Author: Pat W

Thursday Thoughts: Fan Attendance

Thursday Thoughts this this week comes from Adie at F1 Tailpipe:

What can F1 do to enhance the experience of fans in attendance at the circuit? Does the ‘exclusivity’ of the sport add to the mystique of F1 in general, or has F1 set itself too far apart from your Average Joe?

I can’t really answer the first question because I’ve never attended a Grand Prix in either a grandstand or general admission so I don’t know what is currently on offer – though I was lucky enough to watch the 2003 Monaco Grand Prix from a balcony over Ste. Devote! Perhaps the only thing I can suggest here is to lower the ticket prices. The cost of attending a race is just excessive. I’m going to the Belgian GP this year and it’s costing a lot of money, €340 for a 3-day ticket at Eau Rouge (which admittedly is one of the most expensive areas of the track). Imagine taking a family – well you just wouldn’t would you?

I suppose the subject of pricing leads into the other question, the reason for the high prices is the air of exclusivity. Bernie and FOM/FOA have deliberately spent the best part of the last 15-20 years turning F1 into an exclusive club of high-rolling teams, creating the Paddock Club for people to spend thousands to ‘be seen’ among the higher classes (and even that doesn’t grant access to the main paddock). I don’t have a problem with these – it was the right thing to do to move away from the the no-hopers filling the field – though I miss Minardi – and I hope we aren’t returning to the days of cars multiple seconds off the pace and threatening to fold.

What seems to have happened at the same time is a relentless rise in ticket prices for the general fan. While I appreciate that watching quality teams and drivers is worth paying a slight premium, we are past the point where this was a reasonable and understandable rise – and I mean a long way past, say ten years.

This has mainly come about because Bernie had the circuits sign up to high fees with an annual ‘escalator’ clause, and the only way they could get their money back was to raise prices. The problem is that while facilities for teams have improved, facilities for spectators in the main have not. At many race tracks you are still presented with a basic seat or an earth bank, a portable toilet, and a burger van. For facilities like that I wouldn’t expect to pay over £70 for a weekend and we’re being asked to part with much more.

I would say either the prices need to come down, or there needs to be ‘value added’ to make the money worth paying.

There are signs this is already happening. Many races offer concerts on the Saturday and/or the Sunday of the weekend which I think is a really good idea. For some of the names they bring in you’d normally pay £40 or £50 per ticket for a gig.

As I suggested in a previous Thoughts post, there needs to be more fan involvement in the GP weekend. Drivers should be made to hold a joint signing session in a public area of the grounds, or even more than one area, and preferably once or twice per day. There should also be a pitlane walkabout each day, whenever it can be scheduled in.

I am not sure what else could be done in terms of things that could be laid on as extras at no extra cost. More support races perhaps, but only the die-hards would care about those unless they were aimed at being ‘fun’ – let’s say we make the top F1 drivers race the top GP2 drivers in some production cars or perhaps in the Porsche Supercup cars. Do it at 10.30am Sunday, late enough for people to get to their seats but early enough that it doesn’t get in the way of GP prep-time for the drivers.

All of these are simple things that could be achieved with only a little effort and thought while retaining the cachet F1 should always have.

TMR Game – Week 3

Welcome to Week 3 of the Too Much Racing Game!

Don’t worry you didn’t miss anything – Week 2 didn’t feature any racing.

Quick-Start – * Warning – Early Cutoff *

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 WRC and NASCAR events. The closing point this week is early: 7am GMT Friday 12th February. You may pick up to 10 drivers with no more than 7 from a single series. Good luck!

* *

That is the latest I can hold the entry period – Rally Sweden’s first ‘proper’ stage gets under way at 7.18am GMT (8.18am Swedish time) and I don’t want picks arriving when competitors are on-course.

Please note for future weeks if this post has not appeared and you’re unable to wait you can email me your picks and I will publish them here. I am also looking for feedback on an appropriate closing times every week.

New?

If you are new to the game, it is simply this:  Make a weekly pick of up to 10 drivers from a mix of racing series.

You might be a specialist in one championship and know nothing about the others – it doesn’t matter.
You might think you know a little about lots of series but not enough to win – it doesn’t matter.

The game is just for fun, to see what would happen if you created a ‘pickem’ style game with lots of races, and is my way of spreading a little bit of knowledge of the racing world you otherwise might not encounter. Most of us when asked can name one rally driver, one IndyCar driver, one NASCAR driver, one sportscar driver – even if we know nothing else about the series. You’d be surprised how much you do know.

Don’t worry if you didn’t enter the first week – there was only one race and it will be easy to catch up.

