What does 2011 hold in store for motor-sports?

2010 was a great year for motor-sports, no denying that. F1 was as good as I remember it being in a long time regarding the championship. The BTCC gave us a great championship battle too, with a record number of championship contenders on finals day. NASCAR gave us Jimmie Johnson's fifth title, making him an undeniable master of stock car racing. Arguably it was a great year for motor-racing.

So the question is, can 2011 live up to such standards?

I think it can. I am optimistic about the future of motor-racing, despite the onset of environmentalist attitudes and the need to be green, or at least seen to be trying. Long time readers know I think Hydrogen really is the future of the planet, and I believe that cost-cutting regulations and more teams means we can once more relive the "golden age" of motor-racing as such twenty or so years ago.

I believe the future is bright for sim-racing too. It has begun to be taken seriously as a competitive and challenging series. You only have to look at iRacing and its official NASCAR Sanctioned Series for that.

2011 is going to be a great year. Watch out for it!

The future of motor-sports multimedia

Well I was greeted by a very pleasant sight tonight. The NASCAR website was carrying a live webstream of its Ford 400 finale at Homestead.

This is, frankly, fantastic stuff. IndyCar have their own live stream for each race, and if NASCAR and ESPN keep going with this deal it would be great news for race fans everywhere. Already many people in the live chat are saying how great this is. Its clear that the fans are calling for live streaming, and it still amazes me how slow everyone's been to respond. The internet is the future, and yet it seems to be badly neglected - there's so much opportunity to do some cool stuff with it which organisers just aren't picking up on.

Earlier this year the BTCC qualifying was being shown live for the first time in what seems like forever on the ITV website. This is a great start, but couldn't we take it further? I've loved the F1 footage on the BBC website with practically every session covered apart from the warm-up. It means I get an almost comprehensive coverage of F1.

I would watch NASCAR so much more if I actually had the chance to watch it. NASCAR Live streaming gives me that chance and I'm taking it with every second of my life I have! What they don't get is that I want to watch NASCAR, but I physically can't.

I hope they continue this, for my sake and theirs...

The end of a racing year

It is that time of year again. The F1 Championship will be sewn up next week at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. My favourite series the BTCC has already crowned Jason Plato as its champion. The WTCC is almost over, with just the brilliance of Macau to do. IndyCar is over. Heck, even the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, which has one of the longest calendars in motor-sports, has just three races left.

And so once more the question arises - what do us motor-sports fans talk about? Many will point to the "Silly Season" - talking about the backstage stuff, who is going where, what the teams are doing, engineering developments etc etc. It might be me, but this hasn't been happening as much this year. Even if it was, I wouldn't be interested anyway, and especially not this year. I'm more interested in the racing, and even if I wanted to talk about backstage developments, there's not an awful lot to talk about. IndyCar have confirmed they want to go nowhere with their new base chassis idea for 2012, instead of doing what I think is arguably the most sensible choice, and going with Batman's car - I mean the DeltaWing. Okay, the BTCC are moving forwards with the new NGTC concept, which looks interesting, but is not anything ground-breaking. Although I admit it will potentially mean more cars on the grid, which is always a plus.

To be honest, I'll be retreating into the murky world of sim-racing, where the grids get larger and the racing more intense throughout the winter, as people find they have nothing better to do. Perhaps you should investigate such an activity further too...

Tension at Monza

So Button couldn't hold on, and Alonso overtook for the lead via the pits. A shame for fans of Button, but crucially, the championship is still wide open, with the points now standing at:

The green highlights those still able to win
the championship, with 25 points
for a win, and therefore a maximum
of 125 points left, with 5 races left

It means that there are still 8 drivers who could win the championship, with Kubica having to win the next 5 races to do so. A championship this open means that there is still all to play for, with the top 5 covered by just 24 points, one point less than just one race win. Jenson Button could've been higher, and in third, had he held 1st. However, we could still end up with either a new champion, or the 2008 or 2009 champion winning it again.

Exciting stuff for F1 fans, and it all means that the championship could very much go down to the wire.

Bristol, Tennessee

Its the big one - the NASCAR race I look forward to the most. And I don't even live in the country, I may not even watch all of it live!

For the uninitiated, the race I'm talking about is the Irwin Tools Night Race, previously known as the Sharpie 500. As the title suggests, its a night race of 500 laps, which comes to around a 266.5 mile race length. The compact and close nature of Bristol Speedway means that the action here is close, fast and verging on dangerous. In the Nationwide race recently, Kahne ended up driving on the concrete wall after being forced up due to the narrow nature of Bristol.

