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VEHICLES SMOKELESS
“In 2007 not a single cigarette brand will appear on a Formula 1 car,” reports the December edition of Car magazine. Which is a pity, as cigarette brands have supplied some of the sport’s prettiest colour schemes:
The Lotus 49 was the very first F1 car to wear (very discreet) cigarette signage.
So successful was John Player branding on the Lotus 72 that many knew the car only as the “John Player Special”.
Ligier never won many races, but always looked neat in Gitanes liverie.
Marlboro and McLaren were linked for decades. Consider how advertising standards have changed. In 1976, the BBC refused to broadcast a race because this car (driven by Australian Alan Jones) was entered:
Durex is a contraceptive maker. Thirty years after the BBC thought the brand too scandalous, BBC and Durex are now in partnership.
In the US the Federal Electorate Commission has sent a letter of “admonishment” to NASCAR driver Kirk Schemerdine for displaying a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker.
2nd story down…
Several years ago, I was a player/coach in a local men’s amateur soccer league.
A rival coach (and good guy) who ran a club of Bosnian refugees told me that the overwhelming majority of his players smoked Marlboro Lights so he had actually solicited funds from Phillip-Morris in an attempt to 1.) secure funds for uniforms, balls, nets, etc., and 2.) garner (negative) acknowlegement from an ‘outraged’ media and soccer establishment.
P-M never wrote back but I still admire my friend’s punk rock-ish chutzpah in the attempt.
And yes, those Yugo smokers did routinely rout better conditioned non-smoker teams…
Great! Now I feel compelled to have a smoke. Damn subliminal advertising.
Posted by andycanuck on 2007 01 05 at 11:49 PM • permalink1. the sticky tape was to hold the glad wrap in place??
Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2007 01 06 at 12:28 AM • permalink#1 I recall, somewhere back in the mosts of time, hearing on some (undoubtedly US import) TV show a character ask a storekeeper for “a roll of Durex”...
I was at an age where it was still my overarching ambition to be in a situation where it became necessary to don such a thing, and was gob-smacked by the imagined prowess of someone who’d need to peel them off a roll.
Has anybody told the Beeb those jalopies don’t exactly run on biodiesel?
(And if you made your biodiesel from wine, would that be Vin Diesel?)
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 01 06 at 02:55 AM • permalinkBonmot
Next to the DVD player in the back seat…Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2007 01 06 at 02:58 AM • permalinkI love those old cars, death-traps though they may have been.
My dad once owned a Brabham BT-23—an F3 car converted to SCCA Formula B (wider tires, front and rear wings, and a few other details). Despite only having a 4-cylinder engine, in 1973, it set a course record at Riverside (California) with Lee Mueller driving. It was on the NASCAR course, which cut off the hairpin Turn 7 because that section was under repair. Lee’s lap record stood for nearly 9 years.
It never had a cigarette sponsor though, just “James Foreign Car Service”, but it’s black, yellow and gold livery was gorgeous.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 01 06 at 03:10 AM • permalinkActually, the Brabham BT-23 was an F2. My mistake.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 01 06 at 03:17 AM • permalinkIt was on the NASCAR course, which cut off the hairpin Turn 7, and the sports car classes were using it because that section was under repair.
Geeze, must be past my bedtime.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 01 06 at 03:27 AM • permalinkO/T - Re Danish cartons - at last some muscular policing and proscution from the UK:
A British Muslim was facing jail last night after being found guilty of soliciting murder when he called for the death of Americans and Danes during a demonstration in London last year against cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.
Umran Javed, 27, was described to the jury at the Old Bailey as one of the leaders of the demonstration outside the Danish embassy against the publication of the cartoons, first in Denmark and then across Europe. He urged the crowd to bomb Denmark and the United States.Javed, an unemployed university-educated website designer, from Washwood, Birmingham, was recorded on video by the police and arrested later.
As the jury delivered its verdict yesterday, family and friends of Javed, a married father of one, screamed: “Allahu Akbar [God is Great], curse the judge, curse the court, curse the jury.”
