F1 Fanatic redesign coming soon

F1 Fanatic round-up

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Thanks for all your feedback to the proposed changes to the website yesterday. As ever with the kind of thing it ran the gamut from positive to negative but I’ve taken your ideas and concerns on board and they will have a bearing on the final design and layout.

The second part of the Jackie Stewart interview will be on the site later today. In the meantime here’s today’s round-up:

Links

How To Shoot An F1 Car In 3D (Jalopnik)

Ferrari fans get clicking – lots of gorgeous pictures of a 1980 312 T5 being shot for a forthcoming 3D film.

Mosley rules out return to motorsport (BBC)

“I think my F1 days are finished and I’ve moved on to other things. One should never go back.”

Comment of the day

Yesterday Jackie Stewart told us F1 “wouldn’t be what it is today has Bernie Ecclestone not been here” but DGR-F1 doesn’t agree:

I think F1 exists as it does as a result of the work done by Ferrari, McLaren and other teams in the past who keep the history of the sport alive and make the connections with past and present racing achievements.

Bernie is doing nothing to make the sport interesting to new manufacturers, does nothing to help new teams or drivers, seems solely interested in the big bucks and the flashy venues, and has driven ticket prices out of the reach of normal wage earners.

He might not actually be conspiring to lose Spa, Monza or Silverstone, but he won’t lift a finger to help save them, and yet will be complaining next year that he now has too many venues to chose from, even though he is the one who makes the deals.
DGR-F1

From the forum

Here’s a huge post from Nik asking some interesting questions on ‘feeder series’ into F1.

Happy birthday!

A very happy birthday to Striay and Gavin Brown!

On this day in F1

Michael Schumacher scored his final win for Benetton in the Japanese Grand Prix 15 years ago today.

In a typically crushing 1995 performance he started from pole position and set fastest lap on his way to victory.

Damon Hill, who he had already beaten to the championship, spun off in the tricky conditions.

Author information

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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31 comments on “F1 Fanatic redesign coming soon”

  1. Is it a coincidence that the day Max Mosley breaks his long silence I spot a News of the World advert at the top of the page?!

    (the headline was about a footballer ‘bedding £800k hooker’… that paper really loves its prostitute scandals)

    1. Ha! I got that one too. :D

    2. I have We Buy Any Car, which I guess is meant to be a HRT reference.

    3. indeed Ned, all that paper reports on is who is sleeping with who as such I actually call it “The News of the Screws”

    4. Just so! and note that it’s the “brand SPANKING new” version that’s advertised.

    5. The ads are contextual and geo-targeted

      often Google does it so well that it is scary

  2. First comment – fantastic! Looking forward to the new layout, sounds interesting. Also, the second part of the interview if the first was anything to go by.

    1. ok so Ned beat me to it, maybe next time.

      Rather off topic – now that Jenson Button’s nearly out of his title defence I began wondering about the fates of previous world champions in their defending year – how long did they stay in the fight, did they change team, that sort of thing. I’m sure those of you with far more knowledge than me could come up with some interesting facts.

  3. I think Bernie is now becoming a big detriment to the sport.

    He’s demanding more and more money from circuit owners just to hold the race, and then putting more races on the calendar. The teams will eventually struggle to cope with 20+ races, and the circuit owners won’t be able to afford to hold the races, unless its government backed.

    1. The guy is smart. Find new locations that are hungry to get to hold a F1 race. Increase the amount of races. Now the teams get to get worried about to many races.
      Bernie – “Ohhh yeah BTW we need to cut your races this year and since your paying the least to hold a race your the first one to go because one race has to go maybe next year but the new fee will be X millions more. Ohh you can’t afford to hold it then, well I’m sorry we can’t afford to allow you to hold one because we have tracks willing to pay far more.”

  4. What the…?

    what’s that movie about? :O

  5. Happy B-day Striay and Gavin Brown.

    Looking forward to Pt. 2 of the interview. Pt. 1 was excellent.

  6. I’m quite disappointed that, about the Suzuka 95 Grand Prix, Alesi’s awesome drive (before his engine let go on lap 25) is not mentioned.

    1. Agree. Schumacher wasn’t dominant in that race until Alesi retired mid-race. For despite losing 30 sec to a stop-go penalty and another(approximately) 7-8 seconds to a spin after being pushed off the track by Lamy, Alesi was only a couple of seconds behind Schumacher when he retired, and closing. Alesi also set fastest lap 10 times out of 25, overtook Herbert at 130R, overtook Hill round the outside at the chicane, not to mention the other overtakes on Frentzen and the like. An unforgettable performance and well worth a mention in my opinion.

  7. There’s an interesting article on GrandPrix.com that mentions an Autosport article in which Mark Hughes claims that Ferrari again used team orders in Korea, in order to prevent Alonso losing more positions after his bad pitstop.

    http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns22731.html

    It will be interesting to see if this story picks up any momentum. Surely a radio check would be all that was needed to investigate, as it would be quite hard to hide what they were telling Felipe to do.