See y'all at the race!

In Defense of Touring Cars

Today I have decided to do something extraordinary - a post that is actually motor sport-related. I also write out of growing anger for those who attack all forms of touring cars in motor-sports, accusing them of being slow (an average of 100mph is slow?), outdated (again, how?), and even out of touch with the modern world, something which I vehemently disagree with.

Firstly, entertainment value. I struggle, really I do, to think of a single other form of motor-sport that is as fun to watch as Touring Cars. Drifting is pretty cool to watch, NASCAR is good to watch for close finishes, and F1...well, F1 isn't really watched for entertainment purposes.

Touring Cars have everything - they have overtaking. They have bold and bright liveries, and they even have crashes for those who like to watch crashes in motor-sports, and lets be honest here, although most of use wince and grimace at horrific crashes such as Mark Webber's "Gives You Wings" accident, crashes do add interest to what we're watching.

Secondly, speed. Lets compare average speeds between F1 and the BTCC, my personal favourite touring car series, both at high speed venues. Silverstone is regarded as being a reasonably fast circuit. The new Arena layout measure 5.891 km, with the new laptime record for 2010 being a 1:30.874. Doing the maths means that this comes out to give an average lap speed of 144 mph. Looking at Thruxton, a high-speed BTCC circuit, this circuit measures 3.793km, with the BTCC lap record being 1:16.369. This works out at an average speed of about 111mph.

So the speed difference between the multi-million dollar-sucking F1, and the so-called cheap and "pathetic" BTCC, on similar circuits in terms of how quick they are compared to other circuits on their respective calendars, is 33mph. Slow? Right...

And then when we look at the slowest circuits on the two calendars, the difference really does get rather sparse. In F1, the slowest circuit is arguably Monaco, with a length of 3.41 km, and a laptime of 1:14.439, which is a record nigh-on 6 years old. Laptimes now are now a little slower. This means an average speed of 100mph. Comparing this to the BTCC's slowest circuit, Brands Hatch Indy, the length is 1.22 miles, with a lap record of 48.857 seconds. This is an average speed of 91.5 mph. The difference is under 10mph. That's a bicycles-worth in speed.

So, they're arguably not that slow, and we now come on to the last point, which is how relevant they are to the modern world. To be fair, this isn't a comment that is made often, but I have seen it posted on the internet when people refer to its entertainment value, and label it "Boy-racerish".

Again, lets compare the two. F1 is a multi-million dollar business, with tickets costing a ridiculous amount, to see cars that have as much resemblance to your street car as a detached house. By comparison, the BTCC is all about racing cars that you can see and recognise on the street today. In terms of relevance, F1 doesn't even come close.

And I haven't even started on other forms of motorsport...

(Of course, the best way to compare would be to put both on the same track, but unfortunately the only way we can do that is in a video game like rFactor. This is something which I'll do in a later post)

BTCC or the WTCC?

Without question, these are two of the best touring car series on the planet - nothing else even comes close. So how do you choose between the two?

I am fortunate enough to watch both of these series, and must say it is very close. There is plenty of action to be had in both series, lots of good old-fashioned proper racing, very unlike anything you see in the likes of F1 and so forth.

Even the cars are similar, with cars such as the BMW 320si E90, Chevrolet Cruze, Chevrolet Lacetti and SEAT Leon featuring in both series. There is the Ford Focus which doesn't feature in the WTCC, and the Vauxhall's, but apart from these odd examples, most of the machinery is very similar. The laptimes set are very similar - something which can be easily seen with Brands Hatch.

The drivers then must be the deciding factor. Yet even these come in similar shapes and sizes. Drivers from both series are no-nonsense, hard touring-car drivers.

The BTCC may have less in terms of bureaucracy, but the WTCC has the variety of circuits.

Have you tried deciding? Perhaps the ultimate answer is not to decide, but actually to watch both. Which is probably most people do anyway, so apologies for wasting your time.

F1 comes home - who will win?

Finally, the greatest of the great roll back to Britain for one of the nation's highhlights of the summer - the British Grand Prix.

It looks set to be a fantastic weekend, with the newly revamped Silverstone acting as host, as it has for a long time now. And indeed the crowd certainly seems to be behind the race too, with a record number of people of around 85,000 coming just to watch Friday practice.

Yes, you read that right - 85,000. Eighty-five thousand. For Friday practice.

