New Media Enhancements Suggested by F.O.T.A.
Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 8:01 am
Greetings chaps:I don’t know about the rest of the NewsonF1 folks’ experience, but I have to spend an inordinate amount of time jumping from site to site on the web to keep up with the F1 story as it unrolls during the season. And I'm only looking for simple and obvious information; nothing exotic.
And I can’t believe ANYONE believes that the ridiculous ‘official’ F1 site isn't one of the ABSOLUTE WORST PLACES to go. And I'm sure the reaon is that Bernie and Max are so out of touch that they still use their computers for typewriters!! It is obvious that they think the website is supposed to be ‘cheerleading central’ for F.O.M. But as for me, I am about as interested in their idea of how to sell F1 as I am in what the so called important people had for breakfast.
Now F.O.T.A. has called for enhancing the F1 experience. I have some advice for them.
Let’s begin with the obvious: there are only twenty drivers and, maybe, twenty race engineers. There are only ten team principals. So that’s fifty people who have more than a good idea about what’s going on during the races and over the season.
Assuming there is anything like competent video coverage of the events, assembling a quick look in a day or so after the event shouldn't be all that hard. There should be a brief assessment of the qualification performance for each driver, detailed views of the start of each race; some coverage of pit action (mostly of mistakes) and, in each race, upwards of from ten to twenty significant incidents of overtaking.
Each race week end, that is, should be able to be digested easily into a fifteen to twenty minute clip easy to download from the web site. (oh yes: how hard can it be to provide slo-mo clips alongside with real time when the action is a focus of argument?) In addition, the race results and points standings could easily be provided on separate pages there.
The difference between decent coverage for actual race fans and the silly nonsense provided by the ‘Official F1’ web site should be obvious. We don’t really get up in the middle of the night and suffer through the obstacle course of varying sorts of commercial interruption to gape at busty girls in scanty costumes or over the hill pop stars intercut with rapid cuts of utterly disconnected moments in supposedly 'trendy' shooting --and all set to ridiculous rock music and screaming exhaust sounds that have as much relation the the actual sounds of F1 machines or races as the glossy crap they provide does to an actual race.
There could also be the opportunity to supply ‘magazine’ style essays at various key moments in the season on the web page --with clips provided that are easily accessible and clear to watch.
Finally, the possiblity of streamed video from on-car cameras, at a fair price, should also be explored. I can see why streamed data of a technical nature would not be met with enthusiasm by the teams, but driver data (accelerator & brake pressure; tachometer readings) could be shared without compromising the team’s secrets.
None of this is remarkably hard to manage; any number of reasonably competent web page designers could mount it in a couple of weeks. Nor should it be terrifically expensive to mount. All that might be problematic is the continuous supply of the necessary data from the teams – but I would argue that the problem would rapidly be self-policed. If you aren’t sharing, fans aren’t going to you pages on the site –and you aren’t selling any advertising for it!
What have I forgotten, chaps?
Jim Watt
