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.