As part of the current round of the Blogger Swap Shop, I have written about the structure – or lack of it – of the European junior series. Given how often I complain on Twitter and elsewhere about the proliferation of series, you might be surprised to find I leap to the defence of many of them.
While you are there you really should read Leigh’s Q&A with Justin Wilson as well, its good stuff in which Justin is an actual human, there’s little of the usual PR stuff drivers frequently trot out.
As we set sail into this thing known as the motorsport off-season I can help but want to write a piece on how… boring… it is.
Truly, we don’t need to extend the seasons of Formula One, IndyCar, Rally, and for the love of all that is holy do not extend NASCAR. The problem isn’t the timing of the off-season, but that there is a literal break in action for about 3 months; and let’s not pretend testing and “Silly Seasons” suffice. For now I and many other await the 24 Hours of Daytona.
Do we wait because it’s a great and amazing event? Not really, we wait because it’s the unofficial beginning to the motorsports year, by containing drivers from 7-8+ different series providing almost an All-Star type nature. That’s what we’re missing for the off-season; something that fills the space of November/December/January (possibly even February).
We’ve recently lost A1GP which was out best bet, but it was run so poorly and spread out that I lost its way and died. The Race of Champions is getting better, but its own announcers are unsure of how it operates, rules, and no one is allowed to watch it live (without going the extra mile). In the USA we have major Karting events that pull All-Star type rosters, but the SKUSA Super Nationals were held the week before ROC, so even with these off-season events, we’re still stuck in a lull.
What Do We Need? We need a proper international all-star series. And it needs to not be an expansion of ROC, A1GP or the U.S.’s former IROC series. Instead it needs to pull from all of them, it needs:
Multiple Race dates and locations (happening ONLY during the off-season of major series). A1GP had one thing truly correct, multiple dates touring internationally, with the qualifier that a country needed a “horse in the race” in order to host. It doesn’t need 15 rounds, but anywhere from 4-8 would suffice.
Competition via Nations: A1GP and even ROC has proven this to be the most effective route to make fans/onlookers pay attention to something new/foreign. Anytime you can quickly look and see national flags, it’s easy to pick a rooting interest, regardless of having to know the participants. But there is something neither A1GP nor ROC have done, and that’s requiring the different nations to form a line-up of drivers. Ireland won A1GP using only a single driver, Germany wins ROC using two; essentially it’s not a countrywide effort. So…
Force roster building and usage: Let’s say there are 7 race weekends involved. At each weekend there are two scored events (14 in all). Here’s the rule, each nation must field 6 different drivers in scoring competitions minimum (no maximum). This means Schumacher can’t run 100% of the events for Germany; at most he could run 9 of the 14. It needs to be more like the Ryder Cup in golf, or Olympics; countries need a strong roster, not just 1 person who holds it all up. Secondarily, it’s also so countries like USA, who have a MASSIVE/DIVERSE set of drivers to choose from, can get many of them in there; this year at ROC we were stuck (again) with Carl Edwards, a debatable-at-best champion, who went a whopping 0-4. This also means that a driver doesn’t have to go to all 4-8 rounds; they can just do one and then let countrymen pick up other dates if they have other commitments.
Competition diversity. This goes along with the schedule, but the rounds should tailor themselves more to helping the many kinds of drivers involved. A1GP was too strong for European drivers, ROC is at least better, but how about a round in the USA that resembles Rally X/Rally America; how about a round in Australia that more resembles V8 Supercars and some dirt buggying? ROC has many cars lying around, as does the former A1GP, which is for sale; and Rally cars aren’t hard to round up.
It needs more drivers/countries. ROC had a whopping 6-1/2 nations represented, not enough. Where were Scotland, New Zealand, Australia, and Brazil!? A1GP at least had that better covered, and it worked great because it let you learn about other countries and their drivers and driver’s backgrounds when they come from other countries.
Lastly, It needs a way for people internationally to watch, without having to pay additional money than what they already pay for internet or TV.
Now… someone with a lot of money, go and do this! I speak broadly above, but hashing out these details are not hard, I’ll do that work, just ask me to, we’ll all be a lot less bored if it can be done
Late on Friday night saw the recording of the latest in the occasional ‘Sidepodchat’ series at Sidepodcast.com, and I was one of the lucky people to appear. The concept is a short 10-minute show in which Christine and Mr C chat with a small panel of guests about a particular topic or theme. This week’s other guests included some of your other favourite bloggers like Gavin and Lukeh and SPC commenters Steven and Bassano
This Chat’s theme was the Renault F1 team and specifically the driver line-up for 2011. Who will join Kubica? What is the future of the team? It was fun, it always is! Keep an eye out for future editions, who knows you might even appear on one soon – anyone can.
