Sniff Petrol

Now whilst some websites will attempt to make money by plugging other people’s shoddy products, rest assured that Sniff Petrol will not entertain such tawdry behaviour. No, this website will only plug our own shoddy products, most of which make no money whatsoever. Except for the books.

Ah yes, and speaking of which, there’s a new book coming out by The Bloke Who Does This Website. It’s a follow up to last year’s My Dad Had One Of Those (which we somehow completely forgot to mention on this site) and is called, rather brilliantly, My Dad Wished He Had One Of Those. It’s basically a run down of the really cool cars your old dad dreamt about in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, featuring lots of ace period photos and some silly text about each one. The book that will come to be known as MDWHHOOT by almost no one will be published on 29 May but if you’re feeling both excitable and keen to do me out of a few pence of royalties, you can pre-order a copy and save a few quid by visiting amazon.co.uk now.

Secondly, although Sniff Petrol has gone back to monthly issues, please remember that the excellent Gareth Jones On Speed podcast (featuring lots of irritating butting in from an often quite squiffy Sniff Petrol) still comes up with fresh material every 10 days or so. Now that’s a proper work ethic for you. Click upon these words to fill your ears with car-based pleasure.

Thirdly, Sniff Petrol now has an official Facebook group. I don’t know why this is good, it just seemed like a clever idea last weekend. If you become a member you’ll get a message telling you there’s a new issue up and if I can get round to it I might post up some exclusive pictures and stuff that have never made it onto the site proper. Or I might forget. Who knows. Take your chances on that one by joining up at the click of this orange text.

Oh yea, and finally… Sniff Petrol doesn’t normally get involved in politics but we ought to mention that if you live in London please don’t forget to vote in the Mayoral elections on 1 May. We don’t care who you vote for, just for God’s sake get that car-hating cat-voiced twat out of office.

Oh dear God, he’s joined some sort of weird colour-matched pop combo.

(Don’t worry, he hasn’t really formed a hideous Germanic version of Steps to mount a Ross Brawn engineered assault on Eurovision. This photo is actually from three years ago and shows him finishing a beach volleyball match in Australia. Hang on a minute, that’s just as SODDING WEIRD. And why are they wearing microphones? No one wants to hear Barrichello grunting like a sex pest.)

Thanks to Joey Daytona for the picture

CAR magazine launched its revamped website this week, and very smart it is too. Among the exciting new features is a panel which shows, in a slightly arty way, the most popular searches made by visitors to the site. Now clearly this is a new thing so someone at CAR had set the ball rolling by filling the space with the names of some interesting, expensive cars, the kind that a marketing nobber might say were appealing to the dynamic, affluent, ABC1 audience he was looking for. Unfortunately, precisely because this is a new thing, it wouldn’t take too many actual searches to change the popularity listing…

Yeeees, Vanquishes, TTs, all the kind of premium cars an upscale magazine would look for to create the right impression for its websi… hang on a sec… Daihatsu Applause? Sao Penza? Toyota Picnic? Someone’s filling the popular searches board with rubbish cars from the 1980s and ’90s! Either that or CAR’s readers are distinctly less affluent and considerably more mental then anyone might have thought. Still, this sub-minicab nonsense will go away in a second…

… and oh dear God look what’s replaced it. Unless CAR online really does aim to be a valuable source of information about ‘TWATS’ and ‘bum gravy’. In which case, EMAP must be relieved to have got out while the going was good. Still, this is just a momentary glitch. Refresh the page and all will be well…

…although when I said ‘well’ what I actually meant was ‘worse’. In fact the popular searches feature seems to be spinning out of control. Of course, it’s always a possibility that CAR readers really do want less on Lamborghinis and a lot more excellent features about ‘Dame Thora Hird’, ‘anal leakage’ and ‘prostitutes in the Ipswich area’. In which case, I wouldn’t want to work on their road test desk.

Suffice to say, the CAR online ‘most searched’ section has now been removed.

(It seems to be a sort of Belgian fruit juice by the way. Sniff Petrol once bought some French lemonade called Pschit leading us to believe that in general the French language is a cruel mistress when it comes to naming soft drinks)

Uh-oh, it’s Michael Schumacher again, a man whose motto seems to be “I’ll do it! Now what is it?”

This time he’s promoting an industry forever linked to the heady world of Formula 1. Yes, it’s Swiss agriculture.

With thanks to Nic Pini.

We may now be approaching a point where every single object in Spain bears a likeness of Fernando Alonso. Good news for his bank balance, bad news for his integrity and possibly quite tricky for the assiduous church goer who liked the Virgin Mary the way it was, without sideburns.

This week, the Fernando Alonso credit card. Oh dear. Sniff Petrol doesn’t speak Spanish but we’re guessing the slogan is something like, ‘Because you need the money, even if he doesn’t’.

Thanks to Alberto Martínez Uribe for this one.
If you want horrible proof that this, like all these F1 driver promo embarrassments, is not just some Photoshop-based jape, have a look here.

According to BBC News online, he’s now out in Dubai working in an ice bar. Ironically not a job you could give to Kimi ‘The Ice Man’ Raikkonen. Not unless you wanted to come back to find all your stock had been guzzled.

Thanks to Rob A for this one.

This is what Jon Stewart would call ‘a moment of zen‘

STOP PRESS: The actual footage is here. You’ll have to spool forward to about the 2:30 mark. He’s quite the TV presenter isn’t he?