A New Year

Happy New Year!

I am looking forward to the 2010 racing season, it’ll be a good one.

F1 has the return of Schumacher, the uniting of the last two World Champions at McLaren and Alonso moving to Ferrari, with the added interest of Sauber’s return to independent status, Toro Rosso building their own car, the addition of the new teams and drivers, and watching to see if Williams and Force India can capitalise on all of these things.

IndyCar has a new title sponsor which should really help the series grow domestically, which in turn should help it internationally. Ganassi and Penske will be the teams to beat again and it’ll be interesting to follow the Andretti team’s progress after their restructuring, can they challenge as they once did?

Sportscars features the new Intercontinental Cup and I hope we’ll see several teams attempt all of those rounds despite the economic downturn. It could be the prelude to something big and that should excite us all greatly!

It looks like rallying is on the road to recovery now that the FIA is starting to realise it was killing WRC, and along with the IRC we should see some good competition this year.

Touring cars… is shot to pieces, sorry. Manufacturers pulling out and fields of independent teams, not really a great selling point. I’m sure it’ll be bumper-to-bumper as always, but will anybody care?

I don’t know what’s going on in MotoGP, WSBK, NASCAR or DTM, I’ve fallen behind on news. Then there’s the new GT1 World Championship, which might be good or it might not be. We’ll see.

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Moving on to this blog, I’d like to thank everybody who reads and comments here, it really does mean a lot and I hope you stick around into 2010. I plan to blog even more during this season!

I am planning to spend January reviewing the 2009 IndyCar and GP2 seasons race by race as part of the ‘Race Review’ feature. These entries are heavily delayed, initially by studying preventing me from watching them and then by other work or racing news getting in the way, however I should now have time to complete these posts albeit probably in a shortened form. I may well throw some other races in from time to time although we are quickly running out of off-season!

I am persisting with these despite the delay because I would like to refine them into a workable format ready for the coming season, and the best way to do that is to just keep knocking them out. Eventually they will be at the sort of length to get across the information without being overly long which they have been in the past, this in turn will mean I can cover more races.

Towards the end of the month and into February I will move into ‘Preview’ mode and cover the F1 car launches and tests, as well as any other interesting car launches and team news from elsewhere in racing.

I hope you join me on the journey of the 2010 season!

9 thoughts on “A New Year”

  3. Pat,Something I just thought of…When we were young'uns, BTCC was in fashion so to speak and we looked up to the Vectras, Mondeos, 3 Series and A4's with awe as we all thought we could buy a sporty version and be just like them who race in Touring Cars.Then Tuning, Drifting and the Fast and The Furious came along and all the kids suddenly wanted to go sideways with a picnic table on the back of a neon car. I just wonder how much this influenced the demise of TC and the rise of 2F2F?

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  4. BTCC was excellent then! I think cars like the Mondeo and Vectra were aimed at the sales reps and whoever else doing endless miles on the motorways, those people took to it because they could get the 'R' version (or whatever the sport models were called) and imagine they were bombing around Silverstone.The drifting / street racing scenes appeal to a different crowd, I think. More the kids without great prospects who can just buy a crappy Fiesta or Nova and spec it up to pretend they've got a Supra or 350Z. Or the people who do have Supras and 350Zs and think illegal street racing is cool (I've never seen the appeal).The other thing is rallying. The number of people from the late 90s until quite recently who suddenly got Subarus and Mitsubishis was amazing. That seems to have dropped off too now that those brands aren't rallying in a big way. I don't see them buying Citroens 🙂

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  5. Just had to chip in my two cents (pence?) on BTCC and touring car racing in general. I've been catching BTCC on Speed Channel this winter, and after having read about it semi-extensively back in the '90s (the heyday of the Mondeos and such that you guys mentioned; I rooted for the Mondeos, since my dad bought a Ford Contour in '95 when they came out here) in On Track magazine, I've been mightily disappointed in the show that the BTCC currently puts on. I'm not all that enthused by the mix of machinery in the '09 season, since the Vauxhalls have been so dominant in the early going, but maybe that gets better (I've been staying away from websites where I'd see results; I like to be surprised). James Thompson, Rob Collard and the Lacettis have been right up there as well, but it seems to always be a VX whitewash in qualifying and then Race 1, followed by the VXs getting back up toward the front in Races 2 and 3.This, I think, would be a little more palatable, though, if there appeared to be any rules in the series. If the factory Vauxhalls were just clearly better than everybody else, I can basically accept that, but it appears that anybody can use any tactic to get around a car in front of them, or keep any car behind. Just about everybody use dodgy tactics, but the VX guys have been a little more liberal about it than everybody else, especially Giovanardi.So, tell me, guys: are there any stewards employed by the BTCC? Is anything out of bounds in this series? Is this generally typical for British series, or European series, or is this a BTCC-only thing?

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  6. Andy, there are definitely lower standards in BTCC than any other touring car series. I've never enjoyed that aspect of it and it seems to have got worse this last decade.I don't know if you're also going to get WTCC on Speed, essentially the same cars but with MUCH cleaner driving. In some respects that's less 'entertaining' and doesn't make good TV which I suppose is why BTCC lets so much go on. They do issue penalty points on licences but don't publicise it well.VXR were the only real manufacturer team in 2009 which is why they were better, not that I've caught up on races myself yet! 2010 won't have ANY factory teams, which is ridiculous.I've never really liked these cars, either.BTW – Tuppence 😉

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  8. Hmmm, don't think we're going to get WTCC on Speed, so that's too bad. I'm less of a "beating and panging + passing = great racing" guy than a "cars going fast around a racetrack = awesome" guy, so WTCC sounds more my type. I'll probably see out the BTCC season since I'm so desparate for racing now, but I won't like it. ;)Penalty points, huh? Oooooooh. I'll bet that really deters people from punting other people off…

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  9. Thanks Ryan!Andy, there should be some WTCC on YouTube and the like although I think YouTube vids tend to focus on crashes. The racing is cleaner but accidents still happen.. but the manufacturer politics is worse and it devolves to petty sniping, so the series has its' own problems.

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