In my recent post about the nationality of F1 drivers and national populations, I briefly mentioned the problem facing the Formula 1 race calendar: balancing the history of the sport against truly global representation. I’ve been thinking how one might achieve that balance.

We need to rank countries by their historical importance to F1, and their potential value to F1 commercially. The measures mentioned above – the number of F1 drivers and national population – don’t quite cut it. So I’ll use the number of races a country has hosted, and GDP.

These are the top 20 for those measures, which we can work down to generate a calendar.

Working down those two lists, this is our 19 race calendar:

I wasn’t sure how that would work, but it doesn’t look too bad – and not a million miles from the actual 2014 calendar.

• 2014 GPs missing: Malaysia, Bahrain, Singapore, Abu Dhabi
• Added in their place: France, India, Netherlands, Mexico

It looks like there’s a bit too much prominence given to history: Netherlands in particular probably shouldn’t be there. But it’s interesting to note that the next three countries to come in would be South Korea, South Africa and Indonesia – which would go some way to remedying the under-representation of Asia. And it would add an African country, which are noticeably absent from both this calendar and the actual calendar.

Then there’s the Middle East, absent from this calendar entirely. Being made up of relatively small countries, they’re effectively ignored by this method. It doesn’t seem right to ignore an entire region for that reason. But on the other hand, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea to have fewer races which are there just because a small, rich government is willing to pay for the privilege.

Like everything, there’s a balance to be struck. This isn’t a perfect method, obviously – perhaps consideration needs to be given to regions as well as countries. But in an ideal world, a more sustainable model for the sport would be to hold races where there are populations sufficient to support the sport; the fans essentially owning the sport through their spending power.

Harder than getting governments to pay, and more long term – but it sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

It’s been a good few years since I’ve paid for a TV service, but a combination of MotoGP moving to BT Sport and BT TV not being terribly expensive convinced me to dip my toe back in those waters. I wasn’t sure what to expect, so I thought I’d share my experiences. It’s a bit long winded, I grant you, but in short: it’s all pretty good.

The package

BT’s packages are not very well advertised on their website. There are innumerable combinations of broadband and TV, all with different introductory and on-going prices, all badly laid out. It’s a minefield.

Broadband first. I was nervous about going with BT, given their reputation for reliability, but actually so far my fibre broadband connection has been solid – just one stutter that I’ve noticed, which lasted a minute if that. And though it’s by no means the cheapest option, it’s not hideously overpriced: for Unlimited BT Infinity 1, after it stops being free for six months, I will be paying £23 a month for unlimited usage at up to 38Mb – which is ample.

BT Sport is free with BT Broadband, which is all good and well if you’re willing to just stream it on your PC, phone or tablet, or have Sky TV. But I wanted it on my TV.

So I’ve also gone with the BT TV Entertainment package – which requires BT Infinity. That gets you a YouView box and beams the BT Sport channels and a bundle of others magically over the internet to your telly. Most of that bundle is pretty unremarkable to my eyes, but nestled in there are Eurosport and Eurosport 2. Which is all that matters. Given that a YouView box is about £300, an extra £7 a month isn’t bad.

Not to forget that there’s cashback to be had if you’re a new customer, which is always worth having.

The hardware

The YouView box is pretty good: it has all the usual pause, rewind and record functions of a PVR; you can set programmes to record via mobile devices; and the major catch-up services being integrated into the programme guide is nifty. I’ve had a couple of issues with recording, but overall I’m quite satisfied.

One downside of BT TV is that all the non-Freeview channels – including BT Sport and Eurosport – are delivered via the internet. That means it needs a solidly reliable wired connection to your router.

A direct ethernet connection is recommended, though I currently have it wired up via powerline. For the uninitiated: you plug an adapter into a mains power socket near the router, and connect them via ethernet cable; plug another adapter into a socket near the YouView box, and connect them via ethernet cable; the adapters then complete the connection by communicating over the mains power circuits. Magic! (Technology.)

Specifically, I’ve used Devolo dLAN 500 duo powerline adapters. Performance depends on any number of factors – distance, the quality of the electrical wiring, whether everything’s on one circuit. I’m not using them over a very great distance, but in a house with fairly old wiring, and speed tests show no difference to a direct ethernet connection. Which is good.

Performance has dropped once, which I fixed by updating the firmware – which was simple via the surprisingly straightforward Devolo Cockpit PC software, which can connect to the powerline network via WiFi.

