Sean Kelly

Note:  From now on, my blog entries are posted first on my Facebook page....so look me up on there won't you ;)

It's been a bit of a while since I wrote anything, but I now have news of my upcoming travel schedule, as well as some work developments.

Much has happened since we last spoke, with the main headline being that i've been handed the F1/GP2 editorial reins for SPEED Channel's website.  From now on, any dodgy stories, typos, and general suckyness with ultimately be my fault, so no pressure there then.  Today we're leading with Adam Cooper's interview with Lewis Hamilton, so that should keep people happy for another 24 hours :)

Apart from that, my schedule is coming together, and this is how it currently stands:

Feb 10 Shrewsbury
Feb 13 Dublin
Feb 16 Shrewsbury
Feb 20 London
Feb 21 Madrid
Feb 27 New York City
Mar 1 Phoenix
Mar 6 Los Angeles
Mar 8 San Diego
Mar 22 Melbourne or Charlotte
Mar 31 Charlotte
May 2 Las Vegas

There are several highlights in that itinerary.  First off, I haven't been to Dublin or New York City since 2006, and i can't wait to go back to either of them.  I haven't seen my family in Dublin in such a long time that they must be wondering if i'm still alive or not, and both me and my Dad have said that we feel like our Irishness (is that a word?) is wearing off a bit because of it.

I have not been to New York City since July 2006, when the World Cup was reaching its conclusion....and three days before my Mum was diagnosed with what proved to be terminal cancer.  It feels like a generation ago... a generation that was so delightfully irresponsible by comparison to now.  I hope to reconnect with that in Manhattan on Saturday February 28 especially :)

Sandwiched in between that is my first ever visit to Spain, and Madrid in particular.  I'm looking forward to visiting the fabulous Cortes sisters, aka my Spanish girlfriends.  How about this for scheduling - i'm also throwing in a business meeting with Spanish TV and more importantly, Real Madrid v Liverpool in the UEFA Champions League game at the Bernabeu.  Rock on!

Still don't know if i'll bother going to the Australian Grand Prix or just be in my regular position in the SPEED studio...but I certainly won't miss the long plane ride or the 17-hour time difference if I don't go, added to which, the long flight(s) from Melbourne to Charlotte in order to cover the following weekend's Malaysian Grand Prix.

As for May 2 in Vegas... yikes.  The AMA Supercross reaches its finale at Sam Boyd Stadium, while on the same evening Ricky Hatton fights Manny Pacquiao at the MGM Grand Garden Arena for the light welterweight world title.  A great night is guaranteed, let me know if you're gonna be there :)

By the way, Ciaran says hi, and if you're a woman, he's gonna lean out of his high chair and flirt with you.  I don't know who he gets it from ;)

What a finish to a championship eh? Who'd have thought young Lewis could lose the title and then win it all over again within the space of two laps.

I was going to write something about the drama in Interlagos immediately after the weekend, but as it turned out, I was more preoccupied with sitting around not doing anything, which is typical at the end of every F1 season. To me, it is the most exciting race that i've ever seen - not necessarily because of non-stop action, but simply the size of the stakes involved, and having the title decided at the final corner of the last lap. Brilliant stuff.

The ho-hah over the last race of the year was also overshadowed two days later by the US presidential election, and now that it is over I can gladly watch TV for more than 90 seconds without seeing some negative ad. The Obama victory has seen this great nation, momentarily at least, cease to be the laughing stock of the world, as it has been since early 2003. Hopefully he will make good on his promises, but experience has taught me caution.

In 1997 Tony Blair was the landslide winner of the UK General Election. Great, I thought - those idiot Conservatives are finally out of office (having been there continuously since 1979). Unfortunately the reality was different to the dream for me, with the country going down the shitpan to such an extent that I eventually emigrated to get the hell away from it. I appreciate that my Dad continues to insist the UK's current social-economic problems were a creation of Margaret Thatcher, but the incumbent government has still failed to address them.

