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Sauber give pit stops a Shake up - The Harlem Shake phenomenon reaches the Barcelona pit lane

Published by Will Davies

Hot on the heels of last year’s big internet craze, Gangnam Style, has come a new video-meme worth parodying, all to the tune of Harlem Shake by Baauer (no idea either), hence the name.

The first of these videos was created by 5 teenagers for Queensland, Australia, who uploaded their video, TheSunnyCoastShake, in mid February.

Since then the concept went viral and many hundreds if not thousands of these 30-second clips have been filmed, edited and posted across the internet. To go with it the song has hit the tops of charts around the world.

The steps to make a Shake of your own:

  1. Have a group of people looking normal and behaving normally.
  2. Enter someone (generally wearing a helmet) throwing some rather funky and crazy shapes.
  3. As the music reaches the point where ‘the bass drops’ (at about 15 seconds in) cut to everyone ‘dancing’ like a veritable loon. In a lot of videos out there you’ll find that there is also a selection of outlandish costume changes thrown in for good measure.

You have to hand it Sauber for becoming the first team to draw on their reserves of tongue-in-cheek-ness and pluck up the courage to produce a video of their own, reaffirming their position as the party-team on the grid! My favourite part has to be the mechanic climbing onto and trying to balance on top of that tyre.

And if you’ve not yet had your fill of the Harlem Shake, you can even find somewhere that makes web pages join in! I wonder which part of the paddock will get the shakes next!