Christine and I have become bored with Formula 1. In our opinion, the sport has taken a turn for the worse in 2010 with the removal of mid-race refuelling, and with it the strategic elements we enjoyed so much. As a result we've been rethinking our plans for sidepodcast.com this season.

To do what we've been doing since Christmas 2006 requires a certain level of dedication, but more importantly it requires an awful lot of love. Working on this site is much like having a second full-time job, albeit a job no-one asked us to do, admittedly.

Given our current apathy towards the sport in it's current state, we've decided to cut back on the amount of time and effort we're putting into the site, giving us more free time to work on things that do excite us. A rough tally says we each spend about 40 hours per week dedicated to the F1 cause, and we now envisage reducing that to something more reasonable, say 10 hours a week between the two of us.

That minimal level of ongoing effort means we can easily see out even the worst of seasons, and then look again at how we feel come 2011. With any luck, the powers that be will intervene in the meantime, and make things all shiny and new again. The question is, what does all this mean for the site and the community?

Essentially, if it's easy to implement, a feature will remain as is. For example:

• Live commenting threads for all sessions will continue
• The daily discussion will morph into a weekly thread, but real-time conversations will continue as they ever have
• So long as Joe is happy to, we'll continue to record the 'Aside' shows
• Guest posts will continue to be very much encouraged

Parts of the site that require more effort and input from us, will likely take something of a hiatus, particularly the Debrief and Digest podcasts.

We very much appreciate everybody's understanding as we rethink and redefine what it is we're doing. The option to hit the off switch was considered, but too many people have contributed too much time and effort to Sidepodcast these past three and a bit years. Shutting down would neither be appropriate, nor fair.

As a final word, we would really like to make it clear we are not "burnt out" by this project, just fed up with ever more detrimental changes to the sporting spectacle. We'll be putting our free time to more productive endeavours.