Author: Pat W

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.

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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?

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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.

Continue reading “TMR Game – Week 6”

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.
Continue reading “TMR Game – Week 5”

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.

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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.