Pat W

Off to Silverstone

I am going to the Autosport Silverstone 1000km today, the final round of the Le Mans Series and the first qualifier for what I suppose you could call the ‘trial’ Intercontinental Le Mans Cup, which this year is a series of 3 races comprising Silverstone, Petit Le Mans and a race at Zhuhai in China. The ILMC will be expanding substantially next season and could become the de facto ‘world championship’ in all but name for Le Mans-style racing, something that has been missing for many years.

The reason I am going is because it sees the first battle between Audi and Peugeot since Le Mans, it’ll surely be epic. I’m also going because I’ve never been to a race like it before and also because I need to see more live racing.

I’m not doing this to make a point. Unlike many other fans of sportscar racing I am not one of these snooty types who hold their nose up at Formula 1, there seem to be plenty in that community who take great pleasure in making their distaste of F1 known to all and sundry and making snidey sarcastic comments as if everyone agrees with them. In the 1990s it was cool for F1 fans to act this way about all other forms of racing. Thankfully I’ve noticed over the last couple of years this attitude has largely disappeared. It is a shame to see it rearing it’s ugly head amongst sportscar fans, a group I consider to be among the most ardent of motorsport fans and so a group I expect to have an appreciation of all forms of racing (even if they don’t like some of it). Unfortunately it seems some among RLM are guilty of this and I’m going to be very annoyed if I have to listen to that kind of diatribe all day on the tannoy or the radio (if I can find a radio).

I’m actually quite annoyed to be missing the Italian Grand Prix particularly with the grid the way it is and I’ve been agonising over whether I’m making the right choice. For the last two years I’ve bottled out in favour of watching Monza, this year after coming back from Spa I’ve got the trackside buzz back again and I want to get one more fix in before the winter arrives, so off I go.

It’ll be interesting to see how easy the race is to follow, I’ve heard multi-class racing is very difficult to follow in person. It should last about five and a half hours so I’m hoping to see the cars from many vantage points. I want to see the start from somewhere cool, either Becketts or Stowe, whichever I have time to get to. After that I’ll be wandering around the circuit trying out different stands, perhaps finding my way into the paddock at some point.

If you see me, I’ll probably be wearing a blue raincoat and a Goodwood hat, a bit like in this photo. In the unlikely event it is as warm and sunny as Saturday has been I guess you’ll have to just look for the hat.

I’ll be tweeting as much as I can during the day but I’m conscious of how much of my stupidly small data plan I’ll be using up, particularly after the continental trip. Since it is a little more than 3 hours from home each way you won’t see a wrap-up post until late evening or Monday, and I’ll probably save the full details until I’ve posted my Belgium wrap-ups.

Enjoy the GP and if you’re able to follow the LMS on Eurosport, RLM and live timing, enjoy that too.

2011 F1 and IndyCar Schedules

It has been quite the week for 2011 schedule announcements. We’ve seen the provisional calendar for Formula 1, a mostly-confirmed calendar for IndyCar as well as what appear to be firm line-ups for WTCC and BTCC. Leaving the tintops aside for a second, here are the important dates for fans of major open-wheel racing:

13 March: F1 – Bahrain;
27 March: F1 – Australia, ICS – St Pete;
10 April: F1 – Malaysia, ICS – Barber;
17 April: F1 – China, ICS – Long Beach;
1 May: ICS – Sao Paulo;
8 May: F1 – Turkey;
22 May: F1 – Spain;
29 May: F1 – Monaco, ICS – Indianapolis;
12 June: F1 – Canada, ICS – Texas (2 races);
19 June: ICS – Milwaukee;
26 June: F1 – Valencia, ICS – Iowa:
10 July: F1 – Britain, ICS – Toronto;
24 July: F1 – Germany, ICS – Edmonton;
31 July: F1 – Hungary:
7 August: ICS – Mid-Ohio;
14 August: ICS – Loudon;
28 August: F1 – Belgium, ICS – Sonoma;
4 Septemeber: ICS – Baltimore;
11 September: F1 – Italy;
18 September: ICS – Motegi;
25 September: F1 – Singapore;
2 October: ICS – Kentucky;
9 October: F1 – Japan;
16 October: F1 – Korea;
30 October: F1 – India;
13 November: F1 – Abu Dhabi;
27 November: F1 – Brazil;
tba: ICS – season finale venue tbc

It is a shame to see the loss of Watkins Glen and Chicagoland, but in their place we get Milwaukee, Loudon and potentially Las Vegas as the finale. It’ll be interesting to see if the trade-off was worth it. I’m a fan of Milwaukee but I’m not too familiar with the others – it must be said IndyCar fans took the Loudon (New Hampshire) news very supportively and the venue has been missed by many. The Baltimore GP alongside the ALMS will be another interesting weekend to watch for, the track looks promising.

This is a record number of Formula 1 events with the retention of every 2010 GP and the addition of India, however it remains to be seen whether Korea will actually hold a race either in 2010 or 2011. I’m quietly confident about India but Korea looks a shambles. Monaco and Indy on the same weekend is a good double for racing geeks like me, but I enjoyed having them on different weeks this year and allowing each the ‘media breathing room’ they deserve.

