TMR Game – Week 8
Welcome to Week 8 of the Too Much Racing Game!
The F1 and IndyCar openers are done and dusted, one was incredibly boring and I hear the other was very exciting although I didn’t get to see it – I’ll catch it another time.
A word of warning – I am out of the country from Wednesday morning until Tuesday evening, so I probably won’t be able to check entries this week or provide scores next week. I’ll schedule an entry post for next Tuesday as normal and you’ll get two sets of results the following week. I’ll check tomorrow at the airport wifi but that may be it!
The other thing is a request for feedback: it was brought up on the Game page that perhaps Okayama may be too obscure a race. I think we’ll see some familiar drivers from the LMS and ALMS there but it may be a valid point. Do we lose it? The other thing was the Macau F3 GP – what do people say to including that, would it add an element of unpredictability to the final week of the game since the only there at the moment is the last NASCAR race, or is it too obscure also?
Quick-Start
Racing this week:
American Le Mans Series – 12 Hours of Sebring, Florida, USA;
NASCAR Sprint Cup – Bristol, Tennessee, USA;
All you have to do is reply to this post and pick up to 10 drivers! The only limit? No more than 7 in one race.
The cutoff is Friday 19th March at 11.59pm GMT. Call it midnight Friday night. Good luck! American/Canadian players entering Friday please note that although you’ve switched to Summer time Europe hasn’t yet – check your timezones.
For the full results from Week 7, read on.
The Games People Play
It is the time of year to start entering various prediction competitions and this year there seem to be far more than ever before. I noticed this partly through my efforts at promoting my own TMR Game, there have been comments from some quarters saying there are too many games this year – and perhaps there are. It is getting difficult to keep track of what’s what and where, so here are the games I plan to play in 2010. I’m not promising to stick with all of them because my memory is terrible – I will do my best.
I’ll start with F1 and move on to IndyCar. Why don’t you let me know what games you’re playing and perhaps I’ll tag along too?
SofaF1 Pole Poll (F1)
A nice easy going game to start from Alex and the guys at SofaF1. For each race you predict who will be on pole and the top ten race finishers (was top 8 last year). You get a point for a ‘near miss’ e.g. predicting 5th but actually comes 4th. Deadline is the start of qualifying, and the prize is a modest trophy… eventually.
I’ve linked to the extra part of the game, where you choose the top 8 (or ten?) finishers in the Championship which is worth double the points of a race. You don’t have to do that part to play the game during the year.
F1 Wolf (F1)
Fairly similar to SofaF1 in that you pick your top ten for each race, as well as driver with pole and fastest lap. There’s also a pre-season choice of championship winning driver, you have until 23.59 GMT Thursday to choose a champion and I’ve linked directly to that page, there should be another thread soon regarding Bahrain’s picks.
This will be my first year playing Wolf’s game, I’ve heard good things from others and I’m looking forward to it. The prize? 3 bottles of Mumm champagne!
VivaF1 – Predictions (F1)
This is a quirky one, my first time playing this too. Pick the pole winner, the race winner, the slowest driver in qualifying, the team that finishes 7th (what??!), and whether any ‘new team’ will finish the race. It looks like these questions may change from race to race which makes things interesting! Note you will have to sign up to the VivaF1 forum to take part.
VivaF1 – Quiz (F1)
Signing up also grants access to the chat area which is the home of the weekly quiz at 8.30pm UK time every Wednesday.
Fantasy Racers (F1) / Fantasy IndyCar / Fantasy WRC
A series of related games where you are given a budget with which to buy drivers, usually enough for 3 good ones or a more varied mix of 4 or 5. I have joined the Sidepodcast-affiliated leagues in all three variations. The prize is a trophy.
Pick several drivers, but you can only pick a driver so many times in the season. Being the official game of the series there are several prizes available although some or all may be US-only. I play in the Planet-IRL.com league – if I were able to play in two leagues without signing up a 2nd time I’d joined the Midweek Motorsport league too. Unfortunately at the time of writing the site is caught in a loop where I’m logged into IndyCar Nation but it won’t let me log in to the game section (and you do need a free login to play).
