This week, two F1 teams launched revamped websites to coincide with the new season. Both have taken different routes and both have pushed the online F1 experience forward in their own unique way.

AT&T Williams

The new Williams site offers inline commenting on all stories including news items, and iWitness columns. Additionally you can rate posts, and leave feedback on videos. This puts user generated content front and centre within the site. No longer are thoughts from fans tucked in a corner where people in suits hope no-one will spot them.

I love that the Williams teams have done this and the only downside appears to be the need to register before commenting. When Red Bull Racing revamped their site a few weeks back, they too opened comments on posts and multimedia items, but allowed anyone to comment with ease.

Another tantalising section of the Williams site promises driver blog updates throughout the year, apparently Rubens is up first and blogging in Bahrain. This is something we've been calling for since Sidepodcast started way back in 2007, and might just set new standards in F1 coverage.

One notable exemption from the Williams site, is the live timing system, which debuted during winter testing, and that is where McLaren have the edge.

Vodafone McLaren Mercedes

Team McLaren will to be pushing the technological envelope to it's maximum this weekend in Bahrain, with the launch of their new Race 1.0b Live Data Viewer. A system that will provide live information to fans during every practice session, qualifying and the race.

McLaren are no strangers to supplying live updates over the web. Last year they came up with a peculiar telemetry widget which detailed information on braking and acceleration changes from both of their drivers on track.

The Race 1.0b (no I don't get the name either) appears to be a vast improvement though. Amongst other things, it promises:

• Live GPS circuit map data
• Detailed car telemetry
• Comments from the pit wall
• Comments from mission control (in Woking)

The accompanying teaser video also suggests driver radio messages will be transcribed and relayed back to us, which will be a massive boon after the commentators have talked all over them.

We are very much looking forward to seeing the 1.0b in action. Whilst we can't pretend to be huge fans of the revamped McLaren web site, the offer of live data more than makes up for the kooky design. In fact it pushes McLaren to the forefront of fan interaction. Can anyone raise them?

The Force India F1 Team officially unveiled their 2010 challenger during an online-only launch on Tuesday. The team's website carried details of the new car which takes many design cues from last year's chassis.

The rear of the car though, is of key importance to the team. Design director Mark Smith noted that the car was very much an evolution of last years chassis, but also that "the double diffuser is a key development aspect of the car", and the team had gone into the 2010 season much wiser as a result of lessons learned in 2009. Smith also pointed out changes to refuelling regulations heavily impacted the design of the car.

"The removal of refuelling from races increases the amount of fuel needed to be stored in the cars – almost twice the amount we ran in 2009. There is a compromise now: either make the car much longer or wider, or, as we have done, a combination of both. This of course has influenced the mechanical design solutions and also the aerodynamics, specifically with respects to the diffuser and bodywork."

Last year the car handled well on the low downforce tracks, but struggled elsewhere. The VJM03 has been designed to be an efficient car under all conditions.

Like all drivers, Adrian Sutil is looking forward to competing this season, and he sounds very pleased with how things within the team have been progressing.

"It's the first time we have been completely on schedule so I feel this will be the first season when I can show from the beginning to the end what is possible with the car and what I can do. Of course we will have updates and performance packages from this point on but I hope we will be strong from the first practice session rather than compromising at the start."

Others might argue the team are still effectively behind those who ran at the first test of the year.

Finally, Tonio Liuzzi remains realistic, as this will be the first time he starts a full season with the team.

"My objective is to be as strong and consistent as possible and give good feedback to the team to help them improve. For sure scoring points as many times as I can is going to be the key and you never know, perhaps we can get something more as well if everything comes together."

In addition to providing static images, the official Force India YouTube channel uploaded the following video to accompany the launch of the car. Sutil, Liuzzi and recently confirmed Friday test driver Paul di Resta all feature.

The car will begin its first track test on Wednesday, at the second official F1 test of the year. Tonio will handle driver duties for the first two days before handling over to Sutil for days three and four. Paul di Resta won't take to the cockpit until 17 February.

This week, F1 fans received some excellent, and forward-thinking, news from the fine folks at the publishing company Haymarket. A forum post appeared on Wednesday with an announcement of an announcement, but this time it was about something we've long been calling for.