The units are whiney little buggers though, emitting a high pitched tone most of the time. I’ll run an ethernet cable when I get around to it; a nice 10m cable is supplied with the YouView box.

The motorsport

On BT Sport itself, the headline is MotoGP, which as I’ve said at greater length elsewhere on the site is pretty good – and all things considered, an improvement on the BBC’s coverage.

The ‘exclusive’ World Rally Championship coverage isn’t very exclusive. It’s purely the world feed material, and most of it is broadcast elsewhere: the daily highlights on Motors TV, the hour-long review show on ITV4. The only thing that’s exclusive is the live coverage, which is unpredictably scheduled – not BT Sport’s fault, admittedly, but it makes it harder to find.

Also flapping around the BT Sport schedule are various bits of V8 Supercars, DTM, NASCAR, IndyCar – all nice to have, if you can keep up with where and when they’re on.

Then there’s the very considerable bonus of the Eurosport channels. Albeit a bonus you’re paying for. Entire days dedicated to World Superbikes and British Superbikes, full WTCC coverage, European Rally Championship – and plenty more besides.

Though I had forgotten how difficult it is to record Eurosport, due to everything overrunning all the time and programming being shifted as a result. Ho hum. They repeat everything endlessly, so it’s not hard to try again.

But not…

I was a bit excited when I saw that Motors TV was going free-to-air on Freeview HD, albeit via the internet. Alas YouView is not the same as Freeview, and does not adhere to the Freeview HD technical requirements, and does not support the particular internet streaming over which Motors TV is broadcast. So: no Motors TV. At the moment, anyway.

It might change, but there’s a part of me that hopes it doesn’t, because I’m already struggling to keep up with the motorsport that BT Sport, Eurosport, ITV4 and the BBC are throwing at my telly box.

Which brings me to F1, and of course Sky Sports F1 is not part of BT TV. You can pay for the Sky Sports Day Pass on Now TV though – which is available through YouView. That’s £9.99 per day, but you can get a good chunk of cashback the first time you use it.

It was announced this week, and it’s being released in two months’ time. Codemasters aren’t pissing about with GRID Autosport.

If fans of the series – which began in the late ’90s with the TOCA games – thought they got the cold shoulder from Codemasters with GRID 2 (words like ‘accessible’, ‘narrative’, ‘no in-car view’ – that is a word), then this is Codemasters nuzzling back up to them, whispering a quiet racing apology in their ear. Rather than target an assumed mainstream audience, this time Codemasters have consulted their community, racing drivers, and – as the title suggests – Autosport magazine.

Chief games design James Nicholls describes it as “a really focussed racing game”:

“We’ve jettisoned anything that doesn’t support the on-track competition and we’ve chosen a selection of cars and tracks that will give players a range of different racing experiences. That variety is crucial. There are five very distinct ways to race – this isn’t a game where basically every race is the same and the cars and tracks change. You need to adjust your tactics and learn different techniques to succeed in each racing discipline and each car has its own character too.”

Those disciplines will be touring cars, open-wheel, endurance, tuner events and street racing. It looks like there will be a lack of officially licensed series, alas, so there’s no BTCC to take part in – confirmed by Eurogamer. There’s certainly BTCC involvement though: Matt Neal and Andrew Jordan were two of the drivers consulted, and a tweet from Airwaves Racing gives a glimmer of hope that there could be the odd familiar livery, if not full championships.

Licenses aren’t everything though. It’s something that Simon Strang of Autosport – whose staff “got stuck in to help” – said that’s given me most reason to be optimistic:

“The other thing is that while you want the cars to feel authentic, you don’t necessarily want to spend hours mastering it – that’s what real racing is for. You want that experience of racing.”

Quite right. Games aren’t supposed to be hard work, they’re supposed to be fun. I’m still very much enjoying Gran Turismo 6, but it looks like that might only have another couple of months inside my PS3.

GRID Autosport will be released for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC in the UK on 27th June.

I’ll be honest, I thought it was the usual extreme creative license games can delight in taking. “A prototype sportscar, around Laguna Seca? That sounds like fun – in the same way as driving a Formula 1 car around Mallory Park.”

But proving further that I’m a sportscar racing ignoramus, I was wrong: LMP2 cars visit the circuit also known – less attractively – as Mazda Raceway, as part of the American Le Mans Series. Look, here’s Marino Franchitti winning earlier this year.

