MotorTweets Blog

Breaking News: MotorTweets becomes title sponsor of Sauber F1 Team

As we all know, last weekend in Malaysia Sauber had their best finish in several years, with Sergio Perez taking second place and arguably close to getting past Fernando Alonso. They are now fourth in the constructors championship with 30 points. Almost 75% of what they had in the whole of last season.

Because of this positivity we got into discussions with Peter Sauber and Monisha Kaltenborn (CEO) about sponsoring the team.

The deal

We flew our own Founder and CEO, Ollie Parsley out to Switzerland and the teams base near Wetzikon. The talks only lasted a matter of hours before a deal was worked out and contracts signed.

To summarise the multi-year deal:

• MotorTweets becomes the title sponsor of the MotorTweets Sauber F1 Team
• 90% of our monthly £10 advertising income goes straight into the development of the 2013 car, the C32.
• Sergio Perez will read out our the latest blog post on grid. With the hope that Martin Brundle will walk past on his gridwalk for Sky Sports F1 HD
• If Sauber get a driver onto the top step of the podium the constructors anthem shall be Singing In The Rain by Gene Kelly, due to the fact it will probably have to be the weather that shakes up the drivers.
• All of our future tweets will contain the hashtag #MotorTweetsSauberF1Team

Updated livery

From the Chinese Grand Prix onwards the MotorTweets Sauber F1 Team’s C31 car will have the MotorTweets logo on the side pods.

Click here for a bigger version

The teams overalls will also feature the MotorTweets logo in a prominent position.

Thank you

Just a thank you to everyone who has supported MotorTweets since we started in 2009, as readers and followers we’re sure you will be wanting to keep up with the details, so as part of an exclusivity deal, we will only be writing blog posts about the MotorTweets Sauber F1 Team. 

(Source: blog.motortweets.com)

Valencia & Catalunya to alternate from 2013

Straight from the mouth of Bernie Ecclestone, both the major Spanish race tracks which both currently feature in the F1 calendar will, from 2013, alternate with each other. This means that Spain will be in the same situation as Germany is with Hockenheim and Nurburgring. 

The recession means that both cities are in need of this type of cooperation.

It’s a case of finding a way to help Valencia and, if by alternating the event with Barcelona, we can help, then that’s a good solution.

What do you think about the situation? Let us know in the comments or send us a tweet.

A few more juicy bits about Sky Sports F1 HD

I, Ollie Parsley, have just come back from a tour of Sky Sports News and the Sky Sports F1 setup. I won’t go on and on about it for many paragraphs. So I’m going to summarise what was learnt today and some more information about the Sky Sports F1 Channel.

Sky Sports News

As you might already know, Sky Sports News are providing 2 dedicated reporters for 6 days surrounding a race weekend.

Technical challenges

One of the first broadcasters (just one in Spain) have made use of the 5.1 surround sound. There is also way to provide 5.1 in on-board cameras by putting the base sounds behind, to give them impression you are in the driving seat. This is the first time it will be used this comprehensively and Formula One Management have been working with Sky Sports (an ex-sky employee is the FOM sound engineer) to make sure the sound is awesome.

There are fibre optic cables from each race circuit back to Sky Sports HQ to enable multiple video streams back and forth across the world.

Studios

There is a small studio that will be at 16/20 grand prix that includes an awesome touch screen interface that Anthony Davidson, Georgie Thompson and Ted Kravits will be using.

There will be 17 tonnes of equipment and editing studios at each grand prix.

Red button

This is known as “Race Control” and will have 9 separate channels.

There will be around 3-4 driver camera to choose from, also a pit lane camera, a tweets panel, driver tracker and a few more. Plenty to choose from!

Graphics

We got a glimpse of some of the graphics that will be used on the various programmes. They feature video introductions of every driver, CGI grids, CGI track info, generally great graphics.

Virtual car

In the F1 studio there is will be a virtual car that the presenters can walk around. Eventually all the cars for the season will be done. We even got a chance to have a go in the studio and use the virtual car. If I’m brave enough I’ll put the video up, I need to wait for the video to be edited first though. 

Opening titles

Unfortunately we weren’t able to see/hear the opening titles. Apparently they are awesome. We should find out next Wednesday or Thursday.

That’s about all for now. Even that went on for several paragraphs! Please note that I am not affiliated, endorsed or paid by Sky to do this. I’m just a massive F1 fan and really excited to get into the season and see what else Sky Sports F1 HD has for us!

MotorTweets 2012 season updates

You might have seen the tweets from the @MotorTweets twitter account that over the course of this week the MotorTweets.com site has had a teeny refresh. There is a much large brand and site update coming later this year.

Drivers

MotorTweets has always separated news for individual drivers into separate Twitter accounts to make sure you can follow only the drivers you care about.

