The difficult second album, the tricky first album, and motorsport…
Everyone creative knows about the difficult second album. You strive, putting all your energy into your first endeavour, and it is a great success. Then you have to dig deep to try and replicate the success again. And again. This is never easy, and is often much more difficult. Just listen to Terence Trent D’arby’s follow up to Introducing the Hard Line. Or rather, don’t. As in music so in all areas of life, but none so much as professional sport. Once one season is over, no matter how successful it was, each team starts again on zero points.
© ALEXANDRE GUILLAUMOT – DPPI MEDIA
Audi Sport Team Joest won the inaugural FIA World Endurance Championship last year and they find themselves in the difficult second album situation. They began their WEC title defence at Silverstone with last season’s feats forgotten and all eyes on the new battle of the hybrids with Toyota. Audi were successful, bringing their cars home in a one-two and you might think they would now be optimistic.
But whilst Audi face the conundrum of the difficult second album, Toyota are trying to write the tricky first album. And when you are writing your first album it is difficult to imagine that anything can be harder. Last year at Silverstone they came second to Audi and would have loved to reverse that finishing order this weekend. But they were well beaten, mainly because they are still tweaking the new season’s car and were only able to drive the 2012 spec car at this opening round. So the stage is set for a thrilling FIAWEC LMP1 season, which will see the teams meeting six more times before the season finale in Bahrain.
By then we will have been able to see whose album was easier to write.
Leave a Reply