In this special end of year show, Joe wraps up all of the important post season events. Including, what's going on in Michael Schumacher's head, where the PR people have got it wrong and the real reason the FIA have appointed an ambassador for every race.
Additionally, our award winning blogger offers insight into how young driver testing has evolved, where the future of race circuits can be found and who might not survive a season in F1.
All of this and much more, in a festive edition of An Aside With Joe.
Linkage
Coming up on today's show we hand out some really important awards including the best beard, the worst comeback and the best sporting injury. There's also some singing, and a present or two.
Intro
We are back with our second show of the weekend - the planned one - where we hand out awards to the good and bad of Formula 1 in 2009.
Good Week / Bad Week
It has been a good week for Scott Woodwiss and his new job, and for Lou, Lukeh and Emily who've been bumping into comedians. It's a bad week for Tom G, though, and for Alex and Kat, because we might have abandoned them with a partied out house.
The Sidepoddie Awards
The 2009 awards feature such categories as the Best Beard, the Passing the Buck award, and the Worst Comeback. There are some featured awards from the comments, and there are even a couple of last minute winners as well.
Sidepodchristmas Carol
This year, we take on Jingle Bells, turn it into a Formula 1 carol, and perform it brilliantly. Thanks to Gavin, Lukeh, Andy, Chris, Alianora, RG, Scott and Steven for joining in the fun.
Linkage
We have arrived at the last live show of the year and we intend to make it a good one. Yesterday we covered all the F1 news to leave this show free to be our end of year Sidepodparty.
Video properties:
- Length: 02:32:09
- File size: 175.1 MB
- Download: live89.mp4
- Transcript: Coming soon
- HD: Not available
We've got awards to be handed out, Christmas music to be played, alcohol to be consumed and festive treats to enjoy. We'll also be attempting to follow last year's Sidepodchristmas Carol, so start warming your voices up!
We'll hopefully be going live at 8pm GMT, so stick around and join us as we celebrate the year that was 2009.
There are several options for the 2009 F1 Team Principal of the Year award, and I think no one would deny that it should go to Ross Brawn. The man took an ailing team and turned it around, plus dragged it through the worst winter ever and risked his name on the project.
However, if I was in charge of the award, I wouldn't give it to Brawn. I would give it to Christian Horner... and not just because of his jiggly foot.
I was really, really impressed with Red Bull this year, and I think a lot of that has to do with Horner's management. The team started with a few disadvantages, namely one driver without fully healed leg bones, and a couple of cars missing vital double diffuser parts. Through the entire diffuser argument, Horner was adament but polite. He thought they were right, but wasn't put off when they were wrong. They brought the new part to the car and continued to get on with the job.
Despite the fact we're all starting to wonder about Vettel's overtaking abilities, Horner clearly had faith in his young driver and gave him every opportunity to shine - which he did. He picked up four wins to Webber's two.
Towards the end of the season, and under pressure to pick one driver over the other, Horner wouldn't. It's hard to say whether this cost him a proper shot at the championship, as I'm not really convinced they would have had a chance against the epic Brawn lead anyway. Still, if his aim was to be completely impartial, I think Horner achieved that with great aplomb.
He has a straight-forward way of dealing with everyone, his team, his drivers and the media. You could tell he wasn't that impressed that Mark had kept quiet about his broken collar bone, but he would never have turned against him in a public way. It's not easy to hold your own when you're a relatively new team against particularly old hands in the paddock, but Horner does it, and I think he does it well.
That was it then! Not exactly the season ending cliffhanger that we all wanted, but I suppose it was a nice relaxing way to round off the year. Now the off-season begins in earnest and I can't tell you all the stuff we have planned to keep you entertained. It'll be great. What I can tell you though, is some of the things we're talking about:
- Mr Jake Humphrey of the good ol' Beeb has written up his post-race blog with some alternative awards to hand out having spent his first year presenting the F1 show. The Favourite F1 Location award is an interesting read.
- James has been dreaming up some numbers for us, and posted some random facts about the 2009 season. Some of the "most poles" and "most laps completed" ones are fascinating, and James says there are more stats and facts to come. Yay!