That's dramatic in itself, and will hopefully set us up for the rest of the weekend.

Common sense is dead. Long live logic.

This is starting to peeve me off so much that I've decided to write about it, so apologies in advance if this sounds like a rant.

Common sense no longer appears to exist in today's society (certainly in Britain anyway). All we ever get are rules, rules, rules, which must be followed to the letter! Its beginning to drive me mad. Things like small speeding offences take on the significance of genocidal proportions, whilst boy-racers screaming through at 100mph along narrow country roads get away with it.

Don't get me wrong here - I love motor-racing, and I love speed. But it has no place on the public road. Driving there is about comfort, smoothness and to an extent safety. Yet the common sense which used to rule this country just doesn't exist any more, in any shape or form. We are told to obey the rules or else - common sense is just assumed, and unfortunately stupidity or blindness is in its place instead.

I honestly blame this on the information age. We have gone completely overboard - computers have shoved us into the form of unthinking robots with none of that vital human thing - the sixth sense, heart, emotion - common sense.

And this needs to change soon. Or we'll have 30mph speed limits on motorways soon enough, I'm telling you now.

Should we have a World Cup in Motorsports?

With the Football World Cup soon coming to a close, I thought this would perhaps be a relevant question to ask. I have always thought it a shame that the A1GP never really reached its full potential, and sometimes I do think more people would be interested in a sport that they could relate to more, and a World Cup in Motorsports would be a perfect solution to this.

Think about it - how many people do you know who gain a sudden interest in football come the World Cup? Why shouldn't the same happen for motorsports - all it needs is a bit of time. If it hadn't been for the financial crisis, I reckon the A1GP had the potential to really compete with F1, the WTCC and the like. Perhaps its what the sport needs most of all.

This Blog is Still Alive

Sorry guys - time has flown away, and I haven't time to write a full story or post yet

I do however have several ideas in the pipeline, and they'll come up pretty soon, hopefully sometime this Friday.

The 24 Wrapped Up

Its what Le Mans is famous for. Unpredictability was out in force today, with the Peugeots of the front transforming into Audis. It was an incredible race, and although Mansell's car was out early on, it would be foolish to rule him out completely for next year (although you never know with racing drivers!)

It was another great year, shame we'll have to wait a whole year for it again, despite that making it even more special.

Normal articles will resume next week, with a quick look at Communism and Motor Racing!

See you there,

dyewat808

The 24 Hours of Le Mans - UPDATE #2

More retirements were seen in recent hours at the Circuit de la Sarthe, with one of the Peugeots unfortunately dropping out.

However, Peugeot still maintains its monopoly of the top positions, with the Oreca-run Peugeot car also up there.

The 24 Hours of Le Mans - UPDATE #1

Well ladies and gentleman, the greatest race on earth has begun, and the news is not good for racing fans.

Mansell and Co are already out, having a crash at over 200mph, and brought out a whole host of safety vehicles.

Peugeot are still out in front, with Audi already dropping behind

Car? Or the Driver?

An interesting debate has popped up on the backdoors of the Raceconnect.com forums, and although it was being applied to virtual sim racing, the same could be said of the real-world.

What makes someone drive quickly? The car? The driver? Or the setup?

Its an interesting question, and one whose answer could prove to be invaluable to series like F1, where there is little to no overtaking, despite oddities like the Turkish Grand Prix.

Perhaps its a mix of all three factors? Certainly, James "jab" Bennett of the Welsh Grand Prix blog seems to think so.

And to an extent so do I. Drivers are now so good, as they make so few mistakes, a primary reason of any overtake.

Yet the difference in the performance of the cars has a part to play, too. However, this is usually most applicable to the slower backmarkers.

And the setups - these are tailored to the driver, so to some extent, these represent a mix of performance of driver and car.

Whatever the answer is may prove to be a slippery figure. There were 5 pages on this thread last time I checked, certainly one of the longest I've seen on the rather small Raceconnect forum, so its proving to be a debatable subject.

What do you see?

Well, its a sad end for Monday evenings for me, as the rather good "Flashforward" drama, another import from the States, has ended, quite possibly for good.

For those of you who didn't hear, many shows are being cut from the schedule this year because of rising costs and falling ratings, in preparation for the networks to announce their new line-ups. Its a sad thing, because although I don't know about the other shows, "Flashforward" for me, deserved more attention.

Compared to rather more popular dramas like "Lost" and "Heroes", it was better written.