Nonetheless, the Audi R18 e-tron quattro is quite a fun car to have included in the Forza Motorsport 5 demo, even if the idea of LMP1 at Laguna Seca isn’t as far-fetched as I thought. Certainly it was too much for me to resist when I spent some time with the game at the Eurogamer Expo recently.

So, a new generation of consoles. Is Microsoft using the Xbox One to usher in a new generation of racing games? Well, not obviously, no. But there are some neat ideas, such as shoving your performance data to the cloud for processing, to endlessly tailor the AI in future races. It also features open-wheel single-seaters for the first time – IndyCar and classic F1.

It certainly looks terribly pretty, with a low sun clearly chosen for the demo to showcase some particularly distracting lighting effects. By ‘distracting’, I mean ‘realistic’. And also ‘it nearly made me crash once’.

It’s worth being careful with that word ‘realistic’ though. You’re not going to be mistaking this for the real thing; it’s the same lack of incidental imperfections which give away a CGI render.

As if inviting the comparison, there was an actual McLaren P1 on the stand. That was covered in an unavoidable thin layer of dust, while the McLaren P1 in the game was either perfectly gleaming, or perfectly damaged. None of this is a criticism, but it’s worth setting expectations given that we’ve got new hardware here.

Whatever the fancy hardware and cloud-based shenanigans, the meat and potatoes is going to be driving cars around tracks – so how does it feel? A short time standing at a demo pod at a games show is never going to be the best place to judge, but so far so good.

One thing does feel different. The Xbox One pad has added individually vibrating triggers, which means you can feel the accelerator and brake pedal through your digits. The latter is particularly effective: leave it too late to hit the brakes and you’ll feel the squirming and wheel-locking through your left index finger. It’s a remarkably enjoyable sensation, especially noticeable when I was hooning around in the Ford Focus ST.

Of the cars on offer, the Focus ST was the most suited to the track. Throwing it around with a bit of BTCC attitude – rubbin’s racin’ – was most satisfying. There wasn’t really space to give the Audi R18 or McLaren P1 a proper run – clattering down the corkscrew in the R18 in particular felt rather clumsy – though suffice to say the added performance was obvious.

The old gull-wing Mercedes 300SL was a pleasant tootle around in comparison. It was also a reminder that steering wheels used to be massive. So much so that it was slightly in the way of the in-car view. Realism’s one thing, but couldn’t they have found a taller virtual gentleman driver?

With the Olympic Games well under way in fancy London Town, it would be very predictable to write about whether motorsport should be in the Olympics. And doubtless I will be that predictable before long.

But much more interesting is something that I stumbled on while thinking about that: motorsport nearly was an Olympic sport in 1900. Sort of.

Paris 1900: more ‘motoring’ than ‘motorsport’

There were seven ‘automobilisme’ – or ‘motoring’ – categories in the Paris 1900 Olympic Games, and 16 events in total. But they were all exhibition rather than full Olympic events, and calling all but one of the categories ‘motorsport’ is rather generous.

The one recognisable motorsport category was essentially a rally, Paris-Toulouse-Paris, over three stages including timed sections. There were events for passenger cars, small cars and motorcycles.

The rest of the events were more like reliability tests than races, the vehicles having to cover a set distance on a given course, repeated on multiple days. These events were judged on the likes of reliability, fuel consumption, comfort. Really not motorsport, then.

Nevertheless, the full list of categories and events is quite interesting:

• Paris-Toulouse-Paris (Courses de vitesse)
  Passenger Cars (Voitures)
  Small Cars (Voiturettes)
  Motorcycles (Motocycles)
• Passenger Cars (Voitures de tourisme)
  2 seater cars weighing more than 400kg
  4 seater cars weighing more than 400kg
  6 seater cars weighing more than 400kg
  Cars with more than 6 seats
• Motorcycles (Motocycles)
• Taxis and Delivery Cars (Voitures de place et de livraison)
  Taxis with petrol engine
  Taxis with electric engine
  Delivery Cars with petrol engine
  Delivery Cars with electric engine
• Small Cars (Voiturettes)
  2 seater cars weighing less than 250kg
  2 seater cars weighing less than 400kg
• Lightweight Trucks (Poids légers)
• Trucks (Poids lourds)

Some of the winners are notable, too. The small car class of the Paris-Toulouse-Paris event was won by Louis Renault; his brother and fellow Renault founder Marcel also entered, but did not finish. Peugeot were around and about too, competing in quite a number of events.