16thAndGeorgetown Fantasy Racing (IndyCar)
This is the dedicated game-site of the 16th&Georgetown blog. Pick one driver per race – but you may only pick a driver twice per season. You score the points of the position, so if your driver finishes 8th you get 8 points. The player with the least number of points at the end of the season will win a ride in the Indy Race Experience 2-seater IndyCar! Now I can’t collect that prize, not that I’m arrogant enough to think I’ll win it, I’m playing this anyway just for fun because it seems a challenging game (note – I did ask James if I could do this).
is it May yet? Izod IndyCar Series Prognostication Pool of Doom (IndyCar)
This is different. You choose whether drivers will complete 2010 at a higher or lower position than their 2009 ranking in the points table, the number of wins they will have, the number of top tens they will have, and answer some questions. There may be a prize, there may not be.
All-Racing Fantasy League (Multi-series)
This is an email-based game featuring F1, IndyCar, NASCAR, ALMS and GrandAm. You have 14 drivers and may play up to 10 of them per week, on a 5-oval and 5-road course split. The catch is that the drivers are shared among the players and no player may have the same driver as someone else! These facets combine to create a game of strategy. There is a small fee to enter and that creates the ‘pot’ for the winnings at the end of the year.
I’ll add a link to this later, this post took a while to write and I need to get to bed! (sorry Andy!)
TMR Game (Multi-series)
That’s here! It is based on the ARFL with huge thanks to Andy/Speedgeek, and adapted for blog-based entries and adjusted a bit for this blog’s target audience.
I’ve linked to this week’s entry but keep an eye on the blog for updates and there’s also the Game page. Just pick up to 10 drivers per week with no more than 7 from a single race. This week you can have 7 F1 and 3 IndyCar, or 5 from each, or just have 7 from one if you feel like it. It covers a variety of series but don’t worry if you don’t know about some of them, just enter what you’re comfortable with. The prize is merely to declare that you watch too much racing!
Let me know if you play any of these! I hope this prompts you to have a go at some of these games (hopefully mine!), and do let me know what you’re doing, even if I don’t end up playing them I’m interested to know.
TMR Game – Week 7
Welcome to Week 7 of the Too Much Racing Game!
This is the start of the serious business – Formula 1 and IndyCar kick off this weekend and I really hope you play along! Forget the past scores, we’ve got a whole season ahead of us. Let’s go.
Quick-Start
Racing this week:
Formula 1 – Bahrain GP, Sakhir;
IndyCar – Sao Paulo Indy 300, streets of Sao Paulo;
All you have to do is reply to this post and pick up to 10 drivers! The only limit? No more than 7 in one race.
The cutoff is Friday 12th March at 11.59pm GMT. Call it midnight Friday night. Good luck!
For the full results from Week 6, read on. I will endeavour to have results up next Monday or Tuesday as I will be away for a week after that, more details below.
Thursday Thoughts: Blogging
The current run of Thursday Thoughts questions is brought to an end by Maverick from VivaF1.com, who asks at this Sidepodcast post:
“Which blog article or articles have you written that you were most pleased with writing and why?”
An interesting choice to move away from racing and to essentially ask why we are doing this, and I’ve enjoyed the other responses from people explaining why they blog and which posts they are proud of.
Two articles immediately spring to mind and they are both very recent ones.
The Importance of Social Media was a post I wrote about 3 weeks ago about the impact of Twitter on the racing world, from fans to media, to series, teams and drivers. The appearance of Claire Williams of the WilliamsF1 Team at the recent F1 tests armed with a mobile phone and Twitter/Twitpic accounts prompted a frenzy among F1 fans and blogs at the amazing level of access she was granting vicariously to the humble follower. Vision Racing had the same effect on the IndyCar community last season and I had been planning to write a Twitter article for a while on that basis. Claire’s appearance was the perfect excuse.
I liked writing that post because I see that as the purpose of the blog – to take a currently popular issue and look at it from a wider angle. I’m not trying to crow about knowing more about other series, it is just that is where my interest lies. Others prefer to specialise on one thing to the nth degree and that’s great too, I tend to take a broader view without knowing such detail. That post is notable as easily the most-viewed post I’ve ever written, and it got noticed by Vision Racing themselves.