Game News

I’ve created a sub-section of the blog for the game: https://toomuchracing.com/game/

You’ll be able to refer to that page to see the race schedule, a summary of the rules and the latest points standings. It is a work-in-progress at the moment and weekly updates and entries will still be via the main blog.

How To Enter

1. Reply to this post.

2. List up to TEN drivers. Remember you can only pick up to SEVEN from a single series (if you go over I’ll take the first seven in order).

3. Send your entry before Friday.

That’s it!

You can have any combination within the framework, so you could have 7 from WRC and 3 from NASCAR, or vice versa, or anything in between, e.g.:

WRC 7 6 5 4 3
NASCAR 3 4 5 6 7

This is the first week with more than one event and I’m intrigued about the different strategy choices you come up with, not just in numbers but in driver combinations. I wish you good luck! If you are not familiar with this week’s events, read on for some possible pointers.

Events in Week 3

Every week in this section I hope to provide a short paragraph about each race, a few options for people aren’t fans and are happy to guess, and a link to the entry list for those who want to make an informed choice.

There are two eligible events this week:

NASCAR Sprint Cup – Daytona 500, Daytona, Florida, USA

This is the first race of the long NASCAR season. A field of 43 drivers will contest the 500 miles and probably about half of those could pick up decent game points, but equally they could get wiped out in ‘The Big One’. Superspeedways like this are a bit of a lottery.

Daytona has a unique qualifying system and the front row has already been decided. Mark Martin is on pole with Dale Earnhardt Jr alongside him. The remainder of the field will be set via two qualifying races to be held Thursday night – though they could come too late for this week’s game cut-off, for most of us at least.

Some options:  Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Mark Martin, Dale Jr, Juan Pablo Montoya, Kyle Busch, Kevin Harvick. Here are the results from the most recent practice session as at Wednesday night.

World Rally – Rally Sweden

The first WRC round of the year is a snow rally and you are gambling on the drivers not ending up in a snow bank or sliding into a tree. This rally marks Kimi Raikkonen’s debut as a professional rally driver after some warm-up drives in lesser events. Is he worth a punt or is it too soon? Marcus Gronholm also appears in a one-off drive in a Ford Focus, in a well-run car in this event he loves he could do well. Note that Ken Block has NOT been entered for this rally.

Some options:  Sebastien Loeb, Mikko Hirvonen, Petter Solberg, Henning Solberg, Marcus Gronholm.  Here is a PDF Entry List.

WRC 7 6 5 4 3
NASCAR 3 4 5 6 7

The Importance of Social Media

First an apology: This is about Twitter. I know the world is going crazy for it and I know some people are sick of hearing about it, so to you I’m sorry. I hope you read on anyway because a revolution in reportage is occurring, and even if you don’t want to join in, you need to know what is going on.

The Importance of Social Media to the Racing Fan

This post can be summed up in one sentence:  Teams, drivers and racing series as a whole are more open than ever before, if you’re not on Twitter you’re missing out. Like all things though, there’s more to it than a simple sentence.

For me it all started about a year ago following in the footsteps of various IndyCar bloggers who’d announced they’d joined. I’d heard about it before, and their posts made me curious. At first my Twitter world was just myself and some acquaintances I’d met at different blogs and forums. That was pretty good because it meant we could talk without being in a chatroom feeling the need to fill dead air, without being stuck in a dying forum, and without having to check each other’s blog comments for updates. All good and as other people started following me and vice versa, so it started as a good way to connect with fellow fans.

Then the team accounts appeared, or rather I discovered them. Back then a lot of them were just link feeds, an alternative RSS reader purely feeding out links to website articles or Facebook fan page – unfortunately some still cling to this broadcast-only model. No interaction, no replies, apparently no reading of replies to them or of other people’s feeds. It smacks of making a Twitter account purely to tick off the list the entry marked, “Create Twitter Account”. Thankfully some had the vision to look further and a year later, all sorts of teams, drivers, series and a variety of writers, journalists, reporters and broadcasters are all on Twitter giving us an inside-view of their world, a world previously cut off from the public.

[picapp align=”left” wrap=”false” link=”term=Vision+Racing&iid=5013555″ src=”8/0/3/f/Iowa_Corn_Indy_107f.jpg?adImageId=10053954&imageId=5013555″ width=”380″ height=”253″ /]

Pictured: Ed Carpenter (Vision Racing) and Mike Conway (Dreyer & Reinbold Racing) at Iowa Speedway last year. Ed and the two teams are frequent tweeters, Mike signed up a couple of months ago but his account seems to have disappeared.

Two-Way Communications

A variety of teams in various series started to tweet more than just their latest article link or one-line announcement. For me this began at Sebring with Patron Highcroft Racing providing tweets from the track in the lead up to the event, and included several photos posted to TwitPic and copious tweets though the 12 hour race.

