For those of you who do not know what an Ariel Atom2 is (no, it is NOT a brand of washing powder), then you should check out the video clip below. The Atom2 is perhaps one of the most insanely fun cars ever built. It is built by a small company (7 employees) somewhere in the villages of England. The engineering operations apparently run out of a barn on some farm.

 

Fellow my-KARTers and Tail Happy Racing teammates Yusnee, Azlan and I managed to get some invitations to the Perdana Suite for round 5 of the A1 GP at Sepang on 20 November 2005.

I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Datuk Mokhzani Mahathir and SIC for extending the invitation to us. We thoroughly enjoyed the hospitality and more importantly the race.

And what an excellent race it was. Again, Team Malaysia demonstrated that they had the potential to be up there with the best by finishing 8th and 5th in the sprint and feature races, respectively. With this consistent finish, Malaysia is now joint 6th in the A1 GP championship after 5 rounds.

 

Today is the start of the Malaysian A1GP weekend at Sepang.

Malaysia will be Round 5 of the 12 round "winter" racing series - the Racing World Cup of Nations.

It is quite a unique concept which harks back to the the pre-war Grands Prix series (precursor to F1) where (usually European) nations would have an entry with their own manufacturers to battle each other in the premier racing series. Those days, the teams would run in national colours - although those colours have somewhat changed in the modern day A1GP series (eg - Italy was red in the early days and now blue - the azzuris; and Germany was silver, but now follows their national football team colours).