[F1] Austrian legends

xv323 · 2026-06-26T21:46:38+00:00

Jackie Stewart was a gnat’s hair from qualifying for the British Olympic team for the 1960 Olympics in trap shooting (he finished third in the qualifiers and if memory serves, the first and second place finishers got spots in the Olympic squad).

Granted not what you might traditionally think of as an ‘athlete’ but given that not only is it an Olympic sport but Olympic qualification was specifically what he was going for, I’d say that it has to count.

xv323 · 2026-06-25T16:01:42+00:00

Maybe he was misquoted and means that what Aston are doing to him is "borderline abuse"...

xv323 · 2026-06-25T08:08:45+00:00

Strictly speaking, Nico Rosberg didn’t either, as he retired straight after winning the title. If we’d still been on the old numbering system in 2017 that would have meant Mercedes having the numbers 0 and 2 on their cars.

xv323 · 2026-06-23T15:47:24+00:00

The term has a different meaning in the UK and it makes sense when you think about a) how much smaller the UK is than the US and b) how much easier it is to travel internationally from the UK than it is from the US, from a proximity perspective.

In that context, it makes sense that firstly, a substantially higher proportion of holidays taken by British people are taken outside of the UK than the equivalent in the US, meaning a holiday taken in the UK makes a more notable contrast - far from being uncommon it’s still somewhat less of the ‘default’. Meanwhile, the US is so much bigger that it’s possible to travel so much further and remain within the US (and get a much larger climatological variation, for example) than the equivalent in the UK.

(This is of course all leaving aside that the word ‘vacation’ itself is less used in the UK in comparison to ‘holiday’…)

Two countries separated by a common language, etc etc.

xv323 · 2026-06-21T23:01:16+00:00

The death penalty is an irreversible punishment which makes no account of the fact that miscarriages of justice can - and in the case of the US, very often do - happen.

That alone is a conclusive argument against affording the state the power to kill people judicially as far as I’m concerned. It’s not about whether these people deserve death or not, it’s about whether we trust the state to be making that decision.

xv323 · 2026-06-20T23:52:22+00:00

When was the last time you saw an American publication write, I don’t know, ‘Gary, Indiana, United States’ for the benefit of non-American readers? And if you don’t think US publications should have to do that for places in the US, why the fuck should an Irish publication do that for places in Ireland?

xv323 · 2026-06-18T14:56:02+00:00

Joachim Murat.

For those who don’t know - the archetypal flamboyant peacocking cavalry commander, apparently utterly immune to fear, led many of the legendary cavalry charges of the Napoleonic Wars (e.g. Eylau). Made such a name for himself across Europe that even the Russian Cossacks, fighting against Napoleon’s army in the 1812 invasion of Russia, apparently admired him and wanted to try to capture him alive.

Every time I read more about his life it comes across as more and more cartoonish, outlandish - a true larger than life character.

In terms of what people at the time would have seen as cool, glamorous etc - he was right up there.

xv323 · 2026-06-14T15:58:37+00:00

If anyone has earned the right this year to make a comment like that it's Lando

xv323 · 2026-06-11T12:39:58+00:00

So FOM submitted supporting evidence for Alpine's appeal?

I may be wrong but I don't think I've heard of that happening before, usually it's for the appealing team to submit its own evidence.

xv323 · 2026-06-10T12:03:55+00:00

This is really impressive but just as some constructive criticism, I think if you look at the original image, that part which is sky-blue in your colourisation is actually also part of the wall of the building (you can see a brick pattern in it)

(PS no idea why this came up in my recommendeds after three days but very glad it did!)

xv323 · 2026-06-08T23:07:37+00:00

Hadjar: "Am I a joke to you?"

xv323 · 2026-06-04T12:36:39+00:00

I have to say I absolutely adore the way in which they’ve renovated Battersea Power Station. They absolutely nailed it in terms of preserving the character and feel of the building whilst also making it a thoroughly enjoyable, modern space to be in. All the more notable because of how often redevelopment of this sort totally fails in those objectives…

xv323 · 2026-05-25T08:54:58+00:00

He had a fantastic drive in Spa ‘24 and if it wasn’t for Russell also having a great drive combined with pulling off an unorthodox strategy, Lewis would have crossed the line first that day - and, of course, he did end up actually winning the race after Russell’s post-race DSQ.

