Sidepodcast

Earlier on in the year you may recall the introduction of Must Comment Monday. The premise was simple - further the F1 conversation by means of the humble comment.

As it happened, not long after the concept debuted, Formula 1 went a bit mental and we had a tough time keeping up with comments on this site, let alone anywhere else. However, now that the season is over, and given that this year there’s no long-running espionage scandal bubbling away in the background, it feels like a quiet enough period to take a second stab at it.

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At the end of last year we listed some statistics relating to this site, and said we’d take another look in a year’s time. We still plan to do that, but top chap SteveInTheUK has done such a fine job of collating information relating to one of those stats, we just had to give him a plug.

The number in question is the comment count, and at the end of 2007 after pretty much exactly a year of podcasting, that number stood at 1,548 comments. Since then Steve has been keeping track of how the figures have moved as the year has progressed. The results have been entered into a Google spreadsheet, the output of which looks something like this:

If you’re statistically inclined, it’s worth spending some time digging into the data, but the two colours of most interest in the picture above are the Total Comments (in blue) and the Total Comments from Live Sessions (in grey). In essence they show just what an impact live commenting has had on the overall count as well as highlighting just how much discussion the last two races have generated.

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• Length: 1:01:58 
• Size: 54.7 MB 
• File: episode72.mp3 
• Enhanced: episode72.m4a 
• Transcript: Coming soon 
• Torrent: episode72.torrent 

On this week’s show we catch up with all the news from testing (even though it was ages ago), discuss the events of Hungary, and what’s coming up for the show.

Intro

The future is live, baby.

Good Week / Bad Week

Good week for Valencia because they can actually hold a race, but a bad week for Force India because they have to wait for their gearbox.

News and Views

KERS problems in testing, plus the shark fins are taking over, and we hear from Berger on Bourdais’ future.

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• Length: 38:52 
• Size: 35.3 MB 
• File: episode63.mp3 
• Enhanced: episode63.m4a 
• Transcript: episode63.pdf 
• Torrent: episode63.torrent 

A cracking race at Monaco means there’s no time to catch up on the news, which is good, because there wasn’t any. Today, it’s all about the racing.

Intro

Thankfully we had an extra day to make this show, how it’s going to work for Canada, we just don’t know.

Good Week / Bad Week

Good week for Williams and Alonso, bad week for spying and being outdoors.

Qualifying

Only Coulthard could have such an intriguing crash - there’s the wheel but where’s the car?

The Race

So many incidents, so little time, but it all comes back to Sutil.

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So the first attempt at commenting / chatting went pretty well, smashing all previous discussion records in the process.

We’re opening up a new thread for the second session, partly to give the server a break and partly because it seems like a sensible approach. After a very brief investigation, there appears to be a whole bunch of improvements we can make to ensure live commenting is faster and smoother in the future, but for now we’ll go with what we have.

Live timing is running and the cars are on the track. As ever this is all about the opinion, so we’ll throw our observations into the ring as we go.

Yell if you’re still awake!