    1. Wow, onto!! I thought that at the time the race was live. Hamilton and Massa came in the same time and must of been about a 2 second difference between them when coming out, but when Alonso came in and the camera panned out to show corner one and where FA would feed back out, massa was a good 5-6 seconds away from LH. I quickly thought Massa must be setting the time that must of been on his steering wheel, but if so, was Hamilton’s time quicker?

    2. He may be partly right.

      If you watch it back live (not on the highlights), when Hamilton passes Alonso you can see Massa much further back from Hamilton than he was after the pit-stops. It could well be they told him to slow to let Alonso through.

      But as for holding anyone else up, I don’t know. How close was Schumacher to Massa?

      I see three possibilities:
      1) Massa had an unseen moment or was simply driving too slowly and slipped back from Hamilton
      2) Massa was told to slow so if he passed Alonso there wouldn’t have to be a public swap and there’d be no danger of Alonso hitting a damp patch like Buemi and the two smashing into each other.
      3) Hughes’ theory.

      I’m reserving judgement. I hope it’s not true because I don’t want to go through that whole saga again.

      1. Interesting theory for sure!

        But I am not sure I would see this as an illegal team order. In the end, the team used one of their cars to help the other not loose a lot of positions, which makes it pretty clever team work, instead of a clear change of position just to influence the driver championship for the better of one driver.

        Had Alonso fallen further back, the team might have never got past Hamilton for the win in the first place and lost points in both championships.

  8. look at 130R corner in the vid. lovely gravel run off… that’s a challenge. no car park run off in sight!

  9. I know it’s three days late but my lovely wife gave birth to our first child Charlotte on Tuesday.

    Not only are both Mum and baby doing really well, Dad is very proud and also thrilled that his daughters first Grand Prix will be at the always thrilling Interlagos.

    It’ll be on at next Monday at 3AM which I’m lead to believe is Baby’s most active time of the day!

    1. HounslowBusGarage
      29th October 2010, 8:34

      Nappy Days!
      Congratulations to all.

    2. Please tell me you called him Felipe ;)

      Congratulations to your family!

    3. Your own race against time then, congratulations!

    4. Thanks Guys! I really appreciate your good wishes. We are very Excited.

      I pushed pretty hard for boys names like Mika, Damon, Lewis, Jenson, Jack, Peter, Jim, Ayrton. She saw straight through me like cling wrap on a toilet bowl.

  10. As a Ferrari fan I like to pretend the 312t5 never happened. A moose of a car.

    1. If my memory works it was its worst car ever. they finished CC in 10th place or even worse

  11. The comment of the day is very wide of the mark. From what I can gather Bernie Ecclestone works tirelessly to ensure that the right deals get done and if a team has problems but deserves to be on the grid then he will tip the balance in their favour. Same with the tracks. If they deserve to have an event they will. BE makes a good target for people’s ire (I’m just as guilty at times) But I think DGR-F1 is confusing his own prejudice with fact.

  12. Some interesting stories appearing in the GPupdate box, I see, especially the one about Alonso and Mosely. Imagine if Max was still President and had influenced the WMSC (which he was in the habit of) to dock Alonso his points? Imagine the uproar!

  13. When I saw ‘shoot an F1 car’ I thought that someone was actually shooting it with a gun! Then reading on and Keith’s like ‘for a forthcoming movie’ and I’m thinking: Could this be the greatest movie ever?

  14. It’s not often that I disagree with the comment of the day, but this time it’s so uninformed it’s astonishing.

    Bernie, love him or hate him, took a dwindling and dying sport with falling interest, attendances, revenues and media coverage and turned it round to one of the foremost sports in the world. There are millions more F1 fans now than then. He ensured the survival of Ferrari and McLarren et al, and their team owners openly acknowledge that. He’s always supported and encouraged the safety improvements in the sport, read Prof Sid Watkins amongst others on that. Behind the scenes he’s been a match maker for drivers and teams, with quite a few top drivers getting there because of Bernie.

    You don’t get the consistent acknowledgement that F1 is what it is today from almost all that have been deeply involved in F1, even when long out of the sport, unless it’s true.

    Yes he’s constantly trying to increase F1’s revenue and profile world wide, but that after all is the task he set out to do when he first took on the role of head of FOCA, and you can’t do that without making it better. In that as far as I can see, he has never changed his basic attitude since he started.

    I for one seriously worry what will happen to F1 when Bernie is no longer there to run it.

  15. Not sure where to post this, but this is very, very interesting. its tavo helmund talking about the austin GP. videos 3 and 4 are particularly interesting :)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F33_iNa8ZVQ&p=EE923CEE6395AB5A&index=1&playnext=6

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