End of.

Why? It had a story that moved - a story that progressed, and didn't just continuously swim around in circles amidst its own glory, like "Heroes". Sure, at times, the acting was a little dodgy, perhaps "overacted" is the word that some people have used to describe it.

But I didn't, and still don't, care about this [and anyway half the time it simply wasn't true]. This is because I watch a drama for its story, and "Flashforward" had a brilliant one. Every episode, something different happened. The story was different in its very subject matter, too. Full of originality, it seemed [to me], to have so much potential.

It also played around with the themes of time. Never before have I been so absorbed by a TV show about the future. So many get it wrong, and have a simplistic plot where you can go into the future, or the past, do whatever you want, and then leave. Most TV shows use the idea of time merely as a setting.

Not "Flashforward". It played around and explored so many ideas about time - whether you could change your future, whether it was destiny and fate, or something else like free will. For such an original show to be dropped is nothing short of a tragedy, and amongst its fan base at least, it shall be sorely missed.

GP2 Hotlap at Istanbul

This event has now happened, but I thought I'd follow in the footsteps of the guy who was behind Checkpoint 10 - a great blog which is now longer updated. This is the sort of thing he used to do quite a lot:



Managed a 1:36.385 in the end, which is not far off the pace of the real-world cars, I think.

In the race (which was the day of this post), I managed pole position (!), only to lose it in the first corner :(. From thereon, I managed to take every place on the grid at some point. I eventually crawled back up to 7th!

Next race for me is Valencia. I'll post then!

New media, but terrible reliability? Count me out.

I am fascinated by the growth of so-called "social networking". It never fails to amaze me, its an incredibly infectious activity. Services like Twitter and Facebook just keep on growing.

Why is this? Why has this infallible medium caught on?

I think its because people are finally realising that the more traditional mediums of TV (and to an extent radio) are fast running out of ideas. They are lacking originality, focus and ideas. Sure, you occasionally get brilliance like "Ashes to Ashes", if you live in the UK, or perhaps "Lost" in the US (if you think Lost is brilliant, that is, and not just a load of made-up b******t!

And this worries me a lot, because traditional mediums of communications, such as the landline telephone, TV and radio, are all very....well....reliable.

The internet isn't. Its incredibly unreliable. Yet it is increasingly being relied upon as a means of communication.

Very soon, the total number of available internet addresses in the entire world will be used up. The total available number is around 4 billion. This is likely to be a small catastrophe. And this is estimated to happen in 2011. Thats a year away.

If we want to use the internet as the mainstream way of communication, it needs to be 10 times better than it is at the moment. Because I would rather watch my widescreen TV for motor-racing, than a Justin.tv stream, and I'm sure many of you agree with me here.

The internet has huge potential. But we have barely scratched the surface. Reliability must be the next step forward, as we simply can't have it both ways. We must invest, to make it worthwhile. Put it this way: I would rather have a reliable source of rubbish-ness coming to me from the TV, than unreliable, fuzzy, poor quality, excellence.

There's something to chew on.

Austin - the USGP - do these two phrases fit together?

Ladies and Gentleman, it has finally happened. The USGP is returning to the F1 calendar, come 2012.

And there appears to be a great deal of cynicism about it. Is this really justified?

Well, to be honest, actually yes it is. So far, new tracks haven't really delivered - the racing is, quite simply, just better at the traditional tracks. Certainly, the author of the Welsh Grand Prix Blog seems to think so. He's written 10 wholesome points on why the USGP at Austin simply won't happen.

And indeed, all of these points are correct. But does this mean we as motor racing fans want this Grand Prix to fail? For me, I can certainly say not.

Of all the locations in the world, I truly believe that a Grand Prix in America would be the best "new" location to visit. It has the fans, it has the money, and I would very much argue that it has the "right atmosphere" too (even if Bernie disagrees here, considering he said that fans at Indy were the "wrong kind of people" - bare-faced cheek that.

I would love to see a Grand Prix in Austin. Yet I would also like to see a Grand Prix on the moon. What both of these things have in common is they will either fail, or they'll never happen in the first place (though who knows with the moon?)

So, am I pleased about the USGP finally making a return to the F1 calendar? Yes, yes I am. But yet I am also equally depressed and skeptical about the whole thing.

How Big is the "Real Factor"?

News came out recently of TORA (an online racing association), gain full recognition from the MSA as a club. This means it is the first, and only such racing organisation to do so.