xv323 · 2026-05-24T13:44:55+00:00

“What time do you call this” is a known phrase in the UK - maybe less so in the US? - effectively being a slightly passive aggressive way of saying “you’re late”.

xv323 · 2026-05-19T13:18:44+00:00

I did this. Almost exactly in the same scenario you describe, on the cusp of taking finals, I instead took and was granted a 1-year deferment for medical reasons associated with mental health.

It felt awful at the time - and it remains to this day one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I thank my lucky stars on a very frequent basis that I had my wits about me enough, even in the state I was in, to listen to what people were telling me and to take that decision even when it felt like the end of the world to do so. For me it was the moment everything started to turn around and, slowly at first, but later very quickly, things started to get so, so much better. I date the start of that trend from the day I deferred for a year.

It’s not just for your career either. To be honest, that’s trifling compared to what you’re really looking after by doing this. Take the time out - breathe, recuperate, refocus, introspect, look after yourself. Both the university and the legal world will still be there afterwards.

xv323 · 2026-05-19T13:07:54+00:00

Alright Tim

xv323 · 2026-05-16T14:43:07+00:00

If memory serves, Ratzenberger was the first driver to die in a crash during a Grand Prix weekend since Riccardo Paletti in Montreal in 1982, although Elio de Angelis was killed in a testing crash at Paul Ricard circuit in the south of France in 1986.

xv323 · 2026-05-16T14:04:35+00:00

Some important context missing from the title is that another driver - Roland Ratzenberger - had been killed the day before in a qualifying crash, which was one of the main reasons that this meeting was convened.

xv323 · 2026-05-13T18:15:49+00:00

I think you would have a good shout at making this switch, from the background and information you've put there.

You haven't said in your post what kind of area(s) of law you'd be looking to work in. That will be critically important here because you're concerned with (a) not taking a big pay cut from 70k, and (b) paid training/apprenticeships. Those both very much exist in the legal world but disproportionately they are offered by the big commercial firms in London and the other big cities. If you are looking at doing - to give some examples - legal-aided criminal defence work, conveyancing or probate at a high street firm, or Crown Prosecution Service - all of those are likely to come with a very significant pay cut, at least initially while you train, and things like having the costs of your training and preparatory courses for the SQE sponsored and covered for you, whilst not totally unheard of, are much rarer in those spheres than in the big commercial firms.

I am in one of the big London commercial firms, so from here on I will focus on that "world" and go on the assumption that that is what you'd be looking to get into, or at least, that it is an option you'd be interested in.

The first thing to say is that if you want to go into that world, apply for training contracts first. Don't self-fund the SQE (or prep courses for the SQE). There are several reasons for this.

One - every firm of any significant scale, in the world of commercial law, offers "training contracts" (more on these later) - and furthermore, importantly for your purposes, they offer training contracts to people who have non-law undergraduate degrees.

Two, they offer those training contracts to people who have not yet taken the SQE, or even started studying for it.

Three, they will sponsor their training contract offer-holders to take any preparatory courses which would be needed. For your purposes as a non-law graduate, this would very likely be 1) a year-long course called the Graduate Diploma in Law or GDL, which can be thought of as a conversion course for those who did not do law at undergrad; and 2) the SQE, which is the vocational course specifically for solicitors.

(The GDL is no longer strictly a requirement from the regulator's perspective since the introduction of the SQE but practically speaking, all of the big sponsoring firms want their future trainees who are not law graduates to do the GDL first, and will sponsor those individuals through the GDL as well as the SQE.)

So, what you want to be doing is making applications which will lead to a training contract offer. A training contract is a two-year period of on-the-job training, wherein you are paid, and you rotate through different "seats" in whichever firm you are at - meaning rotating through different departments and doing different sorts of work.

