There’s a row of daffodils that came up along a path that leads to an old shed. They lasted a few days and sure made looking for the strimmer seem luxurious.

I don’t know what this is, but it looks like the kind of flower they print on a dress in M&S.

All this is of course just an excuse to show you some photos I took. Do you like flowers? I don’t know whether it is worth trying to incorporate their shapes and colours into my art, which can be somewhat geometric.

I am a fan of the artwork of Takeshi Kitano as showcased in the Hana-Bi film where specific flowers were reimagined. They are also interesting from the perspective of being the sex organs of the plant. My art primarily examines the role of technology in society, so I don’t know where this fits. Perhaps some day gardening will lead to inspiration.

One last flower. I don’t encourage people to visit, so these are mostly just for me.

Now to go and prune these blooms.

Applying logic and maths in Monte Carlo. When to pit at the Monaco Grand Prix?

2024-05-26T00:00:00+01:00

Formula One is a sport made almost entirely of maths, but the commentators rarely use the full toolkit of logic while talking viewers through the races. Maybe they think it won’t be exciting to examine the competition in this way? Regardless, let’s throw some logic at today’s grand prix and see what bounces back.

Max Verstappen’s Red Bull car, photo from my own archive.

If you haven’t seen the 2024 Monaco Grand Prix but you’re planning to catch up, do that and then come back to this article.

Background to the 2024 Monaco Grand Prix

As tradition dictates, it’s the last Sunday in May and I’ve just watched the Monaco Grand Prix and I’m having a bite before the Indy 500, but mostly I’m chewing over the difference between the expectations of the Sky F1 commentators and the decisions of the team strategists.

No team is anywhere near challenging Max Verstappen and Red Bull in the points, but Monaco is a very historic race and one where a lot of important sponsorship deals are done. A win at Monaco is particularly prized by the more established teams, Ferrari and McLaren.

Monaco is a circuit where it is notoriously difficult to overtake, in fact virtually impossible in 2024. Ferrari and their polesitter driver Leclerc are still seeking redemption for the 2021 race.

What was happening?

Let’s jump to around halfway through the race. Here was the order (of the top seven, cars behind these are not relevant to this article)

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari
Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Carlos Sainz Jr, Ferrari
Lando Norris, McLaren
George Russell, Mercedes
Max Verstappen, Red Bull
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes

Current F1 rules require each car to use two different types of tyre in a dry race. The first four of these started on the medium tyre and the other three took the hard tyre for the start, but a first lap incident meant that they were all able to change their tyres. Therefore they all took the opposite choice and none have any mandatory pit stops for the remainder of the race. The Ferrari and McLaren cars are now on the durable but slower hard tyres and the Mercedes and Red Bull cars are on the grippier medium tyres.

You can imagine that Russell, Verstappen, and Hamilton are all now becoming concerned about the remaining lifespan of their tyres, while those ahead are more worried that they could be vulnerable to a car on quicker rubber in the event of a caution period.

Leclerc was trying to slow the pace of the race for the frontrunners. George Russell was also focusing on extending the life of his tyres through keeping his corner speeds down. A substantial gap had developed behind Lewis Hamilton.

Lewis stops, does Max?

Lewis Hamilton was called to the pits and would change to hard tyres, I think the same set that he had used for the first lap. There was a 45 second gap behind, so there was no risk of losing a position.

Max Verstappen followed this with a stop on the next lap. He emerged ahead of Lewis Hamilton but within sight of the Mercedes driver. Lewis felt that he should have been told that there could be an opportunity to pass Max, saying so over the team radio, and the Sky commentators agreed.

Benetton F1 car, a B190 I think. I snapped this at the Thruxton Historic. I didn’t have any more relevant photos I owned to hand.

Maths tells us that this is just not the case though. Lewis Hamilton had a a small gap between himself and Max before the stops, about four seconds, which would have been too much to overcome in one lap without teammate George Russell deliberately slowing Max Verstappen on the lap between.

