The F1 circus did a long flight from Australia to Brazil. São Paulo is the challenge! This circuit is different on many ways: it is driven anti-clockwise, it has a bumpy tarmac, it features less than predictable weather, and tends to be graced with the worst TV transmission of the season. All these aspects are welcome, except for the last.

The Brazilian GP is a true "modern" classic. Grab yourself a copy of Geoff Crammond's GP2 and you'll have the chance to race it, exactly as you'll find it today! It is a twisty track, that can be demolishing on a hot day.

Alain Prost won here some 7 times... but the 4 times F1 World Champion is now living a nightmare as a team director: the new car simply doesn't perform as well as everyone expected, and then some ridiculous events plague Alesi and Heidfeld. For example, Alesi was literally attacked by a Marlboro ad (check the pictures on your right) when he was starting one of his qualification laps, while Heidfeld did no more than 19 outs , due to engine / electric problems.

The qualifying session was fun, but Globo's TV direction stinks! For years that Globo is in charge of doing the TV coverage of this F1 GP, and for years that they do a terrible job, only focusing the top 6 drivers, and missing dozens of accidents. For example, Schumacher's accident and Alesi's Marlboro kiss, were not broadcasted live...

What if you fancy drivers like Irvine or teams like Arrows? In those cases, you have all the right to ask: "are they racing at all?", since Globo really doesn't care for nothing, other than the top racers... If poor Ricardo Zonta (a brazilian driver) got no more than some 2 minutes of coverage, just imagine the scenario for non-local racers...

During the qualification, the Ferrari team showed some lack of gratitude... With nearly every spectator dressing red, Ferrari still expressed strong protests, because of the falling Marlboro ads... Three different ads caused three session stops, in less than 30 minutes... In fact, it is not very understandable, how can a F1 race, being transmited for dozens of countries, each with its local time, be delayed because of such matters.

Now, about proper racing, it is obvious that Hakkinen is really comfortable with pole-positions :) The fin did no mistakes and drove strong laps, improving all the time. He just needs a reliable car to win @ Brazil, tomorrow.

Coulthard is better than the usual, but I suspect that his strong qualifying performance won't be mirrored during the race... he still lacks some consistency.

Schumacher did some small mistakes, that make me wonder if he wasn't trying too different setups. Brazil is the circuit where it is less costly to make a pitstop, so if a team, like Ferrari, can manage agressive setups that will require one more pitstop than the closer adversaries, that might just me a viable option.

Barrichello is doing a great season. I think Schumacher was expecting a slower mate. The thing is that Rubens knows too well how to obey team orders...

New Files!

Creative Labs finally launched the SB LIVE! Windows 2000 proper drivers, which deliver the same kind of functionality of Liveware 1.0 for Windows 9x. That might read like not a big deal, but it surely is a big step forward, from the WDM shipped version. These drivers can handle multiple processors, which is the major hardware support difference for the NT platform.

I downloaded the files some minutes after their availability and noticed a strange problem: when downloading from one of the 4 mirrors, the files didn't install properly, but when downloading from the main site, it all worked fine.

Anyway, here is a direct link for the GOOD files, that spare you the trouble of reading the legal bla bla bla that every file now imposes :)

setup.exe [947 KB]

disk1 [2407 KB]

disk2 [3859 KB]

disk3 [4473 KB]

disk4 [4322 KB]

Meanwhile, after some requests, here is the link for the LEAKED / UNOFFICIAL / Windows 2000 ONLY, NVIDIA Detonator 3.81 drivers, for the TNT, TNT2 and GeFORCE family of cards.

Detonator 3.81 [978 KB]