A shrinking race calendar for 2013?

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I wrote this last week (15/9/2012) , but am re-publishing today after provisional calendar revealed and other news)

I was contemplating on the way back from Spa Francorchamps, when the 2013 race calendar would be published. Then something I heard in Monza made me even more curious…but we’ll return to that later.

In 2011, the draft calendar for this year was published June 3rd. It included Istanbul as part of a 21 race schedule. This race was dropped in the final version confirmed in September leaving the 20 races we have now.

However, this year, we’ve not yet heard a whisper regarding a 2013 schedule and the FIA is due to meet next at the end of September. So it’s unlikely they’ll be any news before then.

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Rules Damn Rules (Part 1: FIA makes historic changes)

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The old maxim, “rules were made to be broken”, has been somewhat ingrained in the DNA of F1 participants since time began.

It appears remarkable to some onlookers that this attitude is almost endemic within F1 teams. To them and others of course the Mclaren spy scandal and Flaviogate are examples of rule breaking that is completely unacceptable. Yet there will always be the run of the mill offences such as speeding in the pit lane, unsafe driving/pit release, blocking and a host of sins that are the ‘yellow card’ offences that we kind of expect.

However, its important not to lose sight of the fact that Formula 1 is a technological and development race every bit as much as a series of motor races, and it is this aspect of the sport that drives the DNA of the teams to develop the cars to the limit of the regulations. Which may be one of the reasons why someone appears to be always breaking the rules, but are the FIA changing the nature of this game?

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Jake, F1 and the BBC conundrum

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For Jake Humphrey, life couldn’t have been much better for the past few years. His rise has been swift from lowly CBBC presenter to the accomplished F1 anchor on the BBC.

Jake married his childhood sweetheart Harriet in 2007 and Tuesday this week announced they were expecting their first child. His sports reporting/commentary career began as a match reporter for BBC radio in 2005 and also he became the face of American Football for the BBC.

He presented a daily afternoon show from the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and has co-presented 4 times the BBC’s end of year love in that is “Sports personality of the year”.

There was a lot of speculation when Sky landed F1 for 2012 that they desperately tried to persuade Jake to join Martin Brundle in their new venture. The importance of this failed coup has become especially evident when you listen to many people’s opinions on Sky’s anchor, Simon Lazenby. They feel he comes across as an F1 Jonny come lately and consider his style a little stilted and fawning toward the senior figures of the F1 world – in general lacking gravitas unlike Jake.

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Hello world!

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It’s a rather sad and poignant day to launch my blog. Yet it is a day that demonstrates the awesome power of social media. This incredible power is to communicate to the world, or certainly those connected through social media across the world, news and information within seconds of it happening.

This was evident today when one of the renown F1 journalists tweeted this morning, “so sad to wake and hear about Sid…” of course referring to the death of Professor Sid Watkins. The first tweet I saw regarding Sid’s death was around 21:00 last night. It used to be the case that we the public would only hear about breaking news quite some time following the event. So for millions of F1 fans to have known that Sid had passed on to join Ayrton before a number of people closely connected with the F1 circus – would have been impossible a mere handful of years ago.

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