Too Much Racing

I started this blog under the name of ‘Too Much Racing’ because that’s what I was doing – watching too much motorsport every week. It soon came to take on another meaning: there is Too Much for one blogger to cover! There’s also Too Much for one person to watch even if they aren’t writing about it. I am not complaining – believe me this is a nice problem to have! I never want to have to change the name of this blog to ‘Not Enough Racing’.

In an average week I would read Autosport magazine, Autosport.com, GrandPrix.com and a few other news sites before hitting the (many) blogs, and of course the F1NGers group. I would watch at least one ‘big’ event per weekend (an F1 or IndyCar race usually) along with a ‘smaller’ event after work one evening (say a touring car meeting of 2 or 3 x 25 minutes).

Since the summer the real world has intervened and I’ve struggled to keep up with anything other than F1 and IndyCar, and I’m 6 weeks behind on Autosport magazines, though I always keep up-to-date with their website.
On the other hand I feel more integrated with the world rather than being sat in front of the TV and PC all the time!

Want I want to know from you all is this: How you do it? I’m sure you all have busy lives to lead, how do you follow so much in so little time?

Are podcasts the answer? So far I listen to FastMachines.com Radio (which is very good). I’d like to listen to others such as Live Fast Radio and Midweek Motorsport but at 2 hours apiece they are just too long for me personally at the moment (sorry guys).. though I will try a bit harder. I like FastMachines because they do a wrapup of the weekend in about 45 minutes to an hour.

I know in the US you have Wind Tunnel. I know that because I find my own way to watch it and it is a good programme. I think MotorsTV should start a European edition and have it link up with the Speed show from time to time.

Perhaps if I spent less time reading and writing blogs I might have more time to watch the racing, but I don’t see myself changing. Then again a year ago I didn’t even consider writing a blog.

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I caught up with some World Touring Car action this week, albeit from June! It was from Brno in the Czech Republic, where Alex Zanardi won the first race and finished 2nd in the second race! Brilliant performance achieved on merit, great to see it. I missed his first win since ‘The Crash’ so I’m very pleased to have seen the second. The gap between the two wins was too long and there was a LOT of emotion from the team, and frankly everyone no matter what shirt they wore, as he got out of the car after both races.
They were good races too, WTCC’s best of the year up to that point. The boys are in Japan this weekend before heading to Macau, while I’m four months behind them.. Let’s get Surfers Paradise (IRL) and Interlagos (F1) out of the way and then I can do a mega catch-up of everything I’ve stored up to watch over the winter.

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Another way to occupy my time is to play prediction games, an interest of mine since about 15 years ago playing F1 games in newspapers. I don’t do that any more, having switched to internet games a long while ago.

I currently play two of them. One is F1Tipping and the other is an interesting new game set up by Andy from The SpeedGeek’s Motorsport Blog, called ARFL. Check out his blog for full details about the game which covers F1, IndyCar, ALMS and NASCAR. I only joined a couple of weeks ago and already I’m familiar with how it all works, it may seem complex on the surface but it really isn’t, just play for one week and you’ve got it. Then the fun starts!

I did used to help run a prediction game on the F1NGers group until I ran out of time for it, so I can appreciate how difficult and time-consuming it can be to run something like this. I can also see that Andy puts a lot of work into this one. He’s looking for new teams, make sure you sign up for ’09.

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Okay, long post today. I’m aware that complaining of a long podcast and then writing a long blog post is probably not the best idea but I don’t really care.

I’m gonna disappear until Monday because I don’t want to know the result of the IndyCar race until I see the race myself. If the IRL online feed was good I’d consider getting up at 4am, but not for the Leader Cam. It drove me nuts at Homestead not seeing the rest of the field, so I’ve not used it since.

Enjoy Surfers, and the Valencia MotoGP!