Last night, Anjem Choudary, 39, who had previously been fined £500 for organising the protest without police permission condemned the trial as “politically motivated”. However David Perry QC, prosecuting, said Javed’s words were plainly criminal.
“If you shout out, ‘Bomb, bomb Denmark; bomb, bomb USA’, there is no doubt about what you intend your audience to understand,” he said.
“The prosecution case is that the defendant was clearly encouraging people to commit murder — terrorist killing. This was not simply a demonstration about cartoons. It was a recruitment for terror.”
Posted by walterplinge on 2007 01 06 at 05:30 AM • permalinkIn 1968, when we took our kids to live briefly in England, we had never heard of Durex as a brand for anything but sticky tape.
First day at Pommy school, the kids came home with a note asking us to get the kids to change their brand to Sellotape.
Travel is a broadening experience.
I hear you Yanks get a laugh out our Queensland beer ads too.Skeeter : Most embarrassing moment of my life was during an extremely sensitive military conference held in an enormous room in Akron, Ohio.
All the diagrams were in butchers paper, and would be shredded and put in the burn bag, along with the blotter underneath. Everything in pencil, too easy to hide recording stuff in pens. That sensitive.
There were VIPs and senior tech reps from FMC corp (makers of fine ways to kill people) and a German Consortium. I was the Tame Foreign Genius of the latter, the equivalent of the Germans in the US space programme I guess.
So I spotted a mistake on a huge diagram of (I could tell you but I’d have to shoot you) and asked in a loud voice “HAS ANYONE GOT A RUBBER?”.
I was born in the UK, and as in Australia, Rubber is a synonym for “Eraser”.
The Silence was deafening. The Germans didn’t know what the problem was, the looks on the USAians faces were indescribable.
“Eraser!!!!!!” I said weakly, “I meant Eraser….”
I learned that day a very important lesson : it is not actually possible to die of embarrassment, a lesson that has stood me in good staid recently.
I just wish the cars I got stuck behind in traffic were smokeless.
It sucks when it’s a hot day and one has the window open to provide a breeze, and then some Mitsubishi shitebox or poorly maintained diesel vehicle pulls in front of you and starts fumigating.
Please Sydneysiders: maintain your bloody vehicles!
when i was a kid i had a toy marlboro maclaren F1 car with realistic exhaust fume action
it didnt work on me though- i smoke stuyvesant
Posted by eeniemeenie on 2007 01 06 at 08:45 AM • permalinkThe West-sponsored “silver arrow” McLarens looked great, too. (West also sponsored the lowly Zakspeed team in the eighties. When they raced in countries where tobacco advertising was illegal, the cars said “East.”)
Ugliest tobacco-sponsored car of all time? It’s a toss-up between the 1991-1993 Camel Benettons and the dreadful 1993 Chesterfield-sponsored Lolas.
I had a toy “John Player Special” when I was a kid (I’m sure I still have it somewhere). Never knew it had anything to do with cigarettes, which of course makes it even more cool.
Posted by Bud Norton on 2007 01 06 at 11:42 AM • permalink#8:
I recall, somewhere back in the mosts of time, hearing on some (undoubtedly US import) TV show a character ask a storekeeper for “a roll of Durex”...
No way. Durex tape was never sold in America (or, at least, was never a well-known brand). The American ‘generic’ brand is Scotch tape. I do remember that the English comedian Jasper Carrot had a routine about the tape/condom confusion which ended with an Australian asking for “a roll of Durex” in the UK.
#23:I was born in the UK, and as in Australia, Rubber is a synonym for “Eraser”.
You’ll be pleased (or possibly sad) to know that “rubber” for “eraser” is on its way out in England. It’s still very widely used, but you almost never heard them called anything but “rubbers” when I came here in the early ‘80s, but now “eraser” is quite common. The same thing happened to “lorry” for “truck”.
I always thought that erasers were called rubbers in the UK because they were made out of rubber, but I found out a few years ago that it was the other way around: rubber got its name because it was used to erase pencil marks.
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A JPS was the first cigarette I smoked.
A Durex was the first brand of sticky tape I used… Oh wait. Damn.