World of Racing: 16 Jan 2011

Links posts. Often useful, these can sometimes be seen an easy route to blogging, simply sharing what’s around as a way to have something on your own blog. Never one to shy away from stealing a good idea which lazily gives me content, I present ‘World of Racing’, my interpretation of the ubiquitous links post!

I’ve noticed many posts in this style focus on one championship, so you’ve got F1 sites sharing F1 links and IndyCar sites sharing IndyCar links, which great and these blogs do it very well indeed, but I don’t see many cross-motorsport blogs doing the same which I think is odd. Whilst it is true many fans focus on one series as their preferred championship and they might not watch all the races of other series or read the dedicated blogs/news sites, perhaps they are interested enough in other championships to watch the occasional race, catch up with a bit of gossip or read an interesting post on the topic. That’s where I hope to come in.

Let’s get started with the first set of links!

• Cheerio, Captain Obvious and ESPN + WRC = WTF?
  Dank is on form with a couple of good posts here. The first is a goodbye to everyone’s least favourite F1 commentator (since the last one), and the second is about the disastrous decision by the WRC’s promotors North One Sport to shunt UK TV coverage from a free-to-air channel to a subscription channel.

• Life As a Motorsport Mum – Lukeh secured a guest post from Chitra Chandhok, the mother of occasional F1 driver Karun Chandhok. No, wait! This isn’t some puff piece on why her son is the best driver around, far from it. This is a funny and highly entertaining account of what it is like for someone completely NOT interested in motorsport to marry into a racing-mad household, and to raise a son aiming to reach Formula 1 (and another aiming to reach the top level in cricket). Do read it.
  Separately, 2010 was the year F1 caught up with the Twitter craze, one of best and most enthusiastic driver-tweeters to emerge was Karun, not long after that Chitra joined too and she began working the fans like anything (including providing a curry recipe to Grand Prix Diary).

• Staying with Twitter, IndyCar’s participants led the way as some of the earliest adopters of the service in all of motorsport. Pressdog has written a brilliant 5-part series on the history of IndyCar on Twitter including the first forays by Pat Caporali (then of Vision Racing) and a small group of others, right up to the present day when practically every team and driver has an account and there’s a huge fan and blogger community there too. Other series are catching on as well. I know 5-parts sounds a lot but it is worth a read through. Start here. There are links to the other parts at the end of each post.

• Tweaking NASCAR’s Shootout… Just A Little Bit More
  Years ago Daytona’s pre-500 race, the Bud Shootout, was for the previous season’s pole-sitters plus winners of past Shootouts. NASCAR has opened up the criteria for qualifying yet again, it seems to be an annual thing now to loosen up the rules a little bit to allow more drivers in. The Speedgeek posts at Grab Bag Sports to suggest further ways in which they could spice up the action.

• IndyCar’s Slate of Changes – Point | Counterpoint | Tangent
  Speaking of GBS, if you missed the fantastic positivity from IndyCar’s ‘State of the series’ conference in the week, have a read of this wonderfully accessible summary with reaction from the whole Grab Bag Sports team, including Mike who doesn’t even watch racing. We can put men on the moon but we can’t make Mike watch a season of racing.

• What on Earth is the A10 World Series? – Amid the pending launch of yet another open-wheel championship, Leigh asks what is going on with the little-publicised A10 World Series. Hardly anything is known so far and this is a good discussion of just what it could be, and where the chassis and engines could come from.

• Weekly World of Sportscars, 1.13
  John Dagys of SpeedTV writes a weekly post rounding up all the latest news and results from sportscar racing, including ALMS, LMS, GT1, GrandAm and various national series. If you are a sportscar fan you MUST include this column in your rotation. This week’s 3-page edition covers the new Porsche 918 RSR and where it could race, a great piece on ORECA, the changes in the ACO’s automatic invites for Le Mans, and a goodbye to the Porsche LMP2 car.

• Track Back – Autodromo Nazionale di Monza
  Adam has been writing a fantastic series of posts about race tracks of the world at Sidepodcast. Being primarily a Formula 1 site you’d expect a focus on F1 tracks but that’s not the case at all, the series has also included the likes of Bathurst and Road America. This week’s post is about the legendary circuit of Monza.

• F1 Debrief – Expect Nothing But The Best
  The first Debrief podcast of the year was released late last night and includes talk of Force India, FOTA, Lotus-Renault (Enstone) and their dealings Autosport, and plenty more.

• Take a look at PopOffValve’s own regular links post The Paddock Pulse for a weekly roundup of the best in IndyCar blogging. VivaF1 used to have a regular roundup of F1 links but Jackie seems to have stopped doing them – start doing them again!

• Finally, it is great to see Meesh blogging again, unfortunately she also brings some sad news. I urge you to please read the story of Dave and Linda Woods.

I hope you enjoyed these posts. This roundup got very long very quickly! The aim is to do this every week on a yet-to-be-chosen day to be figured out when the season starts properly.

*Disclaimer: I don’t always have time to read everything, if you see something good just mention it in the comments!