Trip to Munnar

We travelled to Munnar for a 4 day trip from 25/12. We decided against the train as even the train would require a 3-4 hour journey by taxi, having seen the way the tourist taxi guys drive, I just wasn't prepared to take my chances and decided to drive.

Some memories from the trip

- We left Bangalore at 5:45 am. At Hosur, there was a massive jam caused by an accident where a bus was blocking the entire highway. But, we got very lucky as we hit the jam just near a break in the road divider. We crossed over to the service lane on the other side and rejoined after the accident scene.

- I have a lot of memories of the Bangalore-Salem road, as we used to drive to my uncle’s place in Thanjavur regularly during the 80’s. More recently, we had a nightmare drive from Krishnagiri to Salem, when the 4 lane was being constructed. With the construction complete, the drive was a pleasure. I was easily cruising at 110-120 kmph, which enabled us to reach Salem in 2.5 hours.

- We took the Perundurai-Kangeyam-Dharapuram-Udumalpetai-Chinar-Marayoor-Munnar route to avoid any potential problems due to the Mullaperiyar dam issue. There were absolutely no problems and we crossed over into Kerala with ease

- The forest section through Annamalai Tiger reserve and Chinar national park was a bit of a disappointment on the way out. I was hoping to see some wildlife but some birds and a chameleon that I almost ran over was as close as we got.

- The Club Mahindra resort is almost 20 km beyond Munnar. Since the Marayoor and

Theni routes to Munnar are almost the same distance, going via Theni means that you save almost 45 km if you’re going to the resorts at Chinnakanal. No wonder, many of the people at team-bhp were recommending this. Atleast, we got to see some of the spectacular views over Lockhart Valley

- We stayed in a small hotel unit room for the first 2 days and then shifted to a 1 bedroom unit. The resort was good, but not very kid friendly. My son is at an age where he gives up and wants to be lifted whenever he feels like. Usually, this happens when there are steps to be climbed or a steep slope. Lifting a 15 kg child and walking up a 25-30 degree slope is no fun. I can’t wait for the day when he is embarrassed to be lifted.

- As the driver, I hardly got to see any of the views. So, we decided to take the tour offered by the resort. This had another advantage, as we didn’t have to worry about parking the car at the spots.

- The tour was a little disappointing, we went to an area with elephant rides which was quite nice. The next spot was the Mattupettu dam, we were really looking forward to taking the speedboat ride, but it had almost a 3 hour wait. Having already waited 1.5 hours for the elephant ride, we decided to skip and left after taking a few snaps.

- Day 2 was spent mainly at the resort, where we visited the model village set up by the resort.

- On Day 3, we went to the Erivakulam National Park, home of the Nilgiri tahir. We found a huge traffic jam as we neared the NP. Following the cue of other vehicles, we parked right there itself and walked the final 1 km to the entrance. Near the NP entrance, the cause of the problem was clear, the road was only wide enough for a single bus, but there were 2 huge buses on either side of the entrance wanting to get through. On reaching the park, we found a huge line which extended halfway up the side of the mountain. On enquiring with people, we found that it would take almost 4-5 hours to get the bus and decided to just head back. Our decision to park away proved a blessing as we could easily reverse and head back avoiding the jam completely.

- Club Mahindra resort was excellent as always with good food, generally great facilities. However, the activity room was very poor compared to their resort in Coorg and Goa with almost no facilities for infants. As a result, we avoided it completely.

- In view of the jam at Erivakulam, we decided to start back early hoping to avoid the Erivakulam jam and see some wildlife on the way. Till we entered the Annamalai reserve, we did not see even a single eee-kaaka. To our luck, as soon as we entered the reserve, I spotted a movement on the right and sure enough, there were two elephants making their way up the mountain. Further on, we hit paydirt, there was a single wild elephant on the side of the road eating his/her breakfast.

- On the way back, we stopped for 4 hours at Tirrupur, got some good bargains on clothes at a factory outlet and ate a big lunch at Sree Saravana Bhavan. This delayed our return to late evening, and as I am not very comfortable with night driving, dropped our average speed significantly. We finally made it home at 9:45 pm.

- I was very happy with my car's mileage during the trip. With all the high speed cruising and the ghat roads, we still ended up with a little over 14 kmpl. Not bad for a 1.6l engine.

An ode to the n82

Why a post on the n82 out of the blue? After all, it's been 8 months since I stopped using it full time and around 4 months since I gave it to my mother. Something happened in the last few days that made me realize that there is no turning back.

That something was a little option hidden in my Galaxy S camera app, the anti-shake. Until now, most of my photos were blurry, mainly caused by the fact that the SGS doesn't have a dedicated camera button and when you tap the on-screen shutter, it shakes the phone a little bit. But once I enabled this option, my photos became much sharper.

What does it have to do with the n82? Well, the camera on that little gem is a piece of art and a part of me always missed it, no matter how much I like the SGS in other respects. But now, I've realized that it is time to move on.

But there was one last hurrah for the n82. Last sunday, we bought a new cycle for my daughter. Like any normal kid, she wanted to ride it "Right NOW". It was around 6:15 pm and unfortunately, my camera's battery was out of charge. So which phone did I pick up? You guessed it.

F1 - the season so far

I wrote this post after the Monaco race, but forgot to post it. Well, better late than never...

 

We are now 6 races into the F1 season and we’ve had 6 crackers with lots of overtaking, I cannot remember a time when there was so much happening all at once. Why was overtaking so infrequent in F1? What changed to make such a drastic difference? Here’s my take on it. DISCLAIMER:I don’t profess to be a technical expert, just a passionate fan who has been following F1 for the last 25 years . 