London 1908: just motor boats in the end

Motoring events were originally scheduled for the 1908 Olympic Games when they were due to be held in Rome, and also when they were moved to London after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. They didn’t take place, but motor boats did compete.

Sources & Further Reading

Motorsport at the 1900 Paris Olympic Games by Jeroen Heijmans is an excellent, fuller account of all this and more, from the Journal of Olympic History Volume 10 September 2002 Number 3, via the LA84 Foundation.

The 1900 Official Olympic Report is also available online, via the Olympic Games Museum, if you fancy a long, baffling, French read.

Photo Credit
Dave Catchpole – Flickr – Some rights reserved

So, we’ve established that the racing at Brands Hatch on Sunday wasn’t exactly scintillating. But! All the more time to try to get half-decent photos of the more interesting liveries on display.

Livery of the day

We go straight to International GT Open, and the number 11 Ferrari 458 GT Italia run by Kessel Racing, driven by Philipp Peter and Michael Broniszewski. It only finished 10th and 17th in the races, but by jingo it had the best livery around. A delightful shade of yellow and a spider’s web, you say? Sold!

Formula Two

The top liveries were better rewarded in Formula Two.

Lotus Cup UK / Europe

It’s not particularly associated with Lotus, but there were a couple of Gulf Oil liveried entries in the Lotus Cup UK / Europe. Pete Storey’s Lotus 2-Eleven, above, was a particularly pleasing example of that most distinctive of colour combinations.

The Formula Two meeting at Brands Hatch at the weekend was not terribly well attended. Sunday tickets were £17 in advance, which struck me as reasonable. But when World Series by Renault at Silverstone next month is free, suddenly it doesn’t seem as cheap.

It didn’t affect my enjoyment of the day – it made it easy to get in and out of the car parks, and there was no jostling for position at the inside of Druids. But it does make me question whether Formula Two is working.

Headline or support

After two seasons spent largely as a support category for the WTCC, F2 moved away from that for 2011. The stated reason was to visit more Formula 1 tracks, but presumably it was also an attempt to take more of the limelight. It’s not really worked though.

F2 now shares a bill with the International GT Open at most meetings. Even at Brands Hatch – a circuit owned by MotorSport Vision, the company which also runs Formula Two – it was a joint headline event. The Monza and Barcelona meetings are advertised purely as International GT Open – not even a cursory mention of F2.

The pecking order

So Formula Two has failed to build itself much of a profile.

It’s one of only five FIA world championships, yet in reality it’s certainly below GP2 in the motorsport pecking order, and possibly GP3 too. It probably sits alongside something like Formula Renault 3.5 – on the aforementioned World Series by Renault bill – in terms of notoriety.

F1 feeder series

So what is F2 for? Well, when it was relaunched, then FIA President Max Mosley said:

“The objective is to make top-level international single-seater racing available to drivers who at present have difficulty in raising enough money to demonstrate their talent. Formula One and other major championships will benefit by being able to draw on a far larger pool of drivers, while competitors from countries which do not yet have an established motor racing structure will find it easier to make progress.”

Clearly the intention was that F2 would be a Formula 1 feeder series – the prize of a Williams F1 test backs that up.

But it isn’t. Andy Soucek has been stuck in Superleague Formula since winning the 2009 title. Not what anyone hoped for.

Cheap route to GP2

With GP2 tests for the drivers who come second and third in the overall standings, there’s an implicit admission that F2 is more of a GP2 feeder series.

Which is possibly not such a bad thing when the other objective does seem to have been achieved: F2 is significantly cheaper than GP2, GP3, FR3.5 or F3 – at least according to its own website.

As a result, it has a healthy grid. But it’s still not that cheap – Will Bratt, for example, had to miss the Brands Hatch meeting due to lack of budget.

Perhaps if we give it a few years, Formula Two drivers will start to properly filter up to GP2 and eventually Formula 1. Which, I think, would constitute F2 working.

Palmer promotion

And in the meantime, at least Formula Two can be used as a promotional tool for MotorSport Vision boss Jonathan Palmer’s son.

Jolyon Palmer finished second overall in 2010 (and 21st in 2009), and this year races in GP2. But that doesn’t stop him getting plenty of mentions from @FIA_Formula_Two.

And, of course, a nice big double page spread in the programme for the Brands Hatch round, putting an unerringly positive spin on his as yet pointless – in the literal sense – rookie season of GP2.