In terms of the pure enjoyment of writing, the post I like the most is Managing Expectations from just a couple of weeks ago. It stemmed from an endless Twitter stream of negative comments over a few weeks, usually during NASCAR races – and because NASCAR runs Nationwide on Saturday and Cup on Sunday each to a good 3+ hours, that meant every weekend evening. It also occurred midweek in general conversation and was took in every series you can name. There were many blog posts too. I’m not singling anyone out, several people were at it.
People were complaining about races being boring before a track had held a race, or because of what had happened last year with no consideration for other years, or the changes made since, or because of what they thought the new IndyCar proposals would do, or boring purely and simply because they weren’t IRL on a 1.5 mile oval.
After a while I realised that people’s expectations had changed – rather than the old-style ‘best man wins’ format, they wanted to watch two hours of constant passing every week from March to November. Racing just isn’t like that for the majority of the time, and it never has been, so I decided to state that case. The next day I was pleasantly surprised to find some excellent comments in response, that it wasn’t just me feeling this way.
Why do I blog?
Most of the time I blog simply because I feel like writing about something. Sometimes I’m guilty of blogging because I feel I’m expected to. Occasionally I blog because something is eating away at me and I need to get it out, and Managing Expectations was such a post. I felt a wave of relief when it was posted, and it was very pleasing to see the response – it is the posts like this that I like the best. I just don’t feel capable of doing one or two of those every week.
I like compariing similarities and differences between series, to take one idea and expose it to another arena. I also liked it when Mike Conway joined IndyCar and nobody there knew who he was. I was able to say so. Not many people read it because my blog was much smaller at the time, but that’s not the point!
I’ve been looking at the archive to see if there are older posts worth mentioning. For a long time I wrote reports of every F1 race and most IRL races. Unlike other blog’s race notes I was able to provide quite a bit of detail, I think because I can type quickly and because I expanded a set of more basic live notes. I did enjoy those, and in a way I’m sad that I’m not continuing the same format this year, unfortunately they were just too time-consuming.
I used to write shorter blog posts like this one, I miss those and I’m going to bring them back.
Here’s a note on the name of the blog from October 2008 which the people of Sidepodcast may get a kick out of, and yes I was plugging ARFL even then. 
A little over a year ago I wrote about my first impressions of the Daytona 500, having never sat down to watch it before.
I’m also pleased with my posts about visiting BTCC at Silverstone and the Goodwood Festival of Speed parts 1, 2 and 3. I never did finish the FoS reports, there were supposed to be five or six parts. These were as much about the pleasure in the post’s layout as much writing about my experiences, I learned I could lay out photos in what I think is a good design. I’m not sure the layout has transferred correctly to WordPress but it isn’t too bad.
And finally just for posterity, this was my first blog post. Technically it is only the first post on this blog (or rather the old incarnation), in 2005 I had a Live Journal blog when I lived in Scotland, I was supposed to keep it updated with what I was doing so the family could have something to refer to… it didn’t last long and I don’t even know if it still exists.
In closing I’d like to leave a note about Thursday Thoughts itself, and while I’ve not answered the last couple of questions because I’ve either had other things on or I simply didn’t have an answer, on the whole I’ve really enjoyed the series and it was a great idea to encourage people to blog over the off-season. Thanks to Jackie and RG for the idea and to the gang at Sidepodcast for pushing the idea along and hosting the first few questions to get it established. I really hope it returns next off-season!
TMR Game – Week 6
Welcome to Week 6 of the Too Much Racing Game!
This post contains a quick-start summary for entries to Week 6, the results from Week 5, and a few notes about Week 6’s racing.
Quick-Start
Racing this week: WRC Rally Mexico, NASCAR Cup Atlanta
All you have to do is reply to this post and pick up to 10 drivers! Max of 7 per series. The cutoff is Friday 4th March at 12.59pm GMT. The Rally starts at 7am Mexican time which is 1pm UK time, so that’s the deadline. I’m hoping to attract a few more entries when the F1 and IndyCar seasons start in Week 7, so why not get an entry in this week?
For the full results from Week 5, read on.
Read more »
TMR Game – Week 5
Welcome to Week 5 of the Too Much Racing Game!
This post contains a quick-start summary for entries to Week 5, the results from Week 4, and a few notes about Week 5’s racing.