Vision Racing took this to a new level during the 2009 IndyCar season with updates and photos every few laps and even some pointers to their strategy! Others included Conquest Racing, Dreyer & Reinbold Racing, HVM Racing, Drayson Racing and LolaRacer who all did a good job, but in my eyes it was the combo of Vision and Highcroft that led the early running last season. Both not just live-tweeted the races but also provided a huge number of TwitPics from the paddock and pitwall and these photos really made you feel a part of the event, even when you were sat thousands of miles away. Even the supposedly distant and aloof Formula 1 teams got in on the act, with McLaren’s Fifth Driver and Force India’s Clubforce being the prominent F1 tweeters of 2009, hosting ‘guess the photo’ competitions and hosting live Q&As with the drivers.

Despite my opinion of Tony George and the apparent hypocrisy of running a team in his own series (as was) after what was said about CART teams back in the day, it is a real shame that Vision is being closed or at least stood down. Pat Caporali’s tweets from the pitwall showed how hard working and close-knit that team is and they should be in the field. Without those tweets I wouldn’t have known that, and they really opened my eyes. I still don’t like the George family, but I respect Vision for what they have acheived on a limited budget. Should Vision not return, the other teams – or the series itself – should hire Pat to carry out similar operations in 2010. As far as I’m concerned she led the way in showing how a team should use Twitter, and I’ve only seen one team PR come close to the same style and frequency of updates.

Step forward Claire Williams of WilliamsF1. A relative recent addition to the Twitter ranks, Claire has already opened a window into the team with TwitPics of Sir Frank rolling his way around the factory floor and so many updates (photos and otherwise) from the Valencia test sessions, not just about Williams cars and personnel but of others present too. I think the one thing Pat and Claire have in common is something Dan at Racing Eagles pointed out yesterday – they come across as fans who work for a racing team, rather than PRs promoting their team as their job. That is a crucial difference and it shows. The best tweeters read and respond to their followers, and both do this.

‘Names’

Lots of drivers also tweet, though be wary of the accounts operated on their behalf by their PR reps, accounts I’m convinced the driver never actually sees (hi Scott Dixon!). This is different to the account being updated while a driver is racing – that is actually a great way to bring across what the driver is feeling in the car. Perhaps the best exponent of this was Sarah Fisher’s account which Sarah used day to day and through which the ever-present Klint kept us informed of what she reported over the radio during the race. During the Bud Shootout on Sunday Connie Montoya was tweeting through husband Juan’s account.

Plenty of drivers keep us updated on their own activities. Tony Kanaan is such a frequent tweeter I had to stop following him because he was flooding my feed! Rubens Barrichello sent us pictures of his visits to Williams as he got acquainted with the team. Jenson Button seems only to tell us about his training. James Hinchliffe, JR Hildebrand and Pippa Mann are highly entertaining, especially when they tweet among themselves.

Then there is the media. Curt Cavin’s updates from IndyCar races have been very revealing and it seems Jonathan Noble, Edd Straw, Adam Cooper and many more will be doing this at F1 tests and races now. Noble wrote a great short piece as part of a wider update from Valencia, it is subscription-only but he makes the point that reporting has changed forever – waiting 30-60 minutes for an article to appear on the web is no longer enough and people now expect live reports from the ground. BBC F1 host Jake Humphrey’s photos from in front of the camera have brought a unique dimension to fore, showing how hard it is to make live television in a busy paddock on race day. Even F1 photographers such as @F1Photos are getting in on the act, offering a perspective brand new to me and I’m sure others. There are so many more examples and I wish I could highlight them all.

[picapp align=”left” wrap=”false” link=”term=Jake+Humphrey&iid=4381996″ src=”5/6/a/3/PicImg_F1_Mar_2009_a79e.JPG?adImageId=10089164&imageId=4381996″ width=”380″ height=”253″ /]

Pictured: BBC Sport’s Jake Humphrey, David Coulthard and Eddie Jordan

Downsides?

For one thing there’s Twitter’s notorious flakiness in uptime. This has improved massively during the last few months but is still prone to falling over during a large event. If it does so during a race, we’re back to how we were without it and being disconnected during an event feels like losing one of your senses! The extra layer of information can provide such a good mental picture of what is going on that you can feel blind without it.

Secondly, there’s so much information now flying around in almost real time it is almost impossible to make sense of my main feed during a race – and often even during breaking news stories. It is hard to follow it all.