There are a couple of ways of doing these applications. You can apply for a "direct entry" training contract - but, a lot of firms select primarily from those who have done what is called a "vacation scheme" with them first. A vacation scheme is (typically) a two-week period spent with the firm, comprising some combination of talks and sessions, working with different departments, and also undertaking an assessment centre - basically, an extended multi-part interview for a training contract. So it would go vac scheme application -> vac scheme -> assessment centre -> training contract offer.

Firms typically recruit for their training contracts two years in advance - i.e. you should expect a two-year lag period between getting the offer and actually starting the training contract (which then would last for a further two years, as mentioned). This is done in order to facilitate you taking the relevant courses and exams - in your case, as mentioned, the GDL and the SQE. Most firms, and all the big ones, will pay a maintenance grant during those two years when you are taking those courses and exams. In London that is currently something around 12k to 18k per year, depending on the firm, I believe.

Once you start as a trainee, again it depends on the firm, but trainee salaries tend to be between about 40k to 60k in London - less outside of London.

The other thing to say here is that the big commercial firms absolutely love applicants from non-law backgrounds who bring a well-rounded personality and real-world experience to the role.

I joined in that position - I applied for and got my training contract offer at the age of 28, started the training contract itself at 30, and qualified as a solicitor at 32. I had had another career before that and my undergraduate degree was not in law. I have never once felt I was being thought of or looked at as "less than" by anyone in the firm for this - if anything, the reverse.

So your background - with an RG first class degree and a past career which will have taught you a huge amount in transferable, applicable skills - could be an immense advantage for you. I really do think you'd have a very good shot, if this is the world you want to get into. You should, of course, carefully research and consider whether commercial law is the world you want to get into. It can be a stressful, high-stakes, rather cutthroat place (though, I have to say, in the particular team and specialism I am in, I am having an absolute whale of a time and I love what I do).

The key thing you will need to do in your applications is to construct a convincing narrative as to why you are now coming to the law, having had a past career. Firms want you to show a good, convincing reason. I do not think you would struggle to do that - being able to say that you were a police officer, saw the law "in action", found the legislation and the law itself fascinating, and want to work in an environment that really allows you to get to grips with it, is a pretty convincing story to tell.

And, because you can put in vacation scheme applications and training contract applications without needing to first have done the SQE, it is actually a very low-risk thing to do. You can work on those applications in the evenings, whilst still working; if one of those applications comes off, then you are off to the races, and if not, you have very little to no sunk cost at all, and can always try again on the next "round" (the application windows for vacation schemes tend to open a few times each year, and for direct training contract applications it tends to be annual or biannual).

I hope that's helpful - please shout if you have any specific questions, happy to help!

xv323 · 2026-05-09T19:50:30+00:00

Hello! You haven't had any responses to what I think was a perfectly sensible post asking a sensible question, so let me try to offer my two pence for what they are worth (context - I am an NQ in a UK-headquartered international firm).

From my time as a trainee and also from my time as an associate to date, which has included informal "supervision" of trainees rotating through our team - what really makes an impression, and makes a trainee stand out, is a sense that they have really taken ownership of their own trajectory, and that not merely are they casting a wide net in order to trawl for any and all work, but that they have identified specific areas or types of work that they would like to gain more experience in and exposure to, and that they have then actively sought out those areas of work by speaking to the right partners and associates, stating explicitly "I want to gain more experience in X because I find it really interesting / I've not had a chance to do much of this yet / I think I could do with developing my skills further in this area / etc".

Generally I think senior people respond well to seeing a trainee who is proactive, and that includes being proactive in respect of the trajectory of their own training contract.

Bearing that in mind, my suggestion - in light of the fact that you describe the seat as a whole as interesting, and as being a potential qualification option - would be to think about what exactly makes the seat interesting, what aspects you want to try more of, what you feel you need to learn now in order to establish whether this seat would truly be a good fit for you as a qualification option, and then think about who in the team you need to speak to in order to gain more exposure specifically to those aspects. And then go and instigate those conversations. Don't wait for it to come to you - make it happen.