Right now i'm enjoying my self-enforced exile from F1 work with my Dad, who is a visitor to Statman Towers until November 30. He still seems convinced that I might need to borrow some money off him at some point so that I can pay the rent, but I guess that's a standard fatherly worry.

He arrived just ahead of last weekend, when, staggeringly, I managed to run the Phoenix 10K road race, around the streets of downtown - ironically, several of which comprised the Formula 1 circuit when the United States Grand Prix was held here from 1989-91. Prior to the Thursday before the race, I had never run further than 2.5k outdoors, and yet somehow I managed to complete a 5,000m run on Thursday afternoon, and then a 10,000m run on Sunday morning.

I guess I have to say thanks to my trainer Carlyn for being...well, I don't know what she is, but she got me to achieve what seemed extremely unlikely even on the morning of the race itself. Next up on the triathlon to-do list is the truly hard part - learning to swim 1,500m.

Later that very afternoon I was in the NASCAR paddock, albeit for extra-curricular reasons. I'd heard on the grapevine that George Gillett, owner of Gillett Evernham Racing and, far more importantly, Liverpool Football Club, was to grace us with his presence. So I duly swanned into the paddock wearing my team's 2008/09 home shirt, which certainly achieved the desired level of surprise when he met me (you don't really get many "soccer" fans in a NASCAR crowd).

He proved to be as charming as I was told he was, and he even gave me his business card and told me to e-mail him. That's probably an error on his part, but only because he's simply unaware how stalkerish i'm likely to be after every Liverpool game. In my missive to him on Wednesday night I bemoaned our god awful display in the Carling Cup, while expressing my relief that Chelsea also lost, thus avoiding Blues fans crawling out of the woodwork to gloat at our expense.....

Incidentally, if any of you are thinking of paying me a visit from the UK, you should know that I have Fox Soccer Channel (and it's accompanying Sky Sports News shows) as well as Setanta Sports. I can watch more football here than I can at home! My apartment has become akin to British/Irish overseas territory....oh, and I have a Playstation 3 AND even now the average high temperature in the daytime is 83F. Life continues to be a bitch, etc.

Ughhhhhhhhhh, jet-lag is a horrible thing.

I wasn't in Shanghai this weekend. In fact, I wasn't even within 7,500 miles of the place, as I was on regular duty at SPEED Channel's studio in Charlotte, North Carolina. However, broadcasting the race from China meant being on their time zone, which meant sleeping through the daytime in Charlotte, and being awake and alert through the night, thanks to the perfect 12-hour time difference.

Those who have worked a night shift will know the routine. In order to mimic the Shanghai hours, I stuck a huge piece of fabric to the bedroom window frame to completely black it out, along with covering the bottom of the door with towels, in order that I could sleep through the "night". This has led to a curious side-effect, with my Sunday October 19 having started at 1pm on Saturday afternoon, Arizona time. It's now 11.29pm on Sunday night in Arizona, and it's STILL Sunday! My brain is having a hard time coping with this, especially since it only took me about five hours to fly home from fake Shanghai.....

I didn't think the Chinese Grand Prix was all that exciting from the perspective of a spectator or television viewer, although when you're working a race, there's always stuff to be concentrating on. It's a bit like being on the pitwall myself these days - in between the nerdy stat work, i'm looking at tire and fuel data, graphs and all that stuff, along with watching the raw world feed monitors and talking to about six different people on my headset.

To my surprise, my own exploits ended up being part of a promo that ran during our race broadcast, when SPEED's "ace statistician" and his post-race Stat Wrap on speedtv.com were mentioned on the air. That was one of the weirdest things i've ever heard on television, but I hope somebody logged on to see it, hint hint ;)

I arrived home today after five very enjoyable days in California - firstly in Los Angeles and then latterly in San Diego.