This is frankly incredible news for all sim-racers out there. It would finally seem that real-world motorsports bodies are starting to pay attention to the wealth of talent that is out there floating around in the form of electrons.

I say this, being an enthusiastic sim-racer myself. Laugh you may, but taking the mickey like that is exactly the thing I'm talking about - those kind of attitudes are finally starting to change.

I have always thought that new technology would eventually be recognised as being an integral part of society, and the fast growth of resources such as the internet has only proven my point.

The fact is that sim-racing is often highly realistic. Remember, we're not talking Race Driver GRID - we're talking serious, hardcore stuff here - sims like Forza, rFactor and iRacing. Indeed, iRacing is used by several real-world racers, such as Dale Earnhardt Jr. And its not just him, either. Drivers in the F1 world, such as Lewis Hamilton have admitted to indulging in such pastimes. Clearly, sim racing has had something to show for itself.

Indeed, this is a monumental step for the entire "sim" genre, and to an extent the mainstream videogaming community. I can now say with fair confidence that I can see a world where games become an integral part of mainstream culture.

Or perhaps they already have.

Consoles like the Wii (sorry!) and the Playstation or XBox have revolutionised the gaming world in general. 20 years ago, playing games was a little off the wall, a little nerdy, for want of a better term. And now things have changed on their head, and no-one has made any sort of comment about it! These things just gradually become integrated into our lives. This sort of thing fascinates me - this has just happened, without any kind of resistance.

This leads me onto my next point. How long do you think real-world racing will last now? With our primary fuel source fast running out, and the sport being seen as increasingly environmentally unfriendly, and its image fast degrading, how much longer will we see the BTCC around our favourite club tracks?

I ask, because I'm sometimes in that situation where I'm in an online race which is so exciting, so full of drama, and has so much overtaking, that I wonder:

Does the real thing still cut it?

The Future of Motor-Racing - the Delta Wing might just be it.

I know, I know - this is a bit of a weird topic to start a blog off with, but I think, a valid one.

I know also that a lot of people will hate me for saying that we need to recognise that Motor-racing should recognise its energy consumption issues, and that it is viewed by the general public as a boy-racer exotic hobby, and a symbol of excessive Capitalism.

Don't deny that - we all know that it can be mightily expensive, can be noisy, and occasionally, a little violent. And the only thing we can do to shrug off this badly-earned reputation is to move with the times.

Hard-core petrol-heads (gear-heads - whatever you want to call us) are often seen as a conservative bunch, as indeed many hardcore fans of anything often are. We complain about racing tracks being redone, and the cars being "not like they were before", and I do agree with much of this.

But at some point, we need to move on, and what better place to start than the fuel with which we power our fabulous pastime/hobby?

One day, sadly, the oil and the petrol will eventually run out. Motor-racing is often seen as the showcase of new technologies - the kinds of things that you eventually hope you'll see in a road car. Its why any manufacturer does racing - its a form of PR. And what better use for it than to advertise a new type of fuel?

Now, of course, I will get lots of abuse for even thinking that electricity will power tomorrows races, and this abuse will be badly misplaced, because I do not think for one minute mini-second, that electricity will be the fuel of the future.

I think the fuel of tomorrow, is hydrogen.

Why shouldn't it be? It's the most common substance known to man - everything else on this planet will be used up before the hydrogen is. You can't, for one moment, say that for the oil. Hydrogen is just as good, would be just as fast, and would allow us to once more pursue technological advancement in motor-sport, instead of going sidewards, like in F1 and IndyCar at the moment.

This isn't just about the fuel - its about the re-design of the racing car as we know it, too. Its why I'm hugely in favour of the IndyCar Delta design proposal for introduction in 2012.

And to be honest, if you care about the future of motor-racing, its why you should, too.

The Beginning of an Era

Welcome, Ladies and Gentleman to a new era in motor-racing commentary.

That, and other things not neccessarily related to motor-racing. This will provide you with an opinionated slant on things happening today in the motor-world. I'll try to cover many of the issues today, in as many series as possible, but I can make no guarantees. You'll also see the odd random topic that I've popped in because I feel like talking about it. That will usually come during the week.

Weekend posts will be pure motor-racing.

Another thing - this blog is linked (and part of) our sister site 4WheelSports - this is its official blog, if you like, with 4Wheels providing news and statistics.

Dylan Phillips (me) is also on Ten-Tenths, and I may link things between this and there with discussions on various topics. We'll see how it goes.

Enjoy it!