The Renault F1 Website
Several times last year, I felt like I was a one man marketing machine for Renault’s online F1 presence. Not a week went by it seemed without me extolling the virtues of the team’s blog, website or even their attempts to embrace Second Life.
This year on the other hand, there couldn’t be a more stark contrast in my opinions.
It all went wrong back in January when the team decided to split the ‘fan’ section from the ‘team’ section. Presumably this was to satisfy the sponsors and the groups legal team who were probably a bit uneasy about all those fans with their outspoken opinions.
Once the split had occurred though, things appeared to go from bad to worse.
Regarding the ‘fans’ section - after four months of waiting there still isn’t any form of news feed to track either blog updates or user comments, the picture submission section is rarely updated and despite many attempts of trying, the “submit an MP3 podcast” page has never yielded a successful response from ourselves or any other member of the public. It’s utterly, utterly useless.
Moving onto the ‘team’ section, things don’t get any better there either. The content area is massive (filling the majority of my screen), slow to download and noisy (a soundtrack plays each time the page loads). Many things are still missing months after the initial release with ‘coming soon’ flags still featuring in most areas. However, without a doubt, the worst crime by far is the damage done to ‘Race Control’.
12 months ago Renault did something amazing, they beat Bernie at his own game and provided fans with some stunning insight into what goes on in a car during practice, qualifying and the race. We talked about it in detail during episode 15 and posted screenshots later in the year.
Essentially what Renault had done was provide all the live information about their cars in a handy window roughly the same size as the official live timing screens. In short, it was an engineers view of the race unfolding. Throughout the year we ran the two windows side-by-side, and sometimes referenced the Renault data post race.
It was brilliant in every possible way, but this year they’ve got it all wrong.
Alongside the flashy, but bloated new website, the team have debuted a trainwreck of a timing solution. In principle I can see what they’ve attempted to do, and that is to take what they offered last year to the next level, but in doing so they’ve ruined the very essence of it. It’s hard to describe, so here’s a screenshot:
What you’re looking at there is an image I grabbed during Free Practice 2 in Bahrain. The track in view is live 3D representation of the each car’s location on the circuit, the wheel represents Alonso’s steering angle, while the dial indicates revs, speed and gear selection.
All of this information slows my laptop to a crawl, takes up 100% of screen real estate and tells me nothing that a simple two-dimensional circuit map and an animated line graph couldn’t tell me in half the time, for a fraction of the effort. It is a triumph of style over substance and leaves me hopelessly frustrated. It is unusable.
To add further insult to injury, none of the data can be reviewed or replayed post-race either.
Given that Pat Symonds spent a considerable amount of effort convincing all and sundry post race in Bahrain that Alonso hadn’t lifted and caused the accident with Hamilton, and given that all of that data was actually already available to anyone who wanted it during the race and therefore should’ve made Pat’s job redundant, I can only conclude that absolutely nobody uses Renault’s Race Control for it’s intended function.
It is beyond useless as a concept, beyond useless as a tool and is an utter waste of everybody’s time… including Pat’s.
Now can we have the old timing system (and the old blog) back, pretty please?
April 19th, 2008 at 2:41 pmNONSENSE said:
I’m not particularly into live timing thing but yeah the team site was more user-friendly last year and the blog used to have RSS feed. But the fact that Alonso cult attracts SO many people and the only thing on their mind is YouTube and “go alonso” phrase sort of disguised some faults of the current team website design because people are simply not paying attention, as long as they can see their idol’s picture they’re ok, some tend to enter this weird “electric-shock-beatlemania-state” and start discussing his hair or what he said at 5.00 pm today while speaking to some Spanish newspaper and start rating his smile. Hmm, it’s crazier than Schum cult!!! I guess you could ask RF1 PP his opinion.
I’ll think of something else to say later.
April 19th, 2008 at 2:49 pmme said:
good point, should’ve done that.
posted a comment here:
my.ing-renaultf1.com/en/blog/211…
comment no#241.
April 19th, 2008 at 3:10 pmKeith said:
Agreed - and I was looking forward to being able to watch Alonso’s telemetry too.