- Gavin has completed his usual driver consistency analysis, with a bit of commentary on the race itself as well. I do love a post that begins by saying the race was dull so here are some pictures to liven it up! Sums up the weekend, I think.
That should do it for now. Don't forget that the deadline for the Top Gear competition is tonight, if you haven't already entered. I will see you in the comments.
Following on from the initial nominations and then the finalist voting, the 2008 Weblog Awards closed this week. The votes have been tallied and the final results are now in.
Apparently during the seven days the voting was open, 933,022 clicks were counted across 48 categories. The popularity of the awards is just staggering and the competition was mighty.
As we've said before Formula 1 was very well represented this year, and given the US-centric audience it seems we fared pretty well both categories.
Best Online Community
Congratulations go out to Strobist who took this one with ease. Andy mentioned in the comments that they would be tough competition and he was proven to be correct. In fact it's such a good community I joined myself.
In the end, Sidepodcast came home 8th with 3.4% which represents a fantastic 393 votes.
The eco-mentalists had the run on us in the end, but when the sport you follow has already turned it's back on the entire of North America, we think the Sidepodcommunity can take 8th place with pride. Full results can be seen on weblogawards.org.
Best Podcast
EconTalk took well deserved top honours in the podcast category. Their subject matter is a little above me, but to be honest we were just proud to be nominated.
Sidepodcast came home 7th with 2.2% of the overall votes, totalling 330 clicks.
How we didn't end up last I shall never know. Every other show is a massive name in the world of podcasting and last year's winners TWiT were just ahead with less than double the votes. Full results can be seen on weblogawards.org.
To the Future
That must be enough nostalgia from us. 2008 is done and dusted and F1 is already looking to the future and beyond. It goes without saying we very much appreciate every single vote from every single person, your efforts are much appreciated.
We may never reach such lofty heights again, but we thank you all for taking us there.
Is it too early in the year to start moaning that it's going to fast? 7 whole days of 2009 have passed already, and we're heading swiftly into the 8th. For those wishing the season to hurry up and get here fast, I think it might just do that. Anyway, here are some topics that have hit the news today:
- It looks like Singapore are going to reprofile some of the track to encourage overtaking. The 2008 night race was a success, but perhaps only because of the safety car. Therefore, organisers are in contact with both the FIA and teams to discuss potential revisions for this years race. They want to smooth out the bumps, which personally, I think would be a travesty.
- Also, it seems as though Mark Blundell will be going solo, now that Martin Brundle has a high flying job at the BBC. Actually, it seems as though Mr Brundle wants to concentrate on his own son's career and has stepped back from the management company that he and Mark ran together. Now it's all Blundells responsibility, and we're trying to come up with a new name for him. It can't be 2MB anymore, can it?
- Finally, it seems as though Bernie is just as doubtful about Donington Park as everyone else, although he's willing to give them until September to get things sorted out. He says there are five other venues he can replace them with - presumably he doesn't mean in Britain though?
And before I sign off, if you haven't already been caught in the endless cycle of voting for us every 24 hours, you might like to have a go now:
We've got no chance of winning anything, but we appreciate every vote nevertheless. See you in the comments!
Don’t panic! This is still Sidepodcast. F1 Minute hasn’t taken over the world. Yet.
This is a one off special, because there are some serious circumstances that need urgent attention. We have been nominated for the 2008 Weblog Awards in two categories, and I’m here to ask for your votes.
Yes, this may be a shameless plug of a show – 60 seconds devoted entirely to pleading for you to take time out of your day to vote for us – but what is it they say? A vote for us is a vote for you.
That’s true, in fact, as one of the categories we are a finalist in is Best Online Community. That’s every single one of you that makes up the Sidepodcast Audience, particularly anyone who has commented on the site. You guys make Sidepodcast what it is.
Our other nomination is in Best Podcast. They are both very tough categories so every click counts. You can vote once every 24 hours, and all the information you need is on Sidepodcast.com.
That’s all. Thanks for listening, and I’ll go back to the actual F1 Minute now.
I'm not sure if we've mentioned it enough times yet, but we might've been nominated for a couple of awards this week.