I’ll soon revisit my Google Calendars with the new information and also checking the sportscar races, but since these things are usually quite fluid this early in the going I’m in no hurry to do so. I’m also conscious I haven’t been very good at keeping them fully updated as changes have been made through the year, perhaps I’ll try to do better in 2011.

17/04  China
08/05  Turkey
22/05  Spain
29/05  Monaco
12/06  Canada
26/06  Europe (Valencia)
10/07  Great Britain
24/07  Germany
31/07  Hungary
28/08  Belgium
11/09  Italy
25/09  Singapore
09/10  Japan
16/10  Korea
30/10  India*
13/11  Abu Dhabi
27/11  Brazil

TMR Game – Week 33

Welcome to Week 33 of the Too Much Racing Game!

Quick-Start

Racing this week:

Formula 1 – Italian Grand Prix;
Le Mans Series – Silverstone 1000km;
NASCAR Sprint Cup – Richmond;
World Rally – Rally Japan;

Usual restrictions apply, pick up to 7 drivers in any individual race up to a maximum of 10 drivers.

The cutoff is Saturday 11th September at 4.59am BST (British Summer Time = GMT+1), that’s 11.59pm Friday night US EDT.

For the full results from Week 32, read on. Continue reading “TMR Game – Week 33”

2010 Belgian GP – Tuesday & Wednesday

Sincere apologies for the lack of promised blog posts. While I was away the wifi connection was seriously patchy, and we were all so busy throughout that there wasn’t much blogging time to be found. I then returned to work and had to catch up with boring post-holiday household activities, packing things away, washing and suchlike (not to mention sleep from the extensive walking and driving). The glamour of the Grand Prix!

Happily this is now done and I can now catch up on blog posts. With the state of my memory I’m going to forget something crucial but let’s see how things go.

Tuesday 24th

I was running around like a headless chicken in the morning, panicking that I’d packed enough of everything for the week away and that I hadn’t over-packed. Even though I’d never been I knew that with Spa being Spa you needed to bring enough that if your clothes in the day got drenched you could change into something else for the evening, and ideally you needed that for three days – but we couldn’t pack too much because of the space restrictions in the cars. I was also worried I’d forget something crucial, like the sat-nav or the camera. After fretting for a while I finally got going an hour late, thankfully I had a good run up to London, traffic was quite light with it being midweek in a school holiday so I made much better time than I expected and enough that I stopped for a coffee along the way.

The reasons for staying in London were two-fold. The main reason was to attend the Sidepodcast meetup in London, but it also had the nice side-effect of breaking up the long journey to Belgium. I was staying directly opposite a tube station, a half-hour ride from central London, nice and handy. I got to the pub at about 6pm.

It was a great night and surely the most-attended Sidepodcast event to date, there must have been 15-16 people at its height, probably approaching double the previous maximum. People seemed to be coming and going throughout, and we milled around and caught up with friends met before or got busy making new ones. Great chat with great people, and plenty of drinking! If you get the chance to go to any of the ‘Sidepodpubbing’ meetups in London (and hopefully elsewhere in future) you should do so, most of them are smaller affairs than this as it was a special pre-Spa one but don’t be put off because you’ll find some genuine friendly people at all of them.

Since we’re all regular SPC commenters who are mostly tech-savvy we’re also tweeters, so you could say it was an SPC ‘tweetup’ – the problem with this was the lack of any mobile or wifi signal at all at the venue. It wasn’t as ‘connected’ an event as it could have been. On the upside this meant we spent more time talking and less time looking at screens so it was a really nice social gathering, and it was really good to just hang out. I’d feared a lot of ‘dead time’ while people checked their technology and this was largely absent. It was also really good to meet some people I’d never met before, either because we’d not bumped into each other at other meetups or because they lived entire continents away.

You can see a photo here.

When the bar closed the meetup was officially over, though five of us weren’t ready to finish yet so we went on to a hotel bar for another few hours of drink and chat. I got the taxi back to my hotel at 3am and found the doors locked, I had to use my room card to enter through the car park! That’s how it should be of course, stay out so late nobody waits up. A brilliant night.

Wednesday 25th

The inevitable hangover. The pub meetup was originally supposed to be Wednesday night but was moved for a variety of reasons, one of them was so that there were no hangovers on the drive to Belgium on Thursday. It was a wise decision. I woke up late, struggled out of bed and on to the tube to Heathrow to meet a welcoming party for Gavin (a.k.a. RubberGoat) who was flying in after sadly having to miss the pub night.

Not having any plans for the rest of the day I latched on to a couple of others while a few chores and last-minute preps were done. In the early evening we found a really nice relaxed place to chat over a couple of pints, it was great to get caught up with Gavin again as it had been 18 months since we last (and first!) met despite knowing each other online for years. After food in a posh fish and chip shop our group of four headed back to Bassano’s for a final check of the next day’s plans.

This wasn’t to be a super-late night – the next day we were off to Belgium!

You can read the next instalment here.