Ostensibly I was there to see my accountant, to see what we could score back from the IRS after they performed open wallet surgery on me back on April 15, but I was buggered if I was driving 6 hours to LA only to turn around and come right home again. I hadn't seen my friends there since I left eight months ago, so I tried to pack as much socialising in as I could, heading back to Chez Kovachevich, despite telling Lara back in February that the next time I saw her, I wanted her to be visiting me...

Strictly speaking, the weekend began in Phoenix, scene of my latest rendez-vous with Jon Pollak, known to several of my friends as a purveyor of many a fine evening's entertainment in recent times. I have never met him twice in the same city - in 2006 our paths crossed at Wembley Arena for the Christina Aguilera show, and I last saw him during that infamous evening at Indianapolis in 2007, when I made the fatal error of introducing him to those other like-minded derelicts at Finnish television.

He was in Phoenix working on David Byrne's latest tour, and I was treated to a perfect view of his show. You don't have to be a huge fan of his or Talking Heads to recognise that unmistakable voice, and he still dances on the stage in the same fashion as he did in the days of Stop Making Sense. A great night was had by all, and I continue to insist that one day i'm gonna go on tour with Pollak. With a tour bus as cool as that, as well as a bunch of tour crew who watch F1, i'll be in my element :) As for Byrne himself, we exchanged one of those respectful nods when we passed each other backstage, but I didn't speak to him as he was off to fraternize with the fans - a nice gesture from a man who seems endearingly shy when he's off stage.

In Los Angeles I was reminded how much of a peasant I was by attending events in both a $3.5m house, and a $14m (yes, that's fourteen million) uber-house. The latter domicile was the Esquire House, which is designed as the ultimate bachelor pad, as despite it's size and location at the top of Doheny Drive in the Hollywood Hills, it only has one bedroom. One of the rooms is the current location of the Formula 1 simulator that I drove extensively over the winter, and I was able to briefly reacquaint myself with it....if I had the $50,000 necessary to buy one, I really would be tempted (but I suppose the same could be said of the house, if I had the $14m necessary).

Anyway, the next evening my friend Ashley invited me to a house party, again in the Hollywood Hills, but this time in the bargain basement $3.5m place. As you can imagine, at that price it lacked even the basic creature comforts, such as a personal helipad, wine cellar or resident butler, but I was willing to overlook it when I saw what the house itself overlooked - the view from the balcony of the master bedroom was of downtown Los Angeles. You really don't get views like that where I come from.

That party exposed some prejudices in me, as I assumed, incorrectly, that the type of people attending would be even more up their own arse than I am. In fact, there were many extremely cool people, with personality and wit to match the occasion. I was a bit worried when I got a phone call on the way there telling me to wear all black, having dressed with a hint of blue.

Never mind, hopefully they all thought it was because i'm so rich and important that I can flout such regulations, as opposed to just being a complete berk with no dress sense. Regardless, I was gobsmacked to meet someone who actually knew about Formula 1, and then two blokes wandered in from Ringsend, filling the room with the sort of accents that I normally only hear when around family.

On Sunday I headed south, but not before a temporary detour at Disneyland to see my friend Carlie, another person I had not seen since Indy '07, and another person for whom it was right place right time - she lives in Fresno and coincidentally was in town on the same weekend as me.

A few hours further down the coast and I was in San Diego. Having never previously visited before, I now understand why people go on about it so much. It's like a cleaner, less-congested Los Angeles, with a better downtown area. The area around the beaches reminds me of the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area of western Florida, but without the humidity, while the downtown area reminds me of Seattle, still a sentimental favourite of mine. It's easy to see why people love it there, and I hope i'll be back again real soon.

All in all, a highly successful weekend, with the only crimp coming when I was just 15 miles away from home, when a truck shredded a tire on Interstate 10, sending a large piece of tread straight into the path of my car and ripping off the lower radiator grill. I swear that Audi is bulletproof, because I hit the tread so hard that I expected it to take the lower section of the radiator with it.... but the car continues to live! It's done 25,000 miles in the last year, through searing desert heat, and the ice and snow of the Flagstaff mountains, without ever missing a beat. You all need to buy Audis, trust me on this :)

For several days now, i'd been intending to write something centered around the Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here, as i've spent more than one spare evening recently listening to their 1975 concept album in my half-empty apartment.