But that doesn’t matter, because remember Max Verstappen (and indeed all of the drivers) did not need to stop. If Lewis Hamilton managed a fast enough lap time (or Max Verstappen was sufficiently slowed) then the Red Bull team would just have decided to stay on track and make the best of the tyres Max had. Lewis taking new tyres was a no-brainer because there was no substantial risk of losing the position either way, also there was no likely scenario of improving under normal circumstances, so they might as well make their life easier en route to that 7th place finish.

The strategy team at Red Bull Racing had made the same calculation. There was no probable route to an improved position, but no likely consequence for taking new tyres at this point, so they did so.

Sorry Lewis Hamilton, sorry Sky F1, but in this case you were incorrect.

Did Lewis cause problems for George?

A lap later, George Russell did not stop and take new tyres. Max Verstappen was a lot faster on his new tyres and had been very close to George beforehand. He quickly reduced the deficit to the extent that George Russell did not have the free pit stop option. I shouted at the television that this proved my point, but David Croft and Martin Brundle couldn’t hear me.

Verstappen and Hamilton continued to put decent times in (at least compared to the rest of the field) and soon Russell was coming under some pressure from Max Verstappen. It was starting to look like the actions of Hamilton’s crew had adversely affected his teammate, who would now have to continue on the worn-out medium tyres until the chequered flag while the World Champion looks for an opportunity to muscle through.

Could Mercedes have planned for this? There were two options. Either they needed to prevent the Verstappen pit stop or they needed to enable one for George Russell.

The way to prevent Max having the option of a stop was to ensure the space between George and Lewis was minimised at all times. Red Bull are fast and consistent with tyre changes but they aren’t looking to risk throwing away points for no reason. Lewis needed to speed up on his in and out laps and George needed to hold up Max as far as possible on those same two laps.

It is definitely plausible that Lewis Hamilton could have pushed harder (he did say so!) and I’m sure George Russell could have gone slower without risking a rash move from Max Verstappen. Therefore Lewis actually should have been told to push (perhaps even telling him there was a chance to beat Max, even though there was not) just to protect his teammate.

In any case, it made no difference to the eventual result.

To enable a stop for George Russell, he would have needed to gain time relative to Max Verstappen over the three laps in question. If the timing showed 21-22 seconds gap by the time George Russell reached the Piscine (swimming pool) section on the lap following Max Verstappen’s stop then that would have done the job. This was never likely to be the case unless Red Bull made a mistake with the tyre change, with no way for Mercedes to show Verstappen.

Okay so what about the lead four?

It may at this point in the article be evident that the Indy 500 has been delayed and the curry hasn’t yet arrived and I had more time than I expected to write this article.

The front four were pretty much nose to tail for lap after lap. On the Sky coverage, ex racers Anthony Davidson and Martin Brundle agreed that the Ferrari and McLaren teams would need to make pitstops themselves. This made no sense, and I’m surprised that everyone couldn’t see that.

Remember that there’s really no way to pass a racer at Monaco if they don’t make a major error. In 2018, Daniel Ricciardo won the Monaco Grand Prix despite the failure of his engine’s hybrid system and a faltering gearbox with two shattered cogs. I realise this must sound insane to people who don’t watch F1. Be assured that you are completely right.

Lando Norris, in fourth, would have nothing to gain by taking fresh tyres unless he knew in advance that the cars ahead of him would also stop. He would also need a gap of at least 21 seconds behind him to George Russell to be assured of retaining his position. I don’t think he ever quite had sufficient gap and there was no way Ferrari would surrender track position even if they were down to the rims.

This is not how Monaco went today.

If the gap had developed then it seems reasonable to assume that McLaren would take the precaution of mounting fresh Pirellis on the car of Norris. This would not have triggered the same chain reaction we saw with Verstappen responding to Hamilton, because the four leaders were always so close together and new tyres would have been faster. Even if Norris built the space behind to take fresh tyres, Sainz would always have stayed out to maintain track position. There was never a chance of a positive outcome.