 

Firstly coming to overtaking, I think there are three main reasons for why it was so uncommon in F1

Aerodynamics: The most common method of overtaking in a straight line is slipstreaming. Slipstreaming occurs when the car behind occupies the hole in the air created by the car in front before the space is filled up by the displaced air. Due to the reduced wind resistance, the car behind is able to go faster and overtake. You may well ask why slipstreaming has reduced? When a car moves, the air that it displaces has to go somewhere. The goal of the F1 car designers is to direct the air as they pass through in a way that it presses the car down and gives more grip, thus enabling the car to go through the corner faster. It’s the reverse of aeroplanes where they try to achieve lift. That is why the F1 cars have these big wings in the front and back. The downside of the aerodynamics was that the air that exited the back of the cars was so turbulent that the effectiveness of the aerodynamic design was greatly reduced for the car behind. So, the effectiveness of the wings was reduced and the car could not go as fast and fell behind enough to not be able to slipstream

 

Cornering speeds: In the olden days, the cars would be going 300 kmph on the straight but when they came upon a corner, they would need to reduce the speed to 80-90 kmph to have any chance of making it through the corner safely. Since the tyres and brakes of the day were not that advanced, cars had to brake 50-100 m before the corner and this gave the opportunity for the car behind to delay their braking by 10-15 metres and overtake the car going into the corner. However, with the advance in tyre technology (and aerodynamics), the speed that the car could carry through the corner increased and with the advent of carbon-fibre brakes, the braking distances reduced significantly. As a result, the opportunity to “out-brake” someone into a corner reduced significantly.

 

Strategy: One of the biggest changes in the sport was the advent of Michael Schumacher and the usage of pit-stops as an overtaking mechanism. He figured that since modern technology can make it so difficult to overtake cars on the track, why not pass them in the pits? The strategy involved staying out for a couple of laps after the car in front had pitted and driving to the maximum speed so that when you pitted for new tyres, you would come out ahead. He did this with astonishing success during his heyday. The downside to this was that it was very boring for the average spectator who could not understand the intricacies that went into the overtaking.

 

The FIA has been trying to remedy the situation and put up a good show for the spectators for a while now. In 2010, it banned refueling and made the usage of two tyre compounds mandatory. The hope was that teams would adopt different strategies and we would see cars with varying grip levels on track together, thus promoting overtaking. However, it did not work out as the tyres proved very durable and most teams stuck to one or maximum two pitstops, most of which were in sync with each other. The aerodynamic issues remained as before.

 

So, for 2011, they came up with 3 really bold steps, Drag Reduction system, high wearing tyres specification and KERS. Let’s look at each of them

DRS is the most controversial of the three rule changes. Basically the rear wings on the car are inclined at an angle when viewed from the side so that the air flowing over them presses the car down. This is most useful in the corner. However, in a straight line, the wings create more drag. That is why in circuits like Monza, which is a series of straights, we see the cars with wings that are almost parallel to the ground. DRS basically allows the teams to change the angle of the rear wing on the straight so that the car can go faster. Simple really. But, this is F1 and nothing is as simple. The catch is that DRS is only available if the car is less than a second behind the car in front and only on a specified area of the circuit. So, remember when you could not slipstream because you were falling behind on the corner? With DRS, you now have much lesser drag and can go significantly faster than the car in front and hence can get back into the slipstream and overtake.

 

The importance of aerodynamics had overshadowed the role that tyres played in providing the grip to the car. Historically, tyres have tried to strike a balance between softer rubber compounds that provide more grip but wear out faster and harder ones that last longer but aren’t as fast. The idea behind making the use of different compound tyres was the softer compound With the single tyre supplier rule in effect, Bridgestone had no real pressure to innovate. As a result, their tyres were so durable that 2010 saw many races reduced to a single stop race. In 2011, Pirelli won the contract to supply the teams with tyres and they were given the brief that the tyres had to wear out enough such that there was a marked difference in grip between the hard and soft compounds. In tracks like Spain, the hard compounds were two seconds a lap slower. But the soft compounds would wear out quickly, thus requiring more pit-stops. So, you had an option, lose 20+ seconds in a pit-stop but make up the time at 2 seconds a lap. An added twist was provided when top cars (Webber/China and Heidfeld/Spain) were knocked out in Q1. Since they had not used their soft tyres at all in qualifying, they were able to go much longer on these tyres, thus making it possible to gain enormous amounts of time on the cars in front of them during the closing stages of the race.

 

The least impactful change was the re-introduction of the KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System). While braking, the energy is dissipated as heat, KERS allows that to be transformed to electrical energy and stored in a battery. This gives an additional 10% “boost” over the engine power thus enabling the cars to go even faster. KERS can only be used for 6 seconds over a single lap, so the driver must choose the spot carefully.

 

So, what has been the impact of these changes? We’ve had lots of overtaking, some thrilling come from behind drives (Webber from 18^th to 3^rd in China, Heidfeld from 24^th to 8^th in Spain) and a huge number of pit-stops. There is so much action that it is impossible to get a complete view just watching it on TV. My usual practice is to have my laptop open with the Live Timing in one window and a twitter feed (where I follow some of the prominent F1 journalists) in another. The live timing gives you wonderful insight especially in the mid-field that rarely gets much coverage. It was fascinating to see the gap from Webber and Heidfeld to the driver in front come down by 2-3 seconds a lap. And just to prove a point that it’s not all about overtaking, we’ve seen Vettel soak up enormous pressure at Turkey and Monaco and still keep it together.

 

With all this excitement, I can barely wait for the next race to come on.