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...