August 2013 recap - Keeping quiet at bay - The entertainment continues to flow despite F1's summer holiday

Published 1 September 2013 by Christine

Considering the summer break saw Formula One shut down for four weeks, Sidepodcast was still surprisingly busy. We had the incredible fun and games in the Sidepodcamp, some brilliant guest posts and features, and all the build-up to the return of F1 in Spa.

Formula One in August

Just the one race in the eighth month of the year, with Spa-Francorchamps playing host to the eleventh 2013 race. It wasn't a classic as we have come to know from Belgium, but it brought Formula One back to life for the second half of a brilliant season.

Date	Event
25 Aug	Belgian Grand Prix

Shows in August

We managed to clear up some time and space in amongst the summer stuff to provide a mid-season Feet Up Friday roundup, looking through all the teams performance so far. Then F1 Digest returned to preview the action in Belgium.

Sidepodcast in August

Work on the infrastructure of Sidepodcast has been put on hold for a while, and of late the creative juices have been flowing instead. Mr C has been enjoying adventures in colour and typography, with new formats for many of the posts recently published on the site. We're trying out all sorts of things, and there's a Collection to gather up the recent experiments in layouts. There's a lot more on the way too!

If you have Windows 8 and you're using Internet Explorer as your browser, you can now snap the website to one third of the screen so that you can comment on part of the screen and have whatever else you like remaining the focus on the rest of the screen. If you're commenting along with a live F1 session, you could have live timing on the main screen, with the comments flowing along up the side. Lukeh tested out the process for us and has a great screen-shot of the split screen in action.

Features in August

The Talk on Corners feature was resurrected this month, with Chris returning to take a look at the ongoing speculation over Kimi Räikkönen's future - and who could be in line to replace him at Lotus, should that seat arise.

Adam was hard at work over the summer, with his traditional post-race driver of the day round-up following Spa, preceded by a three-part look at how the teams are faring so far in 2013. The first part looked at the backmarkers, swiftly followed by the midfield runners, with a final glance at the battle for the championship.

As my own timescales continue to get out of sync, I managed two Midfield Monitor columns in August. One pondered the ever-increasing gap between the front-runners and those chasing them. The most recent column examined qualifying in Spa and how the shake-up showed up some performance worries for the midfield drivers left behind.

Stuart's Postcards from F1 returned in style for the Belgian race with an epic Where's Kimi image that you could spend an absolute age looking at, and then still come back for a second glance.

Posts in August

The Rankings continued unabated despite the quiet few weeks as F1 went on holiday, and we also saw thoughts on Formula E, an On this Day about a rather difficult season endured in 2004, plus a great two-part piece on the return of Honda in 2015.

Hidden gems in August

The Scrapbook this month featured plenty from the Sidepodcamp, but also highlighted Romain Grosjean's efforts in the kitchen, plus a pretty great idea to keep track of the tracks.

Meanwhile, we've been busy live commenting more and more events. We've branched out into baking this year, with threads for each episode of the Great British Bake Off but never fear, the sport is still here. F1 continues to take precedence, but we've also got live comments for the US Open tennis and the remaining few rounds of the IndyCar season.