I will come back to that in a moment, but as i'm sure any of you with any iota of music taste will know, Monday saw the passing of Richard Wright, a founding member of the Floyd and keyboardist extraordinaire. As full of a life as he led, the news fills me with sadness because Pink Floyd are one of the most prominent groups I associate with my childhood. Pink Floyd, U2, Queen, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Simple Minds...all bands I was listening to growing up.

Had the original members of Pink Floyd ever reformed and gone on tour, i'd always wanted to catch one of the shows just to say I was there, in much the same way as I did with The Police in 2007. They did reform for Live 8 in 2005, but it was just my luck that it was on an F1 weekend, so I wasn't even in the right country, and never even saw the performance until recently when somebody posted it on YouTube. Fate decreed that it would be their last.

Back to the album in question, as the title would suggest, it is a record about missing someone, and when sitting in an apartment that *still* has no television or sofa (albeit only for another couple of weeks), 2,000 miles away from my workmates, and half a world away from all of my family except my son, it probably doesn't take too much to work out why I might feel that way.

There have been several nights where i've been laying on my $5,000 bed with that album on, and noting that it doesn't matter how flashy and expensive the furniture is in my apartment if i'm sitting alone in it for the umpteenth time. While some have encouraged me to go out and find new friends, i'm not sure that's the solution. It's not a lack of friends that is the problem, so much as missing the ones I already have, scattered around the globe. How I wish you were here.

I'm home (Arizona) for the first time since July 30, and i'm all out of sorts since I got here. Several weeks of travel, plus an infinite number of time zone changes, seems to have left me a little disoriented.

This has also left me with some serious jet lag, and it wasn't helped at all when I was woken at 2.30 this morning by the sound of utter apocalypse, otherwise known as the fire alarm. It took me a minute or two to realise what was going on, and I was buggered if I was leaving the building without putting on some trousers.

Oddly enough, just as I walked out of my front door, the alarm abruptly stopped, so I turned on my heels and when back inside, making a bee line for my still-warm bed. With me being on the top floor and having such a massive window to watch the world from, I could see several dozen people outside, who clearly would have had a much better chance of surviving this psuedo-fire than I did.

The first European Grand Prix at Valencia took place over the past weekend, and from my vantage point approximately 3,000 miles away in the SPEED Channel studio, I must say it looked like a great place for a race, to borrow a line from the Albert Park promoters. In fact, it rather reminded us of another Australia street circuit, Surfer's Paradise.

While the race itself was a bit boring, I think it's a good addition to the calendar. After all, if we continue to live in a world where nuclear weapons exist but none have yet been dropped on the Hungaroring, than Valencia is more than worth its place in F1.

Of course, the last two weeks have revolved around events in Beijing, and I must say that the Chinese succeeded in their mission of making the country seem friendly, welcoming and upmarket, somehow deflecting any thoughts about pollution, slave labour and human rights abuses. The Water Cube and the Bird's Nest Stadium must surely be among the very greatest sports stadia ever constructed, and it's left to London to follow it.

I was doing the F1 race while the closing ceremony was taking place, so I didn't see the much-derided eight minute segment involving the London handover. My brain still struggles to comprehend the images of London mayor Boris Johnson waving the Olympic flag in front of the world's TV viewers, but I guess that means that London really IS the next host.

Hopefully they won't screw it up. Judging from what I have read, the British general public weren't too impressed with what they saw on Sunday, and it would have helped too if London didn't have what it is easily the most appalling official logo in Olympic Games history, but then I guess anything would seem poor when compared to what the Chinese put together, in arguably the greatest Olympics ever held.