The post, written by Autosport.com's Publishing Manager, read:

Following on from the trial during the postal strike of last year, and based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback it received, I can let you know that a digital version of AUTOSPORT will be launched next month.

There will be a formal announcement in due course, but the digital version will be free to existing magazine subscribers and we will offer it at a discounted price to Autosport.com PLUS subscribers.

We've been pushing for more and more in the way of online resources from publishers because quite honestly, it's the future. Mr C wrote a two-part rant back in August last year, entitled Print is Dead, and since then, we've gradually started to see a bit of a shift. When the postal strike hit, the major flaw in the print subscription model was highlighted. What was already out of date information became even more irrelevant by the time it reached consumer doormats, and in some cases it never showed up at all. The introduction of a temporary digital installment of the magazine was a stroke of genius, and a great way to deal with the problem, but it was a sad moment when it disappeared.

Previously, we'd been interested in purchasing the online subscription to Racecar Engineering, which is available through digital publishers Zinio. At the moment, the service isn't ideal, requiring you to download custom reading software. However, Zinio are working on an iPhone app, albeit one that's only available in the US at the moment. Presumably this will scale up for the iPad, and once available in the UK, we'd definitely consider subscribing to RCE. Mr C can then pretend to understand a digital version of the magazine, instead of the paper version.

For us, the ideal solution for an online magazine format is a PDF file, as showcased so well by GP+. Files are easy to archive and more importantly, you can search for words and phrases and find what you're looking for directly from your desktop. The solution that Autosport.com used to cover the postal strike trial, and presumably will continue to adopt for the upcoming subscription model, is provided by Ceros. This system provides a flash version of the magazine with scrollable pages and clickable links. It's a huge step in the right direction, but still isn't quite as accessible as we'd like.

All reservations aside, though, this is brilliant news from Haymarket, and has restored a little of our faith in their ability to adapt to changing technologies. This is the only way we would ever have subscribed to the weekly Autosport magazine again, and we shall be doing just that.

The real beneficiaries of this, though, are not us here in the UK, but the people living overseas who have to wait for their magazines to be shipped, and have nothing of an equivalent nature in their own countries. USF1 are bringing international fans to Formula 1, and now Autosport will bring timely F1 features and insight to them.

The information is at our fingerprints, but most importantly, at everybody's fingertips at the same time. Autosport are taking the right steps, even if they are baby ones. F1 Racing, it's now over to you.

This week's Thursday Thoughts comes courtesy of Pat over at Too Much Racing. He posed this thought-provoking question, based on the recent talk of F1 and the media.

What innovations would you like to see in F1 content delivery?

This is an interesting question for us at Sidepodcast Towers, as we solely consume F1 via the internet. What happens on the TV, on the radio, on Red Buttons and things like that is important... just not to us.

The BBC has made great strides in making the consumption of F1 online possible, with all the sessions available live or as a replay (with the exception of FP3, oddly). There are plenty of niggles with the technology, and particularly with the way content is managed on their website, but ultimately, it is possible to keep up with the sport using a broadband connection alone. Never missing a minute of sporting action, while not owning a television, feels quite innovative.

The talk in Monaco this week has been about making F1 more of a presence on the internet, and the way to do this? Get Bernie to give up his manic control of broadcasting rights. For us to make videos, we need footage, and right now we'd have to pay Bernie millions of dollars for race footage.

With talk of the single launch concept, the situation gets worse. A considerable amount of rights-free video footage that comes from teams emerges pre-season. This alternate footage sidesteps Bernie's restrictions by recording content as far away from a Grand Prix as is possible. With a combined launch, less coverage, and a strong desire to cut costs, there may be no alternate video available at all next year.

Content innovation cannot happen until the current restrictions become more relaxed.

Formula 1 is already struggling to keep up with alternate categories of motor sport in so many areas. Everything about the delivery of the sport is antiquated, and needs someone at the top to start pushing teams for more. That person isn't going to be Bernie.

Given that we're done with all that pesky weekend racing action for a while, I'm playing catch-up on a couple of things that should've been covered months ago.

Something that has been bugging me since August, is just what a raw deal Formula 1 fans get in terms of official information offered during a race.