Even if the Norris crew could see the future and predict a safety car (though there wasn’t one) then Ferrari could always beat McLaren by just doing nothing and staying ahead. In fact, even the Singapore 2008 scenario wasn’t possible today.

Brundle and Davidson focused on the fact that stopping earlier would benefit Norris if all of the lead pack pitted (or at least one of the Ferraris) but this required McLaren to be sure that Ferrari would decide to stop for tyres. Instead, it was obvious that they would not decide to do that. The proposed strategy only wins in the scenario where you already know your opponent’s next move.

Alright, so what is your point?

I don’t think Davidson and Brundle have any interest in misleading viewers, in trying to create tension where there really isn’t any. Martin Brundle has always been a straight-shooter as a broadcaster. He had for years warned about the specific danger of the scenario which led to the death of Jules Bianchi, for example. Davidson also has nothing to gain from any kind of chicanery.

Bernie Collins has been a part of the Sky team at some races recently. Bernie is a strategy engineer with F1 experience, who brings a good dose of sense to the broadcast. I definitely notice the difference when she isn’t available to bring her insights.

Monaco is always an impressive spectacle. There’s nowhere else you can see cars this fast competing around such tight streets. Don’t tune in to the Monaco Grand Prix in future years expecting to see plenty of wheel to wheel action and don’t assume that the commentators know what they are talking about!

Where did the Nico logo design originate?

2024-05-25T00:00:00+01:00

I put together a logo of my name soon after I chose my name itself. It looks like this:

This is my logo thing.

This is how I put it together.

Nico Rosberg

Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg made huge waves en route to Formula One and were very exciting junior drivers at the point where I was first watching the lower rungs of the single-seater ladder. Rosberg was one of the influences on my choice of name and so I did look to him for ideas for a design. I wanted to reference my appreciation for his achievements but with an individual twist.

You can see Nico Rosberg’s logo on the cockpit of this Airbus, replicating his helmet design. The N and I are not connected, and the O has a break in it mirroring the C, but the proportions and concept are similar.

Nico Rosberg’s Williams era helmet design, on an Airbus.

This wasn’t actually the first thing I considered for my own design, but it’s the first thing F1 fans will spot.

Sony Vaio

I primarily took inspiration from the Sony Vaio logo. There are plenty of good articles discussing this design, such as here. Essentially, consider the VA as a waveform representing analogue signals and the IO representing binary code and therefore digital signals.

VAIO P series, Yoggy from Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan, CC BY 2.0

This resonated with my own background, as a one-time photonics student turned musician, or as an artist and engineer.

The geometry

I created the original sketch in a maths education package called Cabri-Géomètre. The O and C were simply overlapping circles (by the full width of the character at the intersection) with the gap in the C character the circumference length of the difference in radius between the inner and outer edges.

The width of the N was four times the width of each stroke, i.e. the white space between left and right leg of the N was double the stroke. Originally the I was the same distance on from there (and therefore the curve linking the N and I matched the top of the N) but this looked super weird so I halved it.

Everything looked a bit precise and weird, so I took a screenshot at low resolution, upped the contrast, smoothed the resulting image, then used an online SVG converter. Then there’s a few little tweaks directly in the resulting XML, notably the radius of the I dot circle (it is a tad larger) and the shape of the top end of the C.

Explanation

The first two characters, N and I, are linked to create a waveform, representitive of analogue audio signals. The dotted i form represents a photon, and so draws the link to photonics and optics and the wider science of light and colour. Combined, they illustrate the particle-wave duality and also the dual aspects of my output.

My work combines science, software, engineering, maths, and code, but also the subjective nature of creation, the necessarily analogue processes of performing in sound and colour. After that there is the return to digital and the metaphorical waveform collapse as the sensor resolves the information into bits and bytes.

The second characters continue the theme, as the C and O combine to make an infinity symbol which is broken. Infinity represents my background in science and maths once again but also the scope of the art world. The shape itself is reminiscent of race circuits and loci showing the mechanical motion of wheels.