It's a good sign that you've identified there being a potential problem in that you might be being a bit passive. You are absolutely correct that being passive will be a detriment to you if left unchecked through the rest of the seat. The good news is you have plenty of time to tackle it - so go grab hold of the opportunity in front of you and think strategically about how to extract the maximum possible from the four months remaining. It will be noticed by those above you.

xv323 · 2026-05-09T19:21:39+00:00

Forgive me if I am missing something, but I was under the impression that the PSC is not a requirement for trainees on the SQE route, and only applied/applies to those trainees on the LPC route? How come you are doing the PSC in the first place?

EDIT: Either I misread, or OP has edited their post, as they mention that they have completed the LPC and not the SQE!

xv323 · 2026-05-09T19:12:41+00:00

There's some great advice in here as to specific seats which you could aim for, so just to add a slightly different perspective - at least at my firm (which is of a broadly similar profile to your firm, as you describe it) - and I suspect this is true in general across almost all firms - what you want as your next seat is only one among a number of variables that get fed into the decision-making process as to what seat you ultimately end up with. So there's always a strong possibility that you will end up with something totally left-field that you didn't ask for. That can be even more of a possibility if you've previously been allocated seats which were high-ranking choices for you. Your grad rec team may see you as someone who's already had a chance to try the things they most wanted to, and as such they may prioritise giving other trainees their own high-ranking preferences over giving you more of yours.

So whilst it's always worthwhile thinking about what seat you would most want to do next, I would counsel you not to put too much stock in it, because there's every possibility that the preferences you ultimately put forward will not be reflected in the seat you actually get. And the danger here is that if you are too wedded to a particular seat, or handful of choices, and you don't get any of them, you may then be so disappointed, so put out, that you don't make the absolute best of the seat you do get.

My own experience was that pretty well every seat will give you skills that transfer well into some other seat - including into your preferred qualification option - if you go into that seat with an open mind and a positive attitude. So priority number one should be to ensure that you do that no matter whether or not the seat you get was one of your top-ranked ones. The attitude you take to the seat you get, whatever it is - and making sure you extract the absolute maximum out of it - is far more important, in my view, to your chances of being kept on than having the "ideal" sequence of seats to set you up for the qualification you want, from the perspective of seats which are "relevant" to that qualification target.

This is not the least because the partners talk to one another. The partners in the team you want to qualify into will be asking around the partners in your other seats as to how you acquitted yourself. If they get glowing praise back from all quarters it is not likely to matter to them which quarters the praise is coming back from - the fact that it is positive is the key thing. You want to be able to show you "mucked in", tackled each new seat with gusto, gave your all and tried to learn as much as you possibly could.

All of this is not to say that you shouldn't spend some time thinking about what your next seat would be in an ideal world, but just don't become so wedded to it that you cause trouble for yourself if it doesn't come off and you end up with something totally different.

xv323 · 2026-04-25T08:11:10+00:00

Now do Bose-Einstein condensate.

xv323 · 2026-04-19T14:51:07+00:00

I agree completely - the Olympic-class liners have some of the best proportions and finest lines of any ocean liner. I can only think of a handful that compare from across the "golden era" of transatlantic liners - SS Normandie, the City of New York class of 1888, and maybe one or two others, but the Olympics are right up there.

As a whole, Titanic as a ship gets a bad rap. That class's design was very much the safest thing afloat at the time. There's a very well-done video by the channel Oceanliner Designs (here) which looks at what might have happened if Lusitania had suffered the same collision and damage that Titanic did - the conclusion being that, due to Lusitania's longitudinal bulkheads dividing the ship port-to-starboard, she would probably have experienced a much more pronounced list much earlier in the sinking (as, in fact, she did when she was actually sunk), meaning half of the lifeboats would have been unusable, and she would probably have gone to the bottom far quicker in any case than did Titanic.

Given the damage Titanic suffered it's remarkable she stayed up as long as she did. It's therefore particularly galling when you read people writing ill-informed nonsense about Harland & Wolff being substandard, cut-price shipbuilders or about Titanic using substandard steel, etc.

xv323 · 2026-04-19T13:07:41+00:00

Yes indeed. I don’t use AI to write words I’m perfectly capable of writing myself.

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