January 2013 recap - Getting the new season snowball rolling - Brand new car launches, some news from Mercedes and Pirelli and more

Published 3 February 2013 by Christine

With the New Year celebrations complete, the off-season transitioned from reviewing the 2012 season to hotly anticipating the coming 2013 action. With pre-season testing just weeks away, we started to see teams gearing up for their launches, and some driver and personnel movements as well. The 2013 season is starting to gather momentum.

Formula One in January

The final three races took us to the often underwhelming (but this time quite exciting) Abu Dhabi, the brand new and totally unexpected US (Austin) and the always brilliant Brazil. The season finale was one of those crazy races that you think couldn't happen at the end of a bonkers year, but then it does!

Date	Event
28 Jan	Lotus launch
31 Jan	McLaren launch

Sidepodcast in January

Much of the work going on at Sidepodcast over the winter has been behind the scenes, but some of it was available to see when the launches began. Starting with Lotus, we managed to show off the new Factbyte Factbox, looking very much like its predecessor. The FBFB can, once again, be put in blog posts for more lengthier breaking news coverage, whilst the icons have been spruced up. There will be plenty more to see as the races begin and more live events are covered, but it's a very good start.

We also introduced a few new logos, which may not seem exciting, but they certainly spruce up the site a little. The Sidepodcast Hangout got a fancy lens-flare enhanced image, whilst Friday Fun was given a brilliantly bulging logo to be going on with.

Posts in January

It was really towards the end of the month that things started to kick off, but as the news from Mercedes filtered out, and Pirelli launched their new tyres, we tried to cover as much as we could. We also enjoyed some Friday Fun entertainment, a bit of Daytona endurance racing, and saw the NFL season build up to something mega.