Be sure to check it out here, at 12 minutes in length you have no excuse not to.
The three new teams made quite an impression on F1 this year. What do you think they brought to the sport? How would the year have been without them? Better or worse? – Thursday Thoughts question of the week
The three new teams have done a remarkable job over the last 16 months or so, starting entirely from scratch to run just 3 to 4 seconds off the frontrunning pace when many predicted they’d struggle to get within 7 seconds or so (which was their testing pace). What’s more they maintained the gap to the front despite the intense development of the championship teams, admittedly they could do so without the minute detail of the top teams.
In competitive terms they’ve really added an extra dimension to the season, they were each fighting and scrapping hard to not be the slowest of the slow and it got desparate at times! It was a race within a race, and it didn’t matter that they were 3 laps down in most races – I did think they jumped for blue flags a little badly quite frequently, coming to a complete stop seemed very dangerous to me and in my opinion caused the Webber crash in Valencia. That was my only real criticism of them.
Without them the back of the field would’ve seen Force India vs Toro Rosso vs Sauber until they improved themselves. Might have been good, these teams all have their fans which is all well and good but we’d be judging them on past form, so I reckon all three would’ve looked very lame indeed. I think we’d have seen line-up changes at more than just Sauber.
* Lotus have progressed amazingly from nothing last summer, to fielding a car within 9 months, to becoming the fastest and (largely) most reliable of the trio although they’ve suffered from hydraulic and other issues. The switch to Renault engines and Red Bull back end should propel them into the realm of the ‘existing’ teams, the added year of car development from people as good as Gascoyne and his team will surely do nothing but help too. The open-ness of Fernandes, Gascoyne, Kovalainen and various other team members as well, has been truly remarkable and particularly on Twitter. I hope they remain Lotus but if they don’t I’ll still be a fan.
* Virgin too are doing very well. They don’t have the experienced F1 unit of Gascoyne’s ex-Toyota crew although I’m sure they’d have recruited several experienced people by now. To design and manufacture an F1 car entirely digitally and have it some vaguely near the pace is a great achievement, especially when you consider the Virgin deal came fairly late in the gestation period. They are convinced they’ll make a jump forwards in the second year, I’m sceptical but then almost everybody was sceptical of them making a car at all, so I’m looking forward to what appears in February/March and I hope they are right. They’ve also got a great and pro-active Twitter presence. The flair of Richard Branson combined with the no-nonsense attitude of John Booth ought to be a match made in heaven. They’ve had far more than their fair share of hydraulic failure and this has cost them very dearly in terms of results. Reliability should remain a focus.
* Hispania have had a bumpy birth but they’ve proven everybody wrong and not only started the year… of sorts.. but also finished it, and finished it without being last (on quality of results). While they were the slowest team all year I really do think the Dallara chassis was better than it looked, sure it had a lot of problems as identified by Geoff Willis with fundamental design flaws, but it wasn’t inherently slow, it was just rushed. Production was stopped for a crucial month while Campos was ousted by Carabante. The car was not developed at all after relations with Dallara broke down during the year – they even ran the same wing design at every race, even at Monaco and Monza. You have to assume this car properly set-up and tuned and developed will have run Virgin close if not beaten them. Will we see them back next year? We will if Colin Kolles has anything to do with it. Of the three, this is the team I am most worried about for 2011 – they seem to have no car for next year other than the ones they already own. They could still end up being very embarrassing.
USF1 did actually fail, and spectacularly so. Stefan GP never really got going.
All three surviving new teams are very welcome and I hope Hispania survive even if they become the new Minardi. I loved Minardi’s spirit in the days before they became Paul Stoddart’s political plaything, they always kept going in the hope of future investment, no matter what troubles faced them they found a way through.
They’ve brought added competition, potential for the future, employment for paid drivers (and pay drivers who in reality aren’t all bad compared to standards of the past and of elsewhere), a vastly more open culture and attitude toward fans and sponsors alike, and very expensive merchandise. Get faster cars and affordable merch and I’m happy, long may they stay.
I Watch Too Much Racing 