F1 Racing to Recovery
F1 Racing magazine has come in for a lot of stick in recent months, exacerbated by the personal attack on Ralf Schumacher by The Bish. It was branded outdated and unnecessary, and generally written off by a lot of previously dedicated readers.
Personally, I’m a fan of the magazine. There are few periodicals I get these days that can hold my attention, and considering how much F1 already consumes my world, I’m impressed that F1 Racing can get me to read it from cover to cover. (Back to front, incidentally, always.)
It’s glossy and beautiful and focuses on the people rather than the action. Whilst we spend ages analysing results and reading up on the intricacies of the Dumbo-Flugel, F1 Racing does the opposite. For every two pages of race coverage, there is a six page interview with Frank Dernie. A couple of pages on tyre technology is evened out with a ten page special on the three championship contenders. There’s something insightful about it that I love.
Clearly I’m sold, but what can be done to turn it around so that everyone else loves them too?
Everyday People
Firstly, the Bish left. He now works for McLaren, doing a sterling job in the marketing and media department. There haven’t been many visible changes since he left, although the mood of the magazine does seem to be slightly more uplifting than it had been under his watchful rule. According to the back page, the July issue is going to be all-change, so new editor Hans Seeburg will finally be able to stamp his mark.
Elsewhere in the team, F1 Racing has some stunning names. They acquired Bradley Lord from the Renault press office, they have all the experience of Peter Windsor, and the technical expertise of Steve Matchett. Plus, the photographers they have out in the field are all incredible.
With these top bods on board, I don’t see how F1 Racing can do anything other than go from strength to strength.
So Retro
The one thing the mag is missing is an online presence. Of course they have a site, and it’s got the details about the latest issue and the obligatory F1 calendar and championship stats. But there’s not much scope for interacting with the fans, the people that are going to buy the magazine.
Recently, we have been able to get involved with the Reader Panel, where questions are submitted to be posed to people like Frank Williams and Ross Brawn. That’s good. And F1 Racing have awards and surveys where they print the ACTUAL results and take on board the publics opinions.
It’s still not enough though. We’ve already seen that Steve Matchett is capable of presenting great video content and F1 Racing once made a solitary video podcast back in 2006.
Bradley Lord did a stunning job at Renault, as the driving force behind their official blog. Comments and questions were, get this, answered by someone within the team. Of course he was constrained on some of the things he could and couldn’t say, but it was definitely something special. I can’t tell you the heartbreak in Sidepodcast Towers when he left for this mag. Where’s the Renault blog now, eh?
F1 Racing could capitalise on these skills and knowledge. They’ve got the talent on board and they’ve got the scope to expand on their existing material. It’s a difficult world for print media at the moment, but I see the way forward as embracing the online experience, rather than just clinging on to the edge of it.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:59 pmlou said:
OOO is this months out? must go and get that tomorrow!
nice thing to read on my day off on thursday!! Is that Jenson i spy on the cover? 
Im a fan of the magazine too, I get both F1 racing and autosport. i think the reason i like them is because of the contrast between them.
I see you collect your magazines too. I have a very large pile of both now, and im not entirely sure where i am going to store them all.
but i can’t bare to through them away.
One of the reasons i go back for more! The photographs are brilliant and i only wish that (if i choose to become an F1 photographer - which i have been considering) i can take amazing photos like the ones they include.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:19 pmdp said:
Wow! I knew our delivery was behind, but not THAT behind…
I’m currently reading the third one down in your pile there. It apparently takes all of six to seven weeks for each issue to make it’s way all the way down here to Texas (the second one down should be here around the 1st). On top of that, I can’t get the model of Lewis’ car with a subscription unless I live in the UK (I wish I could - live in the UK, that is).
It’s bad enough that I have to get up at 6am on Sundays to watch the races live (though TiVo around 9am is the usual), but my news is almost 2 months old!
Not that I want to complain, but with no other F1 fans within a day’s drive, these two items have been bugging me for some time. Without the web, and especially your variety of media, I don’t think I could keep up with the goings-on of F1. Your work is very much appreciated.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:31 pmme said:
is it hand delivered by the editor or something? that’s terrible
we do take our access for granted, glad to be of service.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:19 amKeith said:
Take THAT, ITV…
May 21st, 2008 at 1:21 pmmy FA fantasy said:
The same.