Quick-Start
There is only one race this week and that’s NASCAR Sprint Cup at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. All you have to do is pick 7 Cup drivers in a reply to this post. The deadline is Friday 26th February at 11.59pm GMT (that’s 6.59pm US Eastern). I’m hoping to attract a few more entries when the F1 and IndyCar seasons start in a fortnight, so get an entry in now to get a head-start even if you don’t know anything about Cup!
For the full results from Week 4, read on.
Read more »
Managing Expectations
There appears to be a growing trend among the Tweeting and blogging communities to mark any race which doesn’t have wheel-to-wheel action on every lap as “boring”. I’m beginning to find this a little frustrating.
In times past, a good race was often one where Participant A was in the lead and Participant B was giving chase, perhaps Participant C was in close enough quarters to threaten should the other two falter for some reason. A and B would trade fastest laps and B would eventually make a move, which may work and A gives chase as best he can, or it doesn’t and B ends up in the gravel or wall commiserating a poor move but knowing he’s laid a marker with the fast guy, and getting kudos from the fans for giving it a go. Perhaps A is faster in the twisty stuff and B has more power on the straights. Throw a bit of tyre or fuel strategy into the mix and a few more similar battles in the field, and that’s a pretty good race – it just happens to unfold over 90 or 120 minutes and there are occasional lulls between bouts of action.
It seems to me that for some this isn’t enough. For some, it seems they want to have a battles raging for every lap of the race, okay maybe not the same battles throughout but enough to sustain constant attention. I’ve noticed this in particular about fans of oval racing, specifically IndyCar and NASCAR.
I admit there are many boring races, too many in fact. Some are abominations. Anyone who’s seen F1 at Valencia or Magny-Cours, or IndyCar at Sears Point or Nashville (you can’t have a single-file oval!) can attest to that. Or to be frank, most NASCAR races in my humble opinion! If there is a way to cut down on them sign me up right now, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that not every single race can be a thriller – that’s why we get so excited when those good races do happen – and let’s also not lose sight of the fact that there are some good races going on which aren’t edge-of-the-seat thrilling but interesting in other ways. Let’s not be so quick to criticise.
What I’m getting at is that people seem to be losing their appreciation of the art of racecraft. It isn’t all about the balls-to-the-wall side-by-side stuff. A well-executed move can sometimes take a few laps to set up, you see the driver working to close the gap, trying a few different lines while the leader tries a few lines in defence – note defence not blocking, there is a difference – and making a pass. They might even then drop back again to conserve their tyres before a final push in the closing laps. The best place to find this sort of racing in the current era is MotoGP. I’m hopeful the new F1 rules will bring back the same sort of thing there.
The IRL made it’s name by featuring ultra-close finishes after lap after lap of side-by-side action on ovals. Which is fine and all very entertaining, except it was much derided by others in the early days because the cars have so much downforce all the driver seemingly had to do was mash the throttle and turn left, unlike previous open-wheel oval races where the overtaking manouvres had more of an element of planning and racecraft about them, of choosing when to make your passing move rather than inching forward over five laps and hoping the other driver backs out. Sometimes it feels as though you might as well run a lottery to decide the winner. I like my race winners to have earned their place.
Sometimes – shock! horror! – a driver or car was faster than others and they’d build a lead of several seconds on the field. And that was fine, because they’d done a good job and had earned the win. Get a race like that now and there’s uproar.
I think a generation of fans is growing up expecting every race, or 9/10ths of the schedule, to feature countless battles through the field and multiple changes of lead. I’m sorry but that’s just not realistic. We all love it when it happens but it has to do so organically. The series can do their best to set up the cars and tracks to make it happen but at the end of the day this is the real world, this isn’t Hollywood, no matter what NASCAR does to manipulate the format to generate faux-excitement.
As I said before, I know, a lot of races are tedious and sometimes it can be hard to tell a boring race from one where the drivers are trading lap times, especially without the necessary information to hand. That type of race isn’t for everyone, I get that. But let’s just manage our expectations and not call out a race for being boring before it has even finished.
Launch Season
We are coming to the end of the period unofficially known in the racing world, or the F1 world at least, as ‘launch season’. A year ago I posted a series of articles under the header of Launch Season featuring photos and a brief impression of each of the 2009 F1 cars as well as the Peugeot 908. Obviously this is an F1-specific feature because no other series releases so many brand new cars every single season.
