Monday, October 09, 2006

Alex Yoong, Finally....

A few years back, nobody would have thunk it. Alex was driving for Minardi, the perpetual whipping boys of F1 at that time (now it's Super Aguri).

He really wasn't that good in the lower formulas and touring cars / sport cars before, so it wasn't much of a surprise that he wasn't very good in F1 either.

He was spinning off, setting painfully slow lap times and basically spending each weekend being a moving "BERHENTI. Pemeriksaan Polis" signboard on the race track. To make things worse, he was partnered with Mark Webber. And as we know, Webber's pretty damn good, scoring points in his debut race.

So, Alex drove bad, and his much more capable team mate made him look a lot worse. And the Malaysian public didn't waste any time ridiculing him, calling him names, telling him he was useless and wasting the public's money. Basically, he was the human equivalent of Proton. I know, because I did my share of Alex-bashing in the forums and during long teh tarik sessions at SS2, SS4 mamaks.

Anyway, when Alex got into this A1 GP thing last year, nobody had high hopes. Everybody's mood was encouraging, "yeah, go for it"... but our hearts were actually thinking "maybe it won't be so god damn embarassing this time". Despite several reasonable showings and a podium last year, the Malaysian public weren't that much convinced. We still basically figured he wasn't that fast, maybe all the other cars were just slow?

So, imagine our surprise when the Negaraku "berkumandang-ed" yesterday when Alex won both the Sprint and Feature races at the Czech A1 GP. And though I can't be bothered to confirm, I think he's the first Asian race winner too.

Congratulations Alex. You showed that you are a race winner. Even when we didn't believe in you, you believed in yourself, and that's important. Malaysia is proud of you and we thank you for giving us, the Malaysian motorsports fans, something to be proud of. (Besides Karamjit lah. Sori ya, Karam, you WRC Group N champion, you).

Keep it up, and maybe we'll take back all those nasty things we said about you the last time around. Remember, everybody loves a winner ;p

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