Sidepodcast

Daily: 30th January 2010

Today is Saturday, the penultimate day of January and the start of the weekend. Most importantly this means we can sleep. Both halves of Sidepodcast are officially under the weather today, and the lovely Christine is suffering the most.

Despite us working at less than full capacity on Friday, there were plenty of events to discuss both inside and outside of the F1 scene.

• Kimi got his full time rallying career off the ground on Friday, and we're committing to covering his progress this year, starting with a dedicated Arctic Rally thread. It's a new and confusing category of motor sport for us to fathom, and Räikkönen appears to have much to learn too.
• Yesterday's Friday Fun topic got everybody reminiscing on classic Formula 1 launch parties in year's gone by. I'll happily go on record and say things certainly seemed more exciting back in my day.
• The McLaren team threw back the covers on their 2010 challenger the MP4-25 less than 24 hours ago, but an early leak of press images via Dank on Twitter took the edge off the silver machine's unveiling. That said, the rest of the event in Newbury went off without a hitch, with the live stream offering far more useful coverage than Ferrari's pathetic efforts the previous day.
• If you haven't already, please take a look at Adie's write-up from a day inside Vodafone HQ. It's commendable that McLaren took the initiative to open doors and recognise bloggers efforts to break into mainstream F1 journalism. Although it has been noted that the team from Woking happily opened someone else's factory doors, rather than their own.
• As a final word on launches, I recommend reading Joe's thoughts on viewing from the comfort of one's armchair. With zero hope of an exclusive, why would professional journalists travel from far and wide to experience the same thing as those watching at home (or even less if you factor in the leaked photographs)? There's plenty more to be discussed on this subject, do watch for more posts later today.

Apologies to anyone waiting on F1 Minute or F1 Big Picture, I may be trusted to handle a stand-in daily post, but my talents only stretch so far (plus I charge by the hour, don't ya know?). Here's wishing Christine a speedy recovery.

Heard It on the Radio

Those who struggle to keep up with the seemingly never-ending stream of comments submitted to the Daily thread (and nowadays I count myself as one of those), may have missed something of a seminal moment in Sidepodcast's rather short history earlier today. Not only did Christine make her singing debut on a BBC radio station, but that same voice carried all the way to Italy, Maranello and to the ears of one Rob Smedley.

To cut a very long and convoluted story short, last Saturday a certain lady decided to pen a tune for Felipe Massa in the hope it might inspire the man to score some points in Bahrain. It didn't exactly work out, the Massa suffered another poor showing, and because we didn't do a podcast Sunday evening we sort of forgot about it.

Yesterday there was much discussion in the comments about a number of blogs / forums that had found, and enjoyed the song. So this morning, having decided that the Autosport forums helped to make Me and Page 22 happen, a link was copied over there too. Just a couple of hours later the following response was posted on that same thread:

BBC Tees played the first verse to Rob Smedley this afternoon.

The two of us did a bit of a double take upon reading this, and after some swift investigation from other commenters, it turns out that Lisa McCormick who hosts a light-hearted afternoon chat show on BBC Radio Tees, happened to be talking live to Felipe Massa's race engineer Rob Smedley, and really had played Christine's song to Rob. I wouldn't have believed it without hearing it, so here's an extract:

Anyone who's known Christine for more than five minutes will be well aware of her long term (but frequently denied) crush on Rob and I'll leave you to imagine her reaction upon hearing that particular radio segment.

I'm pretty sure when she wrote and recorded the lyrics, Christine's intention wasn't for it to be played on the radio. I'm absolutely certain she didn't for one minute expect anyone at Ferrari to hear it. However, we will both be eternally grateful to Lisa and the team behind the show for finding and then playing that snippet today.

Even if Christine doesn't know it yet, today has been an amazing day in our lives. Thank you to everyone who's picked up on it, to the Autosport Forums for highlighting the broadcast and to all those who have listened.

Update: BBC Tees have a post on story, as well as the full interview for your listening pleasure.

Who's Working the Hardest?

In the comments of a recent post about total site contributions, Andy pointed out that I'd failed to mention how many submissions Christine or I had provided last year.

It was an intentional omission because when it comes to comment totals, Christine's efforts are somewhat under-represented by the figures. However, I can reveal in the past 12 months I wrote 15,621 comments, while the good lady penned just 4,206 of the things. That meant six people were more vocal on her own site than she was.

