28/09/2024
In March of 2024, in the 3rd race of the season, the reigning world champion, Max Verstappen, was forced to retire from Australian Grand Prix with a brake failure, which had set one of his wheels on fire.
It was his first retirement in 2 years, and a painful one as it stopped his run of ten consecutive wins.
The exact cause was not revealed beyond that it was likely an error with the car's setup or that one of the screws wasn't fastened properly.
Formula 1 is the pinnacle of motorsport racing, with each team boasting a budget of up to $135 million per year to race a car for 2 hours once a fortnight.
Those cars are built by the best motoring engineers on the planet, from cutting edge materials, maintained by the best mechanics and driven by the best drivers.
🔴 And yet, every now and then, they suffer catastrophic failures.
Brakes lock up, engines blow up, pieces fall off and even the smartest people make errors. However rarely, it does happen.
So, when I hear two-bit nobodies questioning how one of the world's best subway systems is being run, because it suffered its first really major failure in 37 years, I just find it hard to contain my fury about this mind-boggling stupidity coupled with the entitlement to whine and run down the people who have spent years making it as great as it is.
We don't yet know exactly what caused the series of problems on East-West Line, resulting in the train being dragged along, damaging pieces of track equipment. Whether it was a mechanical fault, a gap in the process or human error.
Yes, perhaps someone made a mistake, just like when Felipe Massa, Ferrari F1 championship contender in 2008, was released from the pits a fraction of a second too early during the Singapore GP, ripping the fuel hose out, what forced him to retire from the race, eventually costing him the trophy.
One of the sport's greatest teams with a mountain of money and the best people made the tiniest of errors which condemned their race effort and their driver's title chances.
This is how little it takes for things to go very bad, regardless of money and skill. Everybody fails sometimes, and sometimes these failures are really painful.
But it doesn't negate everything they had achieved thus far, nor does it render future success impossible. It's just a stumble, nothing else. Move on.
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