In the latter half of this season, thanks largely to a rather expensive iPhone application, we do at least now know where all the cars are on track. Prior to that only Renault could be bothered to tell us what they were up to. Bernie, as ever, spent 2009 providing us with his ever fallible Live Timing system, which managed to go one better in the summer, going down for everyone at the track too.

You could argue that both Renault's and Bernie's solutions are provided free of charge, and this season, UK residents were able to watch all of the weekends sessions online.

I really should be grateful for what little I have, shouldn't I? Yes, I know some people have to put up with much worse coverage and maybe we just don't need more information?

In truth, my three months of continued disappointment with the F1 experience are born from watching a single IRL race back in August. As those with good memories will recall, many of us tuned in to watch Franck Montagny's auspicious debut in America's premiere open-wheeled series. A quick scan through the conversation shows one of the things that simply floored us during the race, was IndyCar Race Control.

This online dashboard is a feast of insight for any race fan. In addition to the main camera feed, you can choose to track onboard shots from three cars (two more than F1 offers), you also get a familiar live leader board, but when it comes to driver detail, it feels like you've entered another world. Pick a couple of guys or girls you're interested in following and you'll get direct feedback on the following details:

• Head-to-head competition view
• Interactive steering wheel position
• Gear paddle selection and current gear
• Car speed and current RPM
• Throttle and brake usage
• Driver radio
• Commentary updates

Forget what was happening in the race, I could've played with the thing all night. I managed to squeeze data from six drivers onto my screen along with Live Commenting. Renault F1 do provide similar information for their cars but with the IRL you get all this data for every runner to contrast and compare. Truly staggering and open and free for anyone to use.

At present, Formula One has nothing that comes remotely close to a solution such as this. A combination of two websites and a mobile phone could see you get a little closer, but who's going to bother setting that up five times a weekend?

You could argue that I'm being unfair on Bernie here, IRL could be the exception right? Yes it could, but we also took it upon ourselves to watch and comment on the Bathurst 1000 in October, and would you believe the organisers of that event do a better job too?

Again, completely free of charge. Live timing, a car tracker and live audio/video all to be found in a centralised dashboard for anyone who cares to keep up with such things.

Formula One has fallen woefully behind its counterparts in recent times. I'm led to believe NASCAR is another step above what both IRL and V8 Supercars are able to offer fans, which must put our sport somewhere near the bottom of the pile. Just to ram the point home, I'll bring up the subject of 2CV racing. Yep we watched and commented on an endurance race featuring a collection of 4-speed Citroëns, and their Live Timing system was on par with the kind of thing you'll find on F1.com. Are you listening Bernie?

Will anyone wake up and make changes for 2010? FOTA has long promised to improve the experience for those fans watching at home. To a point they appear to have addressed some deficiencies in our television coverage, and I'll cover some of those in a later post, but are they aware of how big a mountain F1 has to climb when it comes to areas such as race control?

I think telemetry can only serve to enhance the viewing experience, it should be made available to those you are interested in such things. Maybe it's not everyone's number one priority, but I challenge anyone to try IRL's Race Control for one race and not wish something similar was available in F1.

The era of the printed magazine is is coming to end. It may be taking longer than either Christine and I would prefer, but the national postal strike in the UK this week has helped drive another nail into the coffin of an outdated industry.

You may recall back in August we argued that it was high time the the paper version of the weekly Autosport magazine offered a digital counterpart for subscribers. This would not only enable text searching, but also allow international readers to access the content in a timely manner.

Thankfully, the impending threat of said postal strike has pushed Autosport owners Haymarket into making the leap into the digital domain, and this morning Dank broke the news that Autosport is available digitally!

How good does that look?

There's an official forum thread and a dedicated page containing more details. Anyone who already has Plus access to the website, which includes all magazine subscribers, gets free access to the digital copy of special edition print. Sadly it's a "special" because a certain British driver won the Formula One driver's championship at the weekend, but I'd like to think the lesser-seen green header additionally symbolises the momentous move from ink to the internet.

Ceros are the company selected to handle online distribution but their system does leave a little room for improvement - Paragraph text looks slightly blurry when zoomed to a legible size, and copy and paste is disabled (making quotes difficult to share without re-keying). You cannot download a full copy for offline desktop searching as you can with GP+ and finally, because the content is built on Flash technology it won't work on your mobile at all.