In truth of course, Christine's often tied up doing a multitude of other things such as editing shows and writing posts, which this chart displaying post count over time, communicates rather well.

As you can see, the lions share of the writing comes from one source and and her level of output is increasing all the time. Hopefully she'll be able to continue the upward trend in productivity into 2009.

A comparison of the above chart versus my comment total suggests that I may need to take a long hard look at whether I'm really making the best use of my time. Let's not go there today though, eh?

And I Would Listen to 300 More

Quite honestly, you couldn't have scripted it better.

I'm not sure how it happened, maybe the stars are all aligned or something, but Tuesday 7th October, marks the one year anniversary of F1 Minute, which by some freaky coincidence also happens to tie in with the 300th episode of the show.

That's 300 minutes or 18,000 seconds of Formula One news delivered to your ears in the past 12 months, all from the lungs of one girl. if you listened to every show back-to-back, and they are archived should you fancy the challenge, you'd have exactly 5 hours of entertainment at your disposal.

I have to take my hat off to Christine, because when she first suggested the idea I figured it would last about a week before the colossal amount of work would bury her.

She hasn't stopped though, nor shown any hint of slowing down. Even when she was unwell post Silverstone the minutes kept on coming. On two occasions there was a requirement for multiple shows in a single day, and despite a minor slip up on my part not so long ago, I've listened to every single one of them.

This evening we'll drink a glass or two of champaaagne and say thank you to the F1 circus for providing a seemingly never-ending stream of fascinating stories, as well as one to everybody who's subscribed, listened or left comments in the past 365 days.

Thank you one and all!

Some Pictures

I think Christine had only planned on putting these up onto the Facebook Group, but as Journeyer pointed out in the comments, Facebook isn't for everyone, so they're duplicated here too.

Standing on the Bridge of the Ship

In the Casino

Lounging Around

The Ring

Now, enough wedding talk. It's Sunday and we have a show to do, the subject of which is... your wedding questions! Hopefully we'll cover some F1 stuff too.

About that Hiatus...

We’re back. I’d like to say well rested, but that would be lying. Suitably relaxed would be closer to the truth.

In case you haven’t picked up on the congratulations floating around the blogosphere, the rumours are true, and I did get married this week. To the other half of Sidepodcast. And that’s the only way of writing it without sounding like a crazy person who believes she married herself.

So, there you have it. That would be the foreseen part of the hiatus.

The unforeseen is more complex. We had plans to continue with at least some Sidepodcast activity during our week away, but in the final few days, things got stressful and we needed a time out. We are sorry that we just upped sticks and left like that, and promise to at least try and be a bit more forthcoming in the future.

I’m sure some of you are curious about the details, and there are a few things I want to share with you. In order that Sunday’s show doesn’t become one of those tedious holiday sessions – you know what I mean, when your relatives sit you down to go through photo after photo of “Uncle George on a camel” - I figured that if you have any questions, you can leave a comment on this post and we will do our best to answer them on Sunday.

Then we’ll get back to F1.

Although, having said that, in terms of Formula 1 news, this week seems to have been a good week to go away.

It’s good to be back though.

Another Day, Another Guest Post

It's seems like all I ever do these days is promote the work Christine is doing on other websites.

Today's no exception, because her first guest post is now publicly available on vee8. The subject this time is Mark Webber's new BBC column.

For those not aware, this site is a spin off from frequent commenter doctorvee's personal blog. The doc has long been a serial F1 blogger but realised recently that he created enough F1 content to stand up on it's own and vee8 is the result.

It's telling that the site has only being running for about three weeks and is already my new favourite source for F1 links, the man sure knows how to dig up quality content.

Impressively anyone can contribute to the site, simply follow these instructions for more information. Ollie from BlogF1 contributed the first guest post last week and I'm pretty sure Christine's planning on writing more in the future.

You might want to bookmark / subscribe to this one now!

Yet More Moonlighting

The girl never stops, she really doesn't. As Ollie pointed out on this weeks show, Christine has written a guest post for BlogF1 today.

The post is part of a series that compares team mates from the top four teams. Christine was challenged to look at the relationship between Alonso and Piquet Jnr, and yesterday Clive made a fine fist of tackling the BMW boys.

It's worth five minutes of your time to give them a both read and do check back to see who's guest blogging on Monday and Tuesday.