The interweb has been flooded with ePress Releases announcing that the FIEh?FIA
 Max Mosley's preferred option for the location of the new FIA offices in Amsterdam. The FIA (or Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile to give it its full, inexplicably french, name) is an ominous association formed to represent motorists and motoring organisations. Its headquarters are at 8 Place de la Concorde, Paris (ring top bell), coincidentally just up the rue from one of the city's best bordellos. The federation acts as the governing body for a number of motorsport series and championships, mostly in a venal or, if we're feeling charitable, incompetent manner. It should not be confused with the Fédération Internationale de l'Alcosport, which governs Drink-A-Long-A-Grand-Prix almost as badly. Comprising 222 member organisations, the FIA can also boast a Senate, a Court of Appeal and a General Assembly and it wouldn't take a stretch of the imagination to see its activities as part of a sinister plan to get itself recognised as a sovereign state in its own right. It's not a million miles from how Hitler started, that's all we're saying. Its decisions have at times left the FIA open to accusations of favouritism and manipulation and its credibility wasn't helped any by revelations that its married president, Max Mosley, was partial to sado-masochistic orgies involving more tarts than you can fit on one hand. Mosley, seeing no incompatibility between his behaviour and his position, failed to tender the resignation that many were keenly anticipating. They claim to do a lot of work on road safety but we've never knowingly seen any of their campaigns.
For those readers whose first language is English, that means that motorsport's governing body has approved eight engines for use in next season's Formula E championship.
OK, so we're beginning to understand why the sport insists on using "powertrain" when it means "engine", because modern engines aren't just an engine, but include a whole series of things like the e-motor, the inverter, the gearbox and the cooling system, but for the sake of the deity of your choice, so did old engines. And the advantage of the word "engine" is that it already has an "e" at either end, which makes it almost the perfect word for FIEh? Formula E's hyperactive mark-e-ting department™. It's not a mere engine, it's an e-ngine or an eNGINe or possibly an engine.
But that doesn't excuse the use of a complicated piece of jargon like "homologated", which, when all's said and done, at the end of the day and when push comes to shove, just means "agreed". I think we're meant to believe that some kind of complicated process has taken place in which it has been recorded (log) that the engines, or powertrains, if you insist, are all basically the same (homo). But, no. Someone has just looked at the engine spec and said "Yes, that looks OK to me."
All of which is only slightly more interesting than the actual news which is that most of the teams have produced their own engine, apart from Drag Racing, who are borrowing Vetinari's engine, and Aduki who are going the MotherRussiaMARUSSIA
The second incarnation of Virgin Racing, a rebranding instigated when a Russian car maker decided to increase the level of its sponsorship to such an extent that it effectively bought the team. In doing so, it chose to ignore the recent salutary example of Spyker, another supercar manufacturer nobody had ever heard of before its purchase of the former Jordan team and which nobody has really heard of since it sold it again pretty damned quickly.
Changes like this are usually of no great significance to the viewing public but in this case it means that fans will no longer be able to anticipate commentating faux pas, such as "Let's see how this Virgin handles in slippery conditions." For that reason, the name change is a bit disappointing. TIGRA 16v: The tooltip with lowered suspension and a racing windscreen wiper route and using last year's, meaning that, technically, the FIEh? have, in fact, agreed nine engines for use in season two. Ha! Homologate that, fuckers!
Watch out for more eracing news from dotdotdotcomma: the Offical Satire Partner of the FIEh? Formula E Championship*.
* Please note that this status is not endorsed by the FIEh?, by Formula E or by Alejandro Agrajag.
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