Although the new RF1 PP is now doing better, the questions are answered on regulat basis; not sure if it’s a new person but he needed some time to learn all the freaks on the blog. RSS feed is still missing and the main team website is not very user-friendly to be honest.
I have to say Bradley was very witty and articulate, fan-friendly and just on the level, everybody misses his “stellar” (if I may say so) input. But what can you do - that’s life; the new Renault PR person takes great pics on the other hand, so that’s a plus. Bradley liked to use his mobile for these purposes and had a habit of shooting against the sun, this new guy keeps surprising me with excellent photos.
The only real problem are Alonso fans, I think he said he learned to live with that, I understand - it’s terrible, like Ringo Starr put it the Beatles were often surrounded by “sad thalidomide kids” during their American tours because people believed the fab four had healing powers, it’s the same thing with poor Fernando, no wonder he lives in Switzerland like so many of the current F1 drivers.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:26 pmme said:
the thing that really annoyed me the other day was the fact that on the right side of the blog, there’s a “News” rss link, but not one for the blog.
talking about adding insult to injury
the site still seems unreliable, couple of times i’ve been recently and all i get is a blank page.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:22 pmmy FA fantasy said:
Yeah, the same thing happened to me a few times, I say me but it’s not you, it’s actually me , the blue orange lion or FA fantasy.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:28 pmmy FA fantasy said:
Mon Dieu! I posted no links and the comment sank anyway. I used “b” button a few time to make it more expressive, I guess that’s a no-no. I might change my nickname to Scuderia Titanic, that’s my fate or as ancient Roman chariot racers would put it “fatum”.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:43 pmme said:
you know akismet sent my comment into moderation earlier today too! thing is, i’d still rather spend a couple of minutes each day trawling the moderation queue than have the site pimp blue tablets all day
May 21st, 2008 at 3:00 pmmy FA fantasy aka Scuderia Titanic said:
Ha-ha! True! I thought I was getting on your nerves with all my requests. Cool, I’m actually trying to caferully choose my words to make sure my comments don’t go into moderation. It’s not that easy; you know, RF1 blog could do the same. Maybe it could help improve the general quality of comments.
I hope they make me a moderator, they’ve been toying with this idea for a while, I said “yes” but nothing happened. Let’s wait and see.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:07 pmme said:
tell you what, if they do, then i’ll come back and comment there again.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:19 pmmy FA fantasy aka Scuderia Titanic said:
Great!
You gotta ask Fraggle then, as the only moderator on the English side of the blog she’s always in touch with the webmaster.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:36 pmme said:
will do. i think christine has fraggle’s email.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:32 pmlinks for 2008-05-21 » vee8 - a Formula 1 blog said:
[...] F1 Racing to Recovery - Sidepodcast Is F1 Racing getting better? Or was it always good? (tags: F1Racing magazines media HansSeeberg MattBishop) [...]
May 27th, 2008 at 12:55 pmStuart Codling said:
Hello Christine,
Firstly, sorry for the late nature of this comment. I’ve been on holiday, managed to miss the GP, and as an occasional listener to your excellent podcast I called in here during my efforts to catch up. I don’t usually comment on websites because one inevitably gets mauled by that sorry spectrum of humanity who love to take pot shots from behind the security of an alias.
Secondly, thanks for buying our magazine. You pay our wages.
It’s in the nature of magazine publishing that you have to try to sell as many copies as possible, which is why F1 Racing is aimed at a mainstream audience. And since it’s impossible to please all of the people all of the time, not everyone is going to be pleased by what they see. The compromise between engaging the old hands without putting off the newcomers is an imperfect one. Inevitably there will be those who feel that a subject hasn’t been tackled in sufficient depth, or that an article is intolerably fluffy; others, reading the same article, might feel that it’s either gone on too long or gone straight over their heads.
The best we can do is plough on, and try to be as entertaining and interesting as possible given the constraints of budget, access, and the increasingly anachronistic means of production (I’m about to proofread a story that was written two weeks ago and won’t appear on the shelves for another two weeks – magazine-making is a s-l-o-w business).