I’ve decided against doing this for 2010 because all I can really do is gawp at the paint schemes and provide team background. I’m not technical enough to point out the nuances of car design and I don’t have the patience to write 11-13 team histories, so rather than rewrite others’ impressions why not just read what I read?
At BlogF1, Ollie takes the ‘team review’ approach, telling us how each has changed since the last race of 2009, makes notes about the 2010 cars and includes some killer shots of the cars. If you’re fairly new to F1 you should have a read of these fully up-to-date team bios to bring yourself up to speed.
At VivaF1, Maverick also has a poke around the cars to see what the design teams have been doing and the pictures there include fascinating back-to-back comparisons to the 2009 models – after viewing only a few shots from different teams you can really see that the 2010 crop are longer to account for the extra fuel weights.
Both blogs attack the subject in an approachable and engaging way which doesn’t leave behind the fan who perhaps wants to know what’s going on, without having to have followed the technical side of the sport before.
If you do want the extra depth there’s F1Technical.net and also Craig Scarborough’s new blog, though these two often look at things in such high detail that I get lost or I don’t really know what I’m looking at.
For once though, it isn’t just Formula 1 cars being revealed at the moment. There are the new IndyCar proposals from Swift, Dallara, Lola and Delta Wing and okay they are just proposals and not actual cars, but there have been plenty of words written about them already. I plan to write something about it myself shortly (that post has been delayed), and I’ll link some of the more interesting articles then.
Write to the Top
The new CEO of the Indy Racing League, Randy Bernard, will be taking his seat in his office on March 1st.
Let’s send him a letter.
This is the new era of fan interaction. Various different series and teams are paying attention to fans more than they ever have done before, whether by survey or direct interaction via Facebook or Twitter. What’ll get his attention on Day 1 better than a stack of letters from the fans? Okay so maybe they won’t reach him, maybe the PR or marketing people will get them – it doesn’t matter, they’ll note the increase in correspondence and hopefully someone will read some of them.
Bernard appears to have a proven record in growing a sporting property from absolutely nothing to something rather much bigger. The IRL/IndyCar needs those skills, badly. Okay, IndyCar has something of a fan base, it has a history and all the rest – but how much of that does he know? He openly admits he’s coming to this raw, no prior knowledge. Let’s tell him what we like about IndyCar, and what we think may need adjusting. We want to make sure he doesn’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
Before you go any further, be sure to remember to be courteous and polite, like not sniggering at his humourous name, nor ranting and raving like a blogger fool. Nobody wants to receive a note that reads like it comes from the middle of a flame war on a forum or a blog. Pressdog wrote some nice guidelines, let’s stick to those. We should welcome him.
Nothing works better than a bit of paper landing on your desk. It’s more personal.
Here’s his address:
Randy Bernard
CEO, Izod IndyCar Series
4790 W 16th Street
Indianapolis, IN 46222
Now, I’m in the UK and I’m not sure whether I’ll use traditional mail (I probably will). But if it doesn’t float your boat, you can always send an email via the website’s contact form:
http://www.indycar.com/contact/
Give it some thought and send him a note. I’m having a think and I will send something in shortly.
*
If after that you are still in a letter-writing mood, pop along to Vision Racing’s Facebook page to see how you can help them convince existing and potential sponsors to back them and resurrect the team for 2010, before it is stood down completely.
And finally, be sure to VOTE on the chassis proposal you favour. I hope to write about those proposals soon but I’ve found myself short on blogging time recently.
Remember, this is the new era of fans being heard, so make the most of it!
TMR Game – Week 4
Welcome to Week 4 of the Too Much Racing Game!
It is not too late to join in, the big scoring hasn’t started yet!
This post contains a summary of how to enter for Week 4, the results from Week 3, and a few notes about Week 4’s racing.
Quick-Start
If you are short on time and want to cut straight to it, just reply to this post with your picks for this weekend’s racing. There is only one race this week and that’s NASCAR at Fontana. This means I can be flexible with the deadline a little so let’s make it Friday 19th February at 11.59pm GMT. That’s 6.59pm US Eastern. As there’s only one race you may only pick 7 drivers. Best of luck!
For those who want more detail, read on.
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