The festivities are over for another year, everyone’s back at work, it’s wet and windy, the news is unremittingly bleak – it’s easy to get down. So, in an effort to keep SAD at bay, here are some reasons to be blindly optimistic.

• It may be months until the new motorsport year gets into full flow, but until then there’s testing and, more importantly and immediately, the Dakar to keep us occupied. Unfortunately Australian broadcaster SBS seems to be finally using geolocation on its website, but with the likes of JMLatvalaFan around on YouTube, even that’s no reason to be down if you’ve not got Eurosport.
• It’s true that the first couple of Formula 1 races won’t be live on the BBC – but don’t dispair, non-Sky types! I for one look forward to having no temptation to get up ludicrously early. I like F1, but I also like a lie-in.
• I also like Ben Edwards, the BBC’s new F1 commentator. His excitable enthusiasm made ITV’s BTCC coverage what it is, and he’ll be a tough act to follow there. But I can’t wait to hear him getting excited about F1 on a regular basis.
• The new CRT entries in MotoGP may not bother the aliens for podium places, but they’ll add much needed bikes to the grid. And in the same way as the new F1 teams a couple of years ago, the battle to be the least bad of them will be something else to keep an eye on. They have to be welcomed.
• It’s not great in the WRC at the moment – just ask North One Sport or Kris Meeke. But it’s not all bad: we can look forward to Loeb versus Hirvonen at Citroen, Petter Solberg in a factory Ford, and Citroens for new faces Nasser Al-Attiyah and Thierry Neuville. We just need the commercial side sorting in the next fortnight, to avoid the Monte’s return to the WRC being less than the triumph it ought to be.
• With Evo regulations as standard this year, there’s every reason to hope that British Superbikes will be even more competitive than 2011. The entry list is filling up nicely, too.
• There’s never much known about the BTCC at this time of year, and 2012 is no different. But with most other grids broadly known quantities already, it’s nice to have a big reveal to look forward to – and that’s what the BTCC Media Day, a couple of weeks before the season starts, usually is.

Photo Credit
Houston Marsh – Flickr – Some rights reserved