So why not forget about the mainstream audience and go for the specialist one? There’s a number of reasons. Principally, the specialist audience isn’t big enough and many advertisers aren’t interested in reaching it (figuring that the petrolheads will already have spent enough time looking at the cars to have spotted the sponsor logos, thankyouverymuch). There are people who have the stamina, willpower and focus to read an 10-page feature composed largely of text, unleavened by photos or other graphic design devices. Sadly they’re in a tiny minority. This is one of the reasons F1 Magazine eventually closed: readers were put off by the reams and reams of dreary copy, interrupted only by the occasional inaccuracy or outright libel. Their circulation was so low that for some time they tried to get by without declaring an ABC.
The specialist audience nowadays is even slimmer because enthusiasts are self-publishing on the web with increasing confidence. Once you get beyond the obvious cut-and-paste guff, the majority of that content is very good. This site is a case in point. And there’s enough of it for F1 obsessives to binge themselves silly on any given subject long before our magazine hits the shelves.
I hope this goes some way to explaining why F1 Racing is how it is: compromised and imperfect for sure, but we do our best.
Anyway, I’m glad you’ve picked up on the ‘uplifting’ mood of the magazine. We had a difficult winter: from September until December we were in the peculiar situation of having Matt, who’d led the magazine for 11 years, occasionally in the office while serving his notice but not actually having any role. It took a while to recruit Hans, and then his employers also held him to his three months. In the meantime we lost exec ed Tim Scott (to A1GP) and chief sub John Lilley (to retirement). It’s fair to say that until mid-February, when Hans and Bradley joined, we were treading water, as you could probably tell from my bad-tempered editorial in the March issue.
With Hans and Bradley and new chief sub Matt Warwick (from the NME) on board there’s been a new energy, and inevitably there have been some changes. If you like what the refreshed team has done so far then I’m sure you’ll like the impending new format. It’s going to look cleaner, cooler and more sophisticated. And – sorry to disappoint anyone whose fingers were at the ready to declaim the Nuts-ification of F1 Racing – there’ll be no breasts.
SC
P.S. Renault’s new PR chap, Will Hings, did work experience at F1 Racing in 2006. Small world, isn’t it?
May 27th, 2008 at 1:33 pmChristine said:
Hi Stuart,
Thank you for braving the comments – we’re actually quite nice here.
It’s impossible to please everyone all the time, especially in F1 where each person views the sport completely differently to the next. Even here at Sidepodcast HQ, you’ve got the technical buff who’s watched for ages and has conspiracy theories tucked up every sleeve – he’s the one that WILL read a 10 page dreary document. And then there’s a relative newbie who just likes the nature of the sport, the personalities and the community – I’m the one that prefers to look at the pictures. In one household there are two completely differing views, never mind all over the globe.
I think as podcasters with an increasing audience here, we sometimes forget that the broadband online experience is still quite a niche market. I often wonder why people in my office are still talking about Eastenders when there are podcasts to be discussed. It’s because it’s still not out there, it’s still quite “geeky”. But at the same time, networking online is becoming more and more important.
The main illustrative point from my article above is the Renault F1 blog. I know first-hand how amazing it was to have someone official, with access, giving us an insight into the paddock. Someone that understood what we wanted to know. And now you’ve got him, we were kinda hoping it might transfer across.
May 27th, 2008 at 2:12 pmAlianora La Canta said:
Stuart, I never knew anyone from F1 Racing (or any other major F1 print publication) paid attention to the blogosphere. It’s good to see you here.
I’m an F1 Racing reader who transferred from F1 Magazine in Marxh 2004 when Bernie ran the latter into the ground, and would definitely categorise myself as the “10-page feature” type. Still, I’m enjoying the current F1 Racing (compromise/mid-market as it is) - I got a letter yesterday to say the subscription rate went up, but it’s still worth it.
Thank you for explaining why things went strange towards the end of last year. I kept the subscription in hope that it was just one of those rough patches that sometimes happens and it is good to see that the new F1 Racing team are back to their best.
I can sympathise with you on the publishing process - I was a proofreader on the student newspaper and it used to have a 9-day process for articles. Pretty awkward when it was supposed to come out every fortnight in term-time.
For those who weren’t reading F1 Magazine at the time, I can confirm that Stuart is telling the complete truth about the ABC circulation thing. F1 Magazine stopped declaring it in the December 2002 edition, which was when ownership transferred from Rubython to the FOM.
