Category: fans

Write to the Top

The new CEO of the Indy Racing League, Randy Bernard, will be taking his seat in his office on March 1st.

Let’s send him a letter.

This is the new era of fan interaction. Various different series and teams are paying attention to fans more than they ever have done before, whether by survey or direct interaction via Facebook or Twitter. What’ll get his attention on Day 1 better than a stack of letters from the fans? Okay so maybe they won’t reach him, maybe the PR or marketing people will get them – it doesn’t matter, they’ll note the increase in correspondence and hopefully someone will read some of them.

Bernard appears to have a proven record in growing a sporting property from absolutely nothing to something rather much bigger. The IRL/IndyCar needs those skills, badly. Okay, IndyCar has something of a fan base, it has a history and all the rest – but how much of that does he know? He openly admits he’s coming to this raw, no prior knowledge. Let’s tell him what we like about IndyCar, and what we think may need adjusting. We want to make sure he doesn’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

Before you go any further, be sure to remember to be courteous and polite, like not sniggering at his humourous name, nor ranting and raving like a blogger fool. Nobody wants to receive a note that reads like it comes from the middle of a flame war on a forum or a blog. Pressdog wrote some nice guidelines, let’s stick to those. We should welcome him.

Nothing works better than a bit of paper landing on your desk. It’s more personal.

Here’s his address:

Randy Bernard
CEO, Izod IndyCar Series
4790 W 16th Street
Indianapolis, IN 46222

Now, I’m in the UK and I’m not sure whether I’ll use traditional mail (I probably will). But if it doesn’t float your boat, you can always send an email via the website’s contact form:

http://www.indycar.com/contact/

Give it some thought and send him a note. I’m having a think and I will send something in shortly.

*

If after that you are still in a letter-writing mood, pop along to Vision Racing’s Facebook page to see how you can help them convince existing and potential sponsors to back them and resurrect the team for 2010, before it is stood down completely.

And finally, be sure to VOTE on the chassis proposal you favour. I hope to write about those proposals soon but I’ve found myself short on blogging time recently.

Remember, this is the new era of fans being heard, so make the most of it!

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.

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: Borrowing Ideas

This week’s Thursday Thoughts question comes from the intriguingly-named Turkey Machine:

What features or regulations from other racing series would benefit F1, and why?


Sounds like my kind of question! Generally-speaking F1 does a good job, yet there are areas from other series it can learn from.

Openness
F1 is notorious for its secrecy. On the one hand it has been an integral part of the game for many years. On the other, we are in a different era now and fans expect a certain degree of openness, and thankfully some F1 teams and drivers are responding, with Twitter accounts and roadshows and so forth. But what at a GP weekend? BMW had the Pitlane Park, and I think it was Indianapolis that pioneered the pitlane walkabout at an F1 race (it having being commonplace in US racing for years).

Other series are still far better at this than F1. I recognise this is semi-deliberate in order to retain F1’s percieved ‘superiority’ and ‘exclusivity’ compared to other series, yet I feel it can be more open while still remaining top of the pile. How?

Let’s have a pitlane walkabout at EVERY Grand Prix, and on EVERY DAY of that GP. There isn’t a packed race schedule at most events (exceptions I think being Albert Park and Silverstone) so time can be found. You can mandate that teams must leave their garage doors open and unobstructed during the walkabout – because as we already know from past walkabouts, some teams put up screens. Some time before an ALMS race starts they line the cars up on the pit straight and allow the fans to walk up and down the straight, taking photos and meeting team personnel and drivers. I’m not necessarily suggesting going that far, but it could be an option.

Then let’s bring in mandatory driver signing sessions in an area outside Bernie’s security wall, with a fine for those who don’t show. This seems to go down very well in IndyCar and NASCAR. I’ve read reports of murmurings from some drivers that ‘extras like this aren’t part of their job’. If any drivers still feel this way, they need to have their attitude adjusting. They are paid millions in order to show their teams and sponsors off to the paying fans, they should give an hour of their time on a Sunday morning to meet them and let the fans get to know them. I argue that if a fan gets to meet their favourite driver they are more likely to associate themselves with that driver’s sponsor/s, whereas if the driver brushes them off that fan may decide to lessen their support or even drop it completely.

Media
HD TV needs to come in and it needs to happen immediately, from Bahrain onwards. No more testing the systems or whatever they are doing. We’ve been promised it every year for the last three or four and the excuses are wearing thin. IndyCar, NASCAR and even World Touring Car are in HD. Admittedly the other series that have gone HD have close relationships with broadcast partners, and F1’s coverage is produced in-house by an subsidiary of FOM – yet surely FOM makes enough revenues to be able to make this investment. I know, because they’ve blogged and tweeted about it, that the broadcasters are pushing hard to have an HD feed released to them – they can’t show what isn’t there. HD channels are currently ‘upscaling’ the standard feed.

The F1.com website needs improving. It is getting there, yet other series sites have tons of photos and videos available, either free or paid-for. Live timing is reasonably good though there’s room to include more information as some other series do.

Consistency of Rulings
Okay, I know you’d be hard-pressed to find a series anywhere that has consistent decision-making when it comes to things like penalties for blocking or running someone off-track. Wishful thinking. It would be nice if they could keep the decisions consistent, whatever those decisions are.

Finally, I’d make the numbers on the cars bigger. Maybe take up the whole rear-wing endplate like in IndyCar. Have you tried identifying drivers by looking at helmets? It’s not always easy.

TM went on to expand to a further question, let’s see if we can answer that as well:

If you can’t think of any that way, what about vice-versa, i.e. what’s F1 got that would benefit other borefests (sorry, motor racing series) around the world?

Certainly with IndyCar and NASCAR I’d bring in the yellow flag rules – don’t throw a Safety Car out there just because a car slowed down for 10 or 20 seconds and cleared the track immediately. I can see why you would do this on ovals where the speeds are so high and laptimes are 25 seconds – on road courses you definitely shouldn’t be going to a full-course yellow unless there’s a car in a dangerous position. It seems both IRL and NASCAR apply their rules to both types of track rather than making adjustments for each, which is a mistake. On a road course you usually have a bit more time and a bit more leeway to let the incident develop and see if it clears itself.

I wouldn’t necessarily take F1’s safety car procedure though, F1 has never really got the hang of when to deploy the car, or run the wave-by.

The producers of the TV feed for most series could probably learn how to cover a race, certainly a road course race, from the FOM crew. The way F1 races are shot is generally very good these days, this has been one of the biggest improvements F1 has made over the last ten years I think and that’s all down to bringing it in-house, not relying on ‘host broadcasters’ as we used to.

Great question. There’s bound to be plenty of other suggestions, feel free to add them either here or in a blog post of your own.