I’m very partial to a bit of Brands Hatch, so what better place to spend my 30th birthday? It’s just a lovely place to wander around – and even better with engines roaring all around you. So, yesterday, off to the Formula Two meeting I went.

Not the most exciting race

It turned into a glorious day by the time the F2 race kicked off. Just as well, because it wasn’t the most exciting of races.

Ramon Pineiro made a storming start to take the lead around the outside at the first corner, and disappeared into the distance. Jack Clarke looked like he might challenge Mirko Bortolotti in the early laps, but they soon settled into comfortable third and second places respectively.

The racing might not have been remarkable, but Pineiro looked incredibly happy with his first Formula Two victory, and on a sunny day who could begrudge him that? Especially in what F2 commentator Jack Nicholls neatly described as a highlighter pen of a car.

Champagne burns

Incidentally, it’s worth watching the highlights of the race on YouTube. The start is decent, but really it’s all about Jack Clarke spraying champagne in an unfortunate grid girl’s face – skip to about 7:41 for that. Her reaction suggests something along the lines of: “IT BURNS!” – I do hope she was okay.

Just as there are some fantastic place names in the UK – Chipping Sodbury is a personal favourite – British circuits have some have some excellently named sections of track. These are five of the best – and the great stories behind a couple of them.

1. Knickerbrook – Oulton Park

   Ha ha, knickers! But the childishness is not misplaced: apparently the corner does take its name from an event involving both knickers and a brook – which we know thanks to a recording by demolition expert, stunt rider and raconteur Blaster Bates.

   When the circuit was being constructed, he and a colleague had the task of removing tree stumps with explosives close to what is now Knickerbrook, and this disturbed a couple ‘getting amorous’ nearby. Either the knickers, or the woman tangled up in her knickers – depending on which account you read – ended up in the brook.

   You couldn’t make it up. Unless it is made up. In which case it’s still brilliant.

2. The Mountain – Cadwell Park

   It’s steep, sure, but you could argue that it’s a touch dramatic as names go. It did cause that crash for Leon Camier though, so maybe it’s justified.

3. Bomb Hole – Snetterton

   Now that is a bit dramatic. Apparently the name has nothing to do with an explosion though, despite the circuit being on a former RAF airfield. According to the internet, it’s a polite version of the name given to it by riders who came off there in the 1970s: ‘Bum Hole’.

4. Dingle Dell – Brands Hatch

   It sounds like something out of CBeebies does Lord of the Rings. But ‘dingle’ and ‘dell’ have broadly the same meaning: small wooded valley. So given its location around the back of the circuit amongst the trees, it’s not hard to imagine how it got its name.

5. Sunny In & Sunny Out – Croft

   Are there happier corner names in the UK? I don’t think so, and that’s why I like them: for their sheer, unbridled positivity. It was simply Sunny Corner before the track was redesigned in the mid-1990s, when it became two corners, but I’ve not managed to find anything to explain the name. Maybe it’s just a sunny corner.

Incidentally, there’s only one corner even in contention for the title of worst British corner name: the Real Radio Hairpin at Knockhill. Sponsored corner names are uninspiring at the best of times, but this is pretty much unique in its unwieldiness. It’s awkward to say, it sounds awful, and it means nothing.

Race of Champions is a lot of fun: construct a race track inside a stadium, add vehicles from buggies to rally cars and everything in between, scatter with top international racing drivers, and shake vigorously. What’s not to like?

It’s in Düsseldorf this weekend, which I’ll take as an excuse to wheel out a video I shot at the 2007 edition – the first of two at Wembley Stadium. Back then it all took place in one day, which made for a mighty good day out. It’s split over two days now, which seems a bit of a shame.

Anyway, this is a lap of Sebastien Buemi and Henning Solberg going head to head in Solution F Prototypes, with stadium commentary from Martin Haven.

There are, of course, far better videos knocking around. For example Race Of Champions For Dummies: Neil Cole going through all the cars at last year’s event in Beijing. With a bit of luck there will be more from him this year on his YouTube channel. Also probably worth keeping an eye out for are official ROC podcasts from BBC Radio Five Live F1′s very own David Croft.

Live coverage of the event is, inevitably, less easy to come by. For free, anyway. Motors TV will be broadcasting it, and it will also be streamed online. Despite that stream being via freecaster.tv, it’s not free – €4.99 is the asking price. It would have been nice to dip in and out of the live stream over the weekend if it was free. Ho hum.