We mentioned back in November last year that we were after preliminary votes for Best Online Community in the 2008 Weblog Awards, because we felt the wider world needed to know just how completely wonderful the F1 community is.
Amazingly, everybody's efforts paid off and Sidepodcast was selected as one of the top 10 finalists in that category.
It Only Takes a Minute
Voting starts today, which means we again need to ask everyone to choose their best clicking finger, and register a vote for the most distinguished Formula 1 community on the Internet.
Clicking the image above will take you to the voting page, then simply make your selection count. You're allowed to vote once every 24 hours, so please bookmark the page, tie a knot in whatever you need too, and ensure you come back and do the same thing tomorrow. Please do it again the next day, and so on until voting closes Tuesday 13th January (at 10pm GMT).
So many of you have contributed so much to the Sidepodcommunity over the past 12 months, you deserve global recognition for being a frankly fantastic bunch of friends. There's nowhere else on the web we'd rather hang out than with the guys and girls who make this place what it is. It's our first port of call in the morning, and the last thing we check at night.
Getting this far already feels like some much warranted recognition though. Taking a quick look at other nominees reveals some tough competitors including several forums, one of which has almost two million members, and a photography group containing over 24,000 discussions. Christine and I were speechless upon seeing the top 10 list, getting this far is a milestone everyone here should be proud of.
Could It Be Magic
As taken aback as we were by the first nomination, an appearance as a finalist for Best Podcast was entirely unexpected. Not least because just recently we failed to get noticed in the Blubrry Podcast Awards, which is dedicated to, well, podcasts. Now here were are sitting amongst nine other remarkable nominees, many of whom we've been listening to for years.
Given that we're already begging for votes today, we'd also appreciate just one more click from your illustrious pointing device if you'll be so kind.
It's by no means being defeatist to say we haven't got a hope in hell of achieving anything in the podcast category, because even Christine and I were quite tempted to vote for This Week in Tech, so enamoured are we of the shows Leo Laporte releases. It's one of only two crossover podcasts that the both of us listen to and putting it bluntly... we are not worthy. Even looking at the list of nominees makes me quite giddy.
I honestly couldn't care less if we came plumb last in this category, it's already made our year seeing the Sidepodcast name up there. Every show that made it through is a quality production and every one is worth a listen and worthy of the win.
Take That and Party
In addition to those two nominations, F1 well and truly put itself on the map in this year's Weblog Awards. Both F1 Fanatic and BlogF1 made it as finalists in the Best Sports Blog category.
For the life of me I cannot fathom how a sport that so fundamentally turned its back on North America, can pick up four entries in what is a predominantly US based competition, but that's an argument for another day. Sadly because both sites sit next to each other in the list, we're being forced to choose between the two when it comes to that single precious vote.
As a final note, there may be some fancy 'embeddable' polling options released tomorrow, which means you'll be able to vote directly from this site rather than clicking through. We'll create a post for them as soon as they become available, but please keep clicking. Your F1 community needs you!
It's the first proper Monday back at work for F1 teams following the holiday period, so if nothing else, we're expecting some actual news worthy of discussion today. Are the rumours true, and will Honda staff learn any more about their long term future in this sport? Or are they in for a protracted and drawn out Aguri-esque lead up to Melbourne?
In the meantime, here's some discussion points to tide us over:
- Sir Jackie Stewart has blasted Bernie for having way too much power and lacking any form of succession plan. Jackie is always right so there's no discussion to be had there, however, what can be done about it, and what would happen to F1 should Bernie not witness another sunrise?
- In the comments, thoughts are already turning to future planning and Alex is considering a visit to Goodwood FoS this year. Do you already have your F1 plans in place, and if so where are you going in 2009 and why?
- Additionally, we've been debating the subject of racing induced hearing loss and whether event organisers should be held responsible for providing protection (the people behind Goodwood FoS say "no chance"). So who should be held accountable for potential hearing damage in this modern era: organisers, promoters, teams, drivers, or the fans who turn up and watch?
All of this and much more to be considered by the Sidepodcommunity in the next 24 hours. You know where you'll find us.