And the ’social network’ site doesn’t like me - I uploaded a bunch of pictures months ago and still nothing has appeared.
I’d like to think they’re working on making the car better but it doesn’t seem to be that…
April 19th, 2008 at 3:30 pmdaniel said:
sadly this is the story of almost all f1 related sites on the internet, from teams or drivers. my guess is that they have too much money and that the design companies try to fit everything into their pages. when all i really want is fast infromation and news.
for movies etc i go to youtube or similar services..
plus to renault though for at least working on their own live timing, hope more teams catch up on that one.
by the way, the last of the drivers to get a website is now online, http://www.nicorosberg.com/ took some time, and must be one of the most missed potentials for commercials etc in the circus.. (note how nothing on his site reminds anything about formula 1 though.. a lot of photos in other settings..)
April 19th, 2008 at 3:43 pmNONSENSE said:
Interesting, let’s see what we get from RF1 PP. Obviously they won’t change the website design in the middle of the season but still it’s worth asking what happened to RSS feed on the blog.
I do find Alonso cult weird, I mean the guy’s intelligent and fast and lucky, but worshipping someone is not my cup of tea. I don’t have heroes in driver area ‘cos if you think just because somebody drives an F1 car he’s/she’s better than you? Certainly not! Let’s face it: your dad makes you sing opera since you’re a kid and you’re guaranteed to become another fat opera singer; your dad puts you in a kart at the tender age of 5 and you don’t mind that kind of activity then with a bit of talent and good guidance/money you can make onto F1 grid. Like Piquet Sr. said winning F1 drivers’ title changes nothing - you eat, sleep and “emit gas from your bottom” (he used a certain verb) just like everybody else.
I’m more into brand theory than driver theory. I hope ya know what I mean. I mean, modern drivers are filthy rich, they take risks while racing in F1 but I never feel sorry or happy for them. I’m a genius who’s working for peanuts while some F1 drivers can barely express themselves properly and nevertheless are doing much better by just turning the wheel and pressing the pedals. It’s unfair I have to say.
And on the question of live timing - somehow I’m feeling too lazy this year to follow F1 action on TV screen and computer screen at the same time. Dunno what went wrong, just not interested in what Bernard or somebody else has to offer. Maybe a possibility to watch the race from on-board camera and be able to switch between cars would move my lazy you-know-what. OK, gotta go.
April 19th, 2008 at 4:32 pmJordan Allen said:
Hey Mr. amd Mrs. ME!
Are your guys trashing the Renault F1 website as this appears to be the logical progression of your F1 Review sidepodcast clip? I mean first year you hav the lap of the track, which looks like “ME” is having fun on a very new F1 computer game in practice mode. This year you have added a better “chalk” outline of the track with the dot moving around to show the car. So the only thing you are missing from the Renault website is the cockpit is the steering wheel angle.
Like really, the only thing that holding you back from adding the steering wheel is that Christine can make up her mind as to is the view going to be from Button’s Honda, Bourdais’s Toro or Sutil’s Force India!
Wondering “What’s so wrong with ‘Claude’?”
Jordan (Allen) F1
April 19th, 2008 at 6:35 pmlinks for 2008-04-19 » vee8 - a Formula 1 blog said:
[...] The Renault F1 Website - Sidepodcast How Renault have messed up their website (tags: Renault internet websites) [...]
April 19th, 2008 at 6:45 pmRich said:
Agree with ME - the Renault F1 website is basically a waste of time - here in SA we virtually cannot access it due to its huge appetite for bandwidth. At least the Podcasts are still around and I like to listen to Pat.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:04 pmNONSENSE said:
Check out comment Nº 267 on RF1 blog.
April 19th, 2008 at 11:00 pmme said:
cool, and thanx for 265
April 20th, 2008 at 6:59 pmHow to follow a Grand Prix » vee8 - a Formula 1 blog said:
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May 21st, 2008 at 8:14 amF1 Racing to Recovery | Sidepodcast : Your Weekly F1 Podcast said:
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