These aren't deal-breaking issues though, and as ex-F1 test driver Karun Chandhok points out:

"autosport magazine is now readable online !! ok you have to subscribe but well worth it when in india...."

How can you argue with that? I do hope this isn't a one-off occurrence.

If you've had a chance to look around, do let us know what you think of the long running magazine's first foray into digital print. Is there room for improvement and will it change the way you consume your F1 news? I want more and I want it now.

We've already mentioned this week how agreeable we find online magazines over their paper counterparts. Any chance we get, we'll plug GP+. See? However, it seems the teams are also starting to find the beauty in online publishing.

Earlier in the year, Toyota started up an online magazine called Push to coincide  with the release of the new car and the start of the season. At the time, I thought it would be a one-off, something to go with their movie-style online launch, but I have been proved wrong.

Issue 4 recently came out, and is packed full of interesting insight. Interviews with team members, previews of the final few upcoming races - particularly Abu Dhabi, plus a rather good look at the drivers seat and how it keeps him safe. The magazine is available as an online read - one of those fancy page turning things - or as a pdf download, and best of all, it's absolutely free.

As I was checking the links for this post, I also discovered the new Push blog from Toyota, started at the very end of September. It looks packed with videos, photos and snippets of life in the paddock, and very refreshingly states from the outset that they won't be talking performance or politics. The mission statement says:

Our blog authors – all long-term team members travelling to the race tracks around the world – will share moments of the team’s life and deliver behind-the-scenes-stories explaining what Formula 1 is all about. Jarno, Timo and Kamui will be invited to open the book of their lives as Formula 1 drivers as well.

That is pretty much all we want as fans, so I salute Toyota for attempting to reach out and connect with us. The blog is a great addition to the Push brand, as my main complaint about the magazine was its infrequency. Four issues a year is tricky to promote. Although it isn't news based, and doesn't necessarily need to be timely, it's easy to forget the magazine exists between issues. The blog seems to be updated on a more regular basis.

That's my only real complaint though. The magazine has great info, the blog seems to be shaping up nicely, and it also adds positive vibes towards the team's future. I'd love to hear what you think, though, of the magazine, the concept, and of course, the blog. Let's hope for a good reaction, as it could give the team a push.

Earlier today I had a bit of a rant about how physical paper makes it very hard to share content amongst friends, especially when all your friends are online. The replacement of print material with its digital counterpart is a large subject and not all of it can be pointed in the direction of Formula 1, but there are a couple of further aspects I wanted to briefly cover.

Advertising Space

Many, many moons ago we took out an advertisment in the weekly magazine, Autosport. It was reasonably priced, located near the back, and ran for 12 weeks or so. Creating the initial advert wasn't hugely complicated, but we chose not to take out a second run of banners because we had absolutely no idea if, or how well, the promotion worked. Herein lies the second major problem with print.

We actually still regularly pay Haymarket money in return for promotion, we pay them a small amount every month to advertise on Autosport.com, using Google AdWords. As it's an online solution, we only pay for individual clicks and we can see if the clickthough has led to more page views or if the person took one look and went elsewhere. It's very simple to see what worked and what didn't because you have solid metrics to back you up.

Do some keywords fare better than others? Which headlines provided the most interest? Everything is completely transparent, it's quick and easy to tailor things on the fly and straightforward to vary advertisements according to budget. We have, in the past, run an advertising campaign purely for the live commenting of races. At most that means running ads for a maximum of four hours before closing them again. Try doing that in print.

Admittedly online marketing isn't perfect, many web users block banners completely for instance, but by and large paying for an appearance on Autosport.com is preferable to paying for something similar in the paper magazine. Once you've compared online versus offline, there really is no going back.

Seek and You Shall Find

Talking of going back, have you ever tried to find anything in a back issue of print magazine? You may have a vague idea of what you're looking for, and can possibly take a guess at when it occurred, but where do you start looking?

We frequently have this problem, and no matter which solution we've tried, the only thing that works is spreading a couple of years worth of content across the floor and turning pages. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Predictably digital search is much easier and we've discussed the convenience of having issue of the very searchable Grand Prix+ on your desktop several times in the past (incidentally GP+ doesn't have usable links this side of the paywall, and that's something of a pain when sharing). Autosport.com also has a useful search service that can scan the restricted content which is invisible to regular search engines.

