Full Throttle

Only because I’m having trouble squeezing out anything but a couple paras at a time, and not tossing up something brings on withdrawal symptoms, below are a few of the stories that have caught my eye in the last few hours.

With Monaco in full swing this weekend it’s hardly surprising the Illuminati, royalty, both real and imagined, plus various and sundry other overly self-important personages are gracing the paddock.

Did I mention out of work race drivers?

Jacques Villeneuve has made his first appearance in the paddock and conducted a quick Q & A session with Speed TV. There’s not much there, mostly boilerplate stuff, but one answer caught my eye.

Q: What do you think of this year with your old team and your old team mate doing all the winning?

JV: ‘It’s good to see that the team I built up is now winning, because at the time I was highly criticized for building up the team and racing for it. And nobody thought it would ever succeed.’

The team he “built up?” What did I tell you, the paddock would fill-up with overly self-important personages.

Villeneuve spent five years with BAR with zero poles, zero wins with a best points placing of 7th. (2000-01) His final two years saw finishes of 12th and 16th in the championship table.

I don’t think “built up” means what Jacques thinks it does.

Le Affair Mayfield has hit Indianapolis, Associated Press made the rounds of Indy asking IRL drivers about that series’ drug testing program.

I can’t recall anyone from the IRL getting busted under their program that is similar to NASCAR’ as it requires random testing.

Nothing really eye popping in the story except Graham Rahal’s comments.

“We don’t get tested nearly that often,” said Rahal, one of the up-and-coming stars in the series. “I don’t think it would be a bad thing to do more testing. I’m kind of curious to see if anybody is messing around.”

Rahal stressed that he doesn’t think he races against anyone who is abusing drugs, but he wasn’t so kind with his assessment of NASCAR.

“Open-wheel racing has always been a more clean-cut sport than NASCAR or any of the other sports, really,” Rahal said. “I’ll bet there’s more NASCAR drivers doing it . . . but they just don’t want to say who they are.”

Bobby Rahal, it might be time to take sonny-boy aside and teach him unsubstantiated, biased horse-hockey just doesn’t fly.

Back to Monaco for one final thought.

The global recession has hit the Micro-State.

No one has purchased the 100-year-old bottle of Remy Martin Louis VIII “Black Pearl” - one of only 358 in the world - on sale at the “Le Bar Americain”

Poor babies