Each of these drivers accounts have been updated with new profile photos and news sources. The new and returning drivers for this season have been created too. You can see all the drivers at motortweets.com/f1drivers.

Constructors

There have yet again been name changes in F1. So the teams accounts have been updated with new logos and teams.

You can see them all at motortweets.com/f1constructors

Lists

This season we have 3 Twitter lists for you. If you want to keep up with all teams, all constructors or just all the accounts.

• All drivers
• All constructors
• All drivers and constructors

Let us know if you can think of any other lists or ideas for the site. Feel free to comment or ask a question.

FOTA Fans Forum: We need more opportunities for young drivers

Last night in Barcelona was the Formula One Teams Association Fans Forum (that’s a mouthful!) Present for the first part of the evening was Ferrari test driver Marc Gene, Caterhams Vitaly Petrov, Williams’ Pastor Maldonado and HRT’s Pedro de la Rosa.

The point that I believe stuck out the most was about getting fresh drivers into Formula 1.

Current young drivers

Two of the panel are relatively new. Those being Maldonado and Petrov. The latter pointed out that it was difficult for him to come over “after winning everything in Russia” to graduate into the bigger leagues of GP2 and F1. With 6 days of testing per driver (assuming the 12 test days are slit evenly between the two main drivers), that is literally all they get before the season opener.

He also said that he had to use lower down formula cars to get some testing done, but even that is a long way off what a Formula 1 car can do.

Red Bull Young Driver Programme

Although some people see this programme from Red Bull Racing as a bit controversial, putting in a completely separate team (Toro Rosso) in order to bring in new talent and get them ready for promotion to the Red Bull Racing team (if they are good enough). But as we have seen since the 2009 season, Toro Rosso have brought in several new drivers. None of them have a racing seat, the closest to a racing seat is Sebastian Buemi, who for this season is the Red Bull Test driver.

Daniel Ricciardo was also part of the programme, but Red Bull already had two arguably good drivers so Red Bull paid HRT to use him as thieir driver for the second half of the 2011 season, he then graduated to Toro Rosso.

You could argue that if the drivers really aren’t good enough to win races and championships, then they aren’t good enough to be in formula 1. But is that a bit harsh? Give them a top car and they might be able to bring home the goods?! 

2012 Rookies

This season we have 2 rookies for this year. 1 of them are at Toro Rosso, Jean-Eric Vergne and another at Marussia, Charles Pic. 

This does show that there are new drivers coming through, but are they really given a chance? Like for Jerome D’ambrosio last year (as we all know, it all went custard for him). Or do we have enough young people already? What do you think?

How will Sky Sports F1 HD differ from the BBC?

At the Sky Sports F1 press day we had a presentation from Martin Turner, the executive producer at Sky Sports.

One thing that was reiterated was that a dedicated channel allows for much more time to get into F1 and dive deeper into the stories and teams.

More teams

Being a whole channel and getting the Sky Sports treatment has allowed them to give more access to the lower teams, the top 4 teams are ususally picked when there is limited time to broadcast, the BBC currently have this issue. But, now the viewers get to see all the teams. We saw a clip showing behind the scenes at Caterham, if they can do that kind of work for all the other teams, then every viewer is in for a treat.

More archives

After doing a deal with Beaulieu, Sky Sports have a lot of archive race footage going all the way back to 1950. They already have a lot of races already edited for broadcast. 

More highlights

On top of full race re-runs, it was announced that there would be a 90 minute highlights show and also a 30 minute highlight programme set to music, in a similar style to the Football highlights programmes.

More behind-the-scenes

Having the whole channel has allowed Sky Sports to go further in-depth on teams. In an example clip we were shown it had a simplified organisational chart of the Sauber team and then went into detail about each role and who the person was. Definitely a lot more in-depth behind the scenes footage then has been shown before.

More technical

One point that Martin Brundle made was that he was not able to do as many technical videos as he would have liked. Now he gets to do that. For instance he is heading to Italy next week to drive the 2010 works Ferrari with a full crew and a lot of the Ferrari team management. Several films will be shot there and will be shown throughout the start of the new season. When Brundle turned up to a meeting earlier in the year he brought a list of 30+ features he’d like to do, so far he is set to do over 20 of them. It just shows that Sky Sports F1 really is getting the full treatment.

More ways to watch

Although the channel requires a Sky subscription, there are many ways to watch the content provided by the channel. Be it online with clips on the website, watching live using Sky Go or just keeping up to date with the @SkySportsF1 twitter account. (You could also follow @MotorTweets too!).

One point that Martin Turner made was that he thinks the BBC do a great job with the limited time that they have to broadcast.

All in all I think that for any type of F1 fan, be it casual or a technical junkie, the channel will have everything required to show off the sport.