There must be something about the off-season that leads us in the direction of Mark Webber. This time last year we ended up dining in his restaurant, and 12 months later we spent an afternoon at Silverstone listening to him talk.

The Porsche Driving Centre, a recent addition to the Silverstone circuit and situated next to Hangar Straight, were running a workshop today called "Fit to Race". In essence this consisted of a number of demonstrations relating to driver performance metrics, from diet and training, to mental preparation and psychology. Mark was in attendance as a guest speaker, offering his take on subjects such as hydration, working out and how he's been coping with a dodgy leg.

The man talked at length in two separate sessions, and we'll no doubt go into more detail in future. Suffice to say, on behalf of all Sidepodcast listeners we put the question of Michael Schumacher's speedy recovery in '99 to Mark and the official word is, he believes he'll match the former World Champion with an eleven week recovery period. How annoyingly diplomatic.

We have to say a huge thank you to Mike Garth, who originally mentioned the workshop on Twitter. Mike was another speaker at Silverstone today (and if we may say so, best after Webber), he specialises in psychology and performance coaching in motorsport, and you can find out more information at Sun1400. As a sideline, he also finds things for Sidepodcast to do during the winter, and we can't thank him enough.

There's so much more to discuss about our day, we met so many fantastic people, we don't know where to begin. We'll cover more in a future podcast, but with the debut of Sidepodchat tomorrow, it may have to wait a while. It wouldn't hurt to keep an eye on our Flickr pages during the week though.