So that’s two PR staff (Hings and Bishop) who trained with F1 Racing. Says a lot about how respected it is. Keep up the good work and good luck to you
May 27th, 2008 at 5:02 pmme said:
stuart, thank you very much for taking time out to comment. and i hope that you choose to do so more in the future, here or elsewhere.
i imagine that some of the ‘pot shots’ can be tough, but the transparency you’ve offered in those nine short paragraphs is enough to ensure that we’ll be subscribers for as long as you remain part of the magazine.
i suspect in the long run it is that sort of openness (in all forms of business), that will separate those that get it, from those that don’t. or rather, those who survive from those that don’t.
May 28th, 2008 at 4:26 pmStuart Codling said:
Hello again.
It’s very interesting to read the thoughts of people who follow the sport and it helps form an impression of what a significant portion of our magazine’s readership may be thinking, even if we aren’t always able to provide what they want.
I can’t say I read all the blogs in tremendous detail because I’m kept quite busy during the working day and my F1-hating wife would take a poor view of me spending the evenings hunched over the laptop. And I usually don’t post comments – or participate in message boards – for many reasons.
If someone has taken the time to write a thoughtful and well-argued blog entry then to me it has an intrinsic merit, whether or not every part of it is totally correct. Often blog entries do go off-piste, mainly because their authors are writing from the outside looking in and don’t have the benefit of certain ‘inside knowledge’. They may be working with bum sources: once a ‘news’ story is not just second-hand but positively 10th-hand (frequently the case now there are so many news sites copying each other’s stories) then it’s got very far removed from the quote or event that gave rise to it. And some people do fall into the basic academic trap of citing something as a source purely because it backs up the point they’re trying to make, even if it’s bunkum.
Faced with all that it would seem churlish and condescending for someone like me to pop up every day and gleefully point out the errors.
The main weakness of writing from the outside looking in is a tendency to characterise the participants in very two-dimensional terms, like the characters in a soap opera. For instance, the Matt Bishop I’ve known for 17 years is a very different person from the one who’s routinely lambasted in many blogs and message boards. Again, there’s not much point in me jumping in to correct some of these misapprehensions – if I spend five minutes composing a response, and the author won’t accept it, because they seldom take kindly to being corrected, then that’s five minutes of my life that I won’t get a refund on at the end.
For that reason I don’t get involved in message boards. They tend to be populated by self-appointed alpha male types who won’t listen to reason.
But if you want to hear more from me then I’ll certainly come back. And if you have any questions or comments about the mag or F1 in general then both the letters page address and the link from the website end up on my computer, as will the tried and tested format of firstname dot lastname at haymarket dot com. I’ll do what I can but please remember that the production of the magazine comes first!
I’ll close off this one by briefly answering a few points made further up the comment chain as well as the original post. Firstly, Jenson on the cover. We were both excited and apprehensive about doing this; news stand sales are incredibly sensitive to what’s on the cover, and Jenson isn’t quite the pull he once was in that regard. Actually, anyone other than you-know-who on the cover can put a dent in the audit. But Jenson was our first choice and the photographer did an excellent job of producing a striking image.
Our web presence is limited by our physical resources (even if we ran a blog, or something, we’d need to pay someone to moderate it) and our licencing agreement with FOM. We also wouldn’t want to tread on the toes of Autosport.com, which is one of our stablemates.
Saying that, Bradley is as keen as the proverbial mustard to do something on the web, so the energy is there. It may just be a case of persuading the people upstairs…
SC
May 28th, 2008 at 5:40 pmme said:
cheers stuart.
you are of course completely correct regarding chasing down and responding to forum posts, but what you’ve just written about jenson in the third from last paragraph here, is exactly the sort of thing that makes the difference to someone like me.
the kind of decisions that go into choosing a cover image are no doubt wide and varied, and probably of limited interest to the majority of people. you wouldn’t want to take up valuable print space detailing that process, but if you were put it into a blog post, you’ve shown a little transparency for those who are interested, where before the was none.
i don’t know the first thing about what goes into picking an image that has to sell a magazine for a whole month. but i do know that seeing the same face all year round gets a bit dull. and that leads me to think the people making that choice might also be a bit dull.
by explaining the process, by detailing how you’ve got several options available to you and why you made the final decision, might allay my fears. it could also serve to provide a repository of factual information for someone who does have the time to defend you and fight your corner on a forum thread or blog post.