F1 Fanatic

While looking for past experiences of the Belgian GP my father came across the spectators experiences section. This was around mid 2008, and only realised there was a site with reports etc until after the GP when instead of being directed straight to the spectators experiences section I was linked to the main page.

I’ve been visiting multiples times a day ever since.

It was after the 2008 Brazilian Grand Prix (remember it? It was a decent race). I was still bouncing of the walls after the race had finished and I needed as big a fix of F1 info as possible to calm myself down. At the time, my regular F1 sites were probably ITV-F1 and GrandPrix.com (neither of which I visit these days), and that just wasn’t enough for me.

So, having discovered the site I was merely a lurker for several months, until in mid 2009 I was commenting semi-regularly, firstly under various random names like Tim or Bob, then Casino Square, before I finally settled on Ned Flanders later that year

Journeyer- wow, I’ve just clicked the link you put up, the site looks so different now!

‘found’ this place about 5 years ago whilst searching for testing schedules – i have friends that live about 30k’s from the ricardo tormo (sp?) circuit in valencia that’s used for pre-season testing. deffo the best f1 site on the web!!

I know it was around the start of the 2009 season, but how I found it, I can’t remember. I hadn’t followed F1 in years, due to being forced to live an actual life where TV wasn’t a priority (and Schumacher domination was boring as early as 98 or 99, even when he wasn’t winning you could tell it was inevitable). I was relying on the BBC site, autosport, and boards.ie at the time, so I suspect that I followed a recommendation on boards.

It was sometime during the 2008 season, while I was looking around for some decent F1 images, I stumbled across the site, bookmarked it and promptly forgot about it until after the season where I followed it until November of ’09 when I finally became a member.

I think I didn’t use internet much to find information about F1 until the start of 2009 season. For sure, I knew that Autosport had its website and used to visit it and some other sites occasionally but didn’t spend a lot of time on this. Then, at the beginning of 2009 season, I decided to take part in a predictions contest, which was organised by Heikki Kovalainen’s fan page. In order to improve my ‘prediction skills’, I started to search for some more information, which could help me to understand, for instance, which track suits Red Bull / Brawn better. So I found James Allen’s blog. I think I noticed F1 Fanatic at about the same time as well but first thought that F1F was something like Planet F1 (a thought, which I feel ashamed about now :)) But JA’s blog showed me how interesting and useful an F1 website can be so I became hooked and wanted more. When I started to pay more attention to F1F’s content, I understood that it is actually professional and high-quality. Since then, I have been a regular visitor.

For me it was about summer 2007, because if I remember right, I was trying to find copies of the old season review videos and this was the only site I could find with reviews to all of them, and just started visiting regularly from there. I used to comment rarely under the name ‘al’, and only started commenting/using the forum more regularly about a year ago.

And yeah, I remember the old design, seems so recently that it got changed, but actually it’s 4 years ago!