Sidepodcast

I’ve had quite a bad day over here at Sidepodcast Towers, and in order to release some of the tension, I’m gonna pick on a couple of news stories that have wound me up today.

More Stories From Nothing

As ever, Autosport has managed to extract as much as possible out of a single situation to make as many stories as possible. In this case, Hamilton’s reaction to questions about whether he’s expecting a bad reception in Spain.

Hamilton: “No.”

Autosport: “That’s all we needed to know.”

Wonders Will Never Cease

Danica Patrick won a race last weekend, which is brilliant for her, for motorsport, for womankind, etc, etc. But apparently, the BBC think she may not be worthy of a namecheck.

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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.

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You can imagine that researching F1 Minute means I read a lot more news now than I used to. In fact, quite often, I’ll be talking to the man and he won’t know what I’m on about. Did you read that right? I’m ahead of him. Brilliant.

Anyway, I was browsing Autosport.com today, and saw the return of their traditional posts headed up Preview Quotes: #Team Name#. You know what that means, don’t you? The season is truly coming back. I was excited, I may have even whooped out loud. But then I saw that Autosport didn’t just have one post about the Previews. They’d managed to stretch it out to three posts.

I know this isn’t unusual for Autosport, we’ve certainly picked up on it in the past. I know a lot of other bloggers find their site very frustrating. I’ve been giving them the benefit of the doubt, but it’s starting to get a little bit ridiculous.

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• File: Episode47.m4a
• Length: 19:06
• Size: 18.3 MB
• Transcript: Episode47.pdf

An outside broadcast from Autosport International, Episode 47 takes you behind the scenes at the UK’s biggest motorsport show from the comforts of the restaurant at the NEC.

Intro

Where we are, what we’re eating and why we’re absolutely exhausted.

Good Week / Bad Week

This week has been good for drivers and personnel getting jobs and signing contracts, whilst others are being left behind as time advances towards the start of the season.

News and Views

Alex Wurz joins Honda? Who’d have thought that would happen. We discuss why he’s settling for a test role again, and what is in store for the team now. We also share our first impressions from the McLaren and Toyota launch - is Honest Ron not living up to his name, and why do Toyota seem to lack passion in every single department?

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I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear, that Sidepodcast has returned safely from a weekend in Birmingham. We’re in the midst of processing all of the pictures we’ve taken, while picking our way through the free tat merchandise that we’ve collected.

All of this means that today’s podcast will be slightly delayed, while we recover from the exercise we had to endure on Saturday and then repeated today.

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• Length: 02:41 
• Size: 29.8 MB 
• File: video1.m4v 
• Transcript: video1.pdf 
• Torrent: video1.torrent 
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At last - the video footage we shot at Autosport ‘07. It’s only taken us two long weeks to make it watchable, but hey, we’re new at this. Oh, and next time, we promise to take a tripod.

Music played:

Rich Reich, Keeping Up With The Race
All Mighty Whispers, Love Revolution
Alice Marie, It’s Amazing

Music comes from music.podshow.com.