F1 blogs review: Flight difficulties

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“Flight difficulties” have caused the FIA to postpone Nigel Stepney’s date with them to discuss the small matter of why he felt compelled to give 780 pages of information about Ferrari’s car to McLaren.

Also in the F1 blogs this week the Singapore Grand Prix ticket hotline sees huge demand for tickets to the night race and reported problems with McLaren Electronic System’s standard engine control unit. Read on for more.

Stepney to meet with FIA – Eventually.

F1 2008 team launch reviews – Which team had the best launch? See them all here: Ferrari, McLaren, Toyota, BMW, Renault, Red Bull, Honda and Force India.

Doffing the budget cap – Why forcing the teams to spend less won’t work.

Huge F1 demand for Singapore GP – High volume of enquiries crashes Singapore Grand Prix ticketing service. This either means the race is really popular or their ticketing service sucks.

Alain Prost wins second consecutive Trophee Andros championship – Alain Prost now has four F1 titles and two ice racing titles to his name.

Yours Trulli – Why Jarno Trulli should get Felipe Massa’s seat at Ferrari.

F1 – Totally cool – Lots of pictures behind the scenes with Red Bull.

29 days until the 2008 Australian GP – the countdown continues at F1 blog.

Look-alike: Felipe Massa vs The Fonz – Does what it says on the tin. Ayyyy!

Stealing the start – Italian magazine Autosprint suggests there are problems with F1’s standard ECU.

…and if you’ve had it with the racism story, stop reading now.

What’s wrong the colour?

Lost in translation

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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10 comments on “F1 blogs review: Flight difficulties”

  1. I think, and I might be wrong about this, but wasn’t it the FIA who couldn’t get their ticket sorted rather than Stepney?

  2. The Singapore ticketing … The easiest excuse is to blame a mess up on huge demand …

    Why so many people tried to buy tickets right at the start of the ticket sales ? Because all of them expected the huge demand … Everybody expected that except the ticketing company …

    They simply did not do a right job, that’s it … There was no back up plan, they did not even bother to put up a message on the web saying that the system crashed and ticketing will resume then and then … Or to change the message on the telephone hotline, that kept asking people to go online to purchase tickets …

  3. Just to put the Singapore debacle in perspective, I started trying to get tickets at 9 AM (I am in the same timezone as Singapore), and the system duly crashed. I got in a couple of times (as in 2 times in 9 hours), only to run into errors (and duly get booted out of the system both times). The 10-minute time limit to pay for the reserved seats didn’t help any, either (especially with the system being VERY slow). Finally, I was lucky to slip into the system (which at this point had been moved to a backup web server) right after one of its hourly crashes at 6 PM and nab a pair of tickets (at the marina grandstand).

    From what I’m reading, many, MANY others were nowhere near as lucky.

    Milos, you hit it spot on. (Were you also trying to buy tickets?) There was no coordination, and there were no backup plans. Not even the phone operators knew what was going on! At one point, they were giving a disclaimer at the start of every call (assuming you can get through), saying that they cannot guarantee that they can get you tickets. As an IT professional, the Omnimedia ticketing system was awful. Its development seemed very haphazard and it isn’t very user-friendly (especially when errors come out).

    And here’s the saddest part. From what I gathered, they managed to sell a thousand tickets at the end of day 1. They would’ve sold a heck of a lot more if it didn’t keep crashing so often. So many people just got pissed off and decided not to bother. Will they come back? Hopefully, yes. But whatever happens, the damage has been done to the reputations of both the GP organizers and Omnimedia. They’ll have to do a LOT better than this come September.

  4. I hope the guy who designed the ticketing system isn’t responsible for the lighting

  5. Nope, he’s not. Philips will be the one designing the lighting, from what I know. :)

  6. Oh, Alex, you’re right, it’s the FIA who had ticketing problems, not Stepney. :)

  7. Yes you’re both right and I’ve fixed it. Thanks for the spot!

  8. I enjoyed the blog post on Trulli joining Ferrari; I think it would be a good fit. Not to mention having the chance to see what Jarno could do in a top car.

  9. I live in the UK and when my wife and decided we were going to try for tickets to the Singapore grand prix i stupidly thought it would be easy. After refreshing the website for over 2 hours i miraculously got through only to have it crash on me when i tried to pay! Thankfully though it seems my transaction did go through as i got an order confirmation and the money left my account a couple of days later.

    i very much doubt this’ll taint the organisation of this grand prix or future singapore grand prix. Its the racing people remember! It would be cool to hear from other fans who have tickets to the Singapore grand prix.

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