It's still too hard to find content online, requiring multiple searches across many services, but I'll take that over flipping pages on the living room floor any day.

One thing to think about is the idea of putting back issues of magazines online. Would you be interested in searching old copies of F1 Racing right back to the first issue. I know I would and I'd be happy to pay for that too. Is it remotely possible? I have no idea but it is something to aim for.

Me and Page 22

It would be remiss of me not to mention me and page 22. Earlier this year we had a huge amount of fun after Sidepodpictures appeared in copies of F1 Racing and Racecar Engineering. I won't deny we were ecstatic to see them there. You could also argue that people photographing themselves with physical magazines is far more interesting than if they'd appeared online.

I would say that as the two magazines are published monthly there's much less emphasis on timely news stories and therefore they become obsolete less quickly. I suspect though that one day the monthly magazine's time will eventually come, and the inability to search, link, and share may mean we eventually rethink how we consume those too.

Where might we be in a year's time?

In a couple of hours time Toyota's 2009 F1 challenger will be given its world premiere, but unlike the Ferrari launch earlier this week, this one will happen exclusively online.

It's not the first time a team have tried this, in fact last year's Toyota launch was streamed via the web too, but it does provided a compelling alternative to the closed press launches we often witness in Formula 1.

There's been speculation leading up to the event as regards to the nature of teaser shots distributed last week. Scott covered this in a recent post on his blog. Will we see a radical livery change today, and why are the boys from Cologne pushing the Hollywood connections so hard?

All will become clear soon, and you can follow live on www.tf109-premiere.com. If you're watching, please do let us know. We've commented on a bizarre selection of events in the past on sidepodcast.com but I believe this is the first time we've covered the unveiling of a car before. As with the Ferrari launch, please let us know all your thoughts on the new styling and how it stacks up to the Italians. We'll keep this thread up to date with the latest video and photographs as they become available.

Update: Predictably the web site fell over during the first few minutes of the launch. Once it became accessible we were treated to the sight of a remarkably similar livery from previous years.

I'm a big fan of the new matt-black effect, but it's still not enough to mask the mismatched front and rear wings. More images and videos from the launch can be found in the comments along with initial reactions as the car and drivers were rolled out. By far the best shot is this photoshop disaster. The mind boggles.

With the UK's Formula One television rights now in the hands of the BBC, we were expecting ITV's online F1 presence to disappear at the start of this year. Surprisingly ITV-F1 is still going strong.

It was pointed out to viewers at the end of the season, that the team had every intention of continuing with the site, but seeing as they no longer have any exclusive access, nor any unique video content, it's hard to see why they would bother?

Commercial Matters

The most likely answer is the site still brings in enough advertising revenue to justify it's costs. However, the main promotion for said site was a television program which regularly publicised it. Without any ongoing plugs, shouldn't the number of readers begin to drop like a stone?

Make no mistake, the British commercial broadcasters online popularity was massive. Googling the phrase F1 sees ITV listed second behind only Bernie's official homepage, and here's how Google Trends rates them compared to Autosport and F1 Live (who sit beneath them in the search results).

According to that data, ITV ranked second behind F1 Live throughout 2008, but ahead of Autosport. We can't see the most up-to-date information, but towards the end of November, after the season was over, they were clearly falling ever further into the clutches of Autosport's grasp.

You can see the chart in more detail on the trends website. It's hard to gauge just how reliable the figures are, but we were discussing web statistics in the comments recently, and by comparison they appeared to be the most reliable of those freely available.

I'm Not Dead Yet

With declining figures and no cost effective means with which to further promote the homepage, I assumed it would only be a matter of time before the thing was axed. At least, that was until I read an interview with Mark Blundell yesterday.

Talking to Crash.net, Mark revealed he still has a year left to run on his contract with ITV and they're looking at doing something a little bit different, but still motorsport related in the future.

It seems the broadcaster really hasn't given up on the project just yet, but if what we're led to believe is true, and the company really didn't want to deal with F1 any longer, why on earth are they hanging on in there. Drivers on their books and a website with content updated as recently as Thursday, it doesn't make sense.