De Paddock - de messias is pro autosport

Naar aanleiding van de 'sekte' (en geleid wordt door een Franse Messias luisterend naar de naam Raël) die de eerste mens zou gekloned hebben, verscheen het volgende op dailysportscar:

Should he choose to return to sportscar racing, Claude Vorilhon (“Räel”) presumably won’t have any difficulty securing sponsorship (from his cult followers), after yesterday’s news that his Clonaid company has created the first human clone.

Räel’s attempts at racing during the late nineties simply highlighted the fact that the man was a clown, his ‘outing’ at the Rolex 24 in 1997 – in an Edd Davin Argo – descending to pure farce. “His inter-galactic advisors had told Räel not to drive prior to Sunday morning,” explained our Janos Wimpffen in TIME AND TWO SEATS, “which conveniently allowed him to only take the wheel when he was refreshed and the field would be well depleted. However, moments before stepping into the banging and clanging car, he announced to Davin that he had been commanded to retire from the sport.”

Unfortunately he didn’t retire, making other appearances at Homestead and Monza in 1999. Meanwhile, he was also busy setting up Clonaid, and claims that his Raelian Movement has 55,000 ‘followers’ from 84 countries. He won’t need many of those to ‘cough up’ substantial sums of money in the quest for eternal life to fund a sportscar racing comeback. Unfortunately, that might mean a “Raël” still turning up on sportscar grids throughout the future life of the planet.

”Once we can clone exact replicas of ourselves,” says the man on his website, “the next step will be to transfer our memory and personality into our newly cloned brains, which will allow us to truly live forever. Since we will be able to remember all our past, we will be able to accumulate knowledge ad infinitum.”

Perhaps in his case that might mean he will actually learn how to drive.

Unfortunately, most observers have reacted with revulsion to the birth of the first cloned baby, and real (rather than Raël) scientists are predicting a short life for the poor child created by this outrageous bunch. The Clonaid spokeswoman wasn’t even prepared to announce where the child had been born yesterday. Nine other mothers have apparently begun pregnancies with cloned embryos, although five were terminated.

Raël’s original claim to notoriety was that he had been abducted by aliens, the Frenchman then suggesting that only a man who had had intercourse with an alien could truly satisfy a woman. Sadly, his cult has developed from a humorous bunch telling ridiculous stories into a very worrying collection of lunatics with the power to clone human beings.

Motor racing certainly attracts all sorts, doesn't it?

Incidentally, that funny little knot of hair on his head is apparently an antenna for receiving extra-terrestrial messages.