Lists

To solve the latter point Twitter came up with the idea of lists. I have created a series of Twitter lists which I then imported into Tweetdeck (my choice of client – others can do this too). This creates a new column alongside your main feed showing only those items from people in the list, so you don’t miss that all-important bit of info from the journalist on the ground. It’s fair to say the number of columns is growing and itself could be unmanageable soon, so we’ll see if it turns out to be the elegant solution is currently appears to be.

My Twitter Lists (and others I follow) are publically available here and some are also linked on the sidebar of the blog. Feel free to follow them, or you could just scroll through and cherry-pick the tweeters you’d like to follow. Even better, you make your own list up of your own preferences. The point here isn’t to promote my lists, it is to let you know how useful the system is. Play around with it, do what works for you.

TMR Account

It is worth a quick mention of my account:  @TooMuchRacing
I’m planning to change the way I tweet during races. Last year I live-tweeted all of the F1 races and most of the qualifying sessions as well as some races in other series. That will change this year. I will still be using Twitter during events, though I now think one or two tweets per lap is excessive both for me as well as you. I found I was actually missing the race while I was on Twitter, in SPC’s comments or checking live timing,  so this year I intend to sit back and enjoy the races a bit more and tweet conversationally. Connected to this, I am also likely to cut back on the Race Review/Notes posts because the note-taking was also quite distracting. 2010 for me is all about enjoying the racing and not taking it so seriously.

Conclusion

I’m aware that many teams and drivers are opening up Facebook fan pages. This is great too, but doesn’t float my particular boat as I just don’t get on with Facebook’s news feeds and I’m not going to visit each fan page every day, that defeats the object. Twitter is different, you can easily add or remove accounts. It doesn’t take much for someone to update Twitter – just post and go. People can easily respond and reply to each other and have conversations. The level of information and knowledge coming out of pre-season tests this month is incredible and this will only increase as the racing season gets under way.

As far as I’m concerned you can no longer go through a race weekend without Twitter, you can’t even go through pre-season testing without it. You just have to follow the right people.

Thursday Thoughts: Your Ideal Team

Thursday Thoughts this week comes from Journeyer who asks:

If you were a team boss with 3 vacant seats (2 race seats and 1 test seat), who would you hire?

If I were a team boss in F1 with an unlimited amount of money, I’d want to pick a fast team of drivers but also ones who will get on well with each other. There is no point having animosity in the team leading to a split within the garage, we saw the damage that did to McLaren.

I would also want two potential race winners, perhaps one faster than the other, who would go for the title while the second can back him up should he falter. That’s not to be confused with a ‘team orders’ situation where the weight of the team is squarely behind one man. I actually think the line-up that would best fit this description exists already, at Red Bull. Vettel is marginally quicker than Webber, who is still under-rated for some reason. They would both be free to win races but I’d lean toward Vettel for the title run, just as the team did last year. If I were picking two guys to work together, I’d pick these two and it just so happens they are already teammates.

There are plenty of reasons why you would hire Hamilton, Alonso, Button or Raikkonen (or even Michael Schumacher). The only one that tempts me from that list is Button, the others just seem like too much hard work, too demanding in terms of preferential treatment. Yes, even Kimi.

My test driver would be an experienced hand who’s had a long career but is maybe looking to gradually find his way out rather than stop dead, and also knows how to set up a car. That’s why I choose Rubens Barrichello. He’d be my ‘third driver’. I’d also keep Anthony Davidson hanging around for testing and development purposes, I want to put him in a race seat and if when running him I find out why Mark is under-rated I can easily slot Ant into the seat.

Being a perfect world I’d move these drivers – and Adrian Newey – to Williams. I am a fan of Williams and it is time they were championship contenders again. Rubens can do his year of racing with them and then can move into testing. Of course, if Nico H turns out to be dynamite I reserve the right to change my mind about any of this.

So that’s who I would pick if my talent pool was restricted to current F1 drivers, but that’s not answering the question completely honestly. If I truly wanted my ideal team I’m going to do something radically different.

I’m going to hire Juan Pablo Montoya and Ryan Hunter-Reay.

Again at Williams because JPM should never have left them, and because Ryan is a born Williams driver if ever I laid eyes on one. Montoya’s never-give-up attitude struck fear into Schumacher himself, and if Michael is back I want Juan back. I’ve always been a fan of Juan, right back to the CART days. I think what he’s achieved in racing is fantastic and is criminally overlooked. Plus his new-found experience of tyre-management in NASCAR, where you have to nurse them, will help massively in the new-look F1 this year.

In the second car, Hunter-Reay is arguably the best road-course racer in IndyCar right now and is American too, which is what F1 needs, and I don’t care if it screws up IZOD’s marketing plan. Have him learn F1 for a year or two and then he can take over the title challenge in the 3rd year after Juan gets bored and does something else. RHR would make a brilliant F1 driver.