Skip to main content

Fantasy Formula 1

Image
By

Well now... This is tricky.

After a great deal of pondering and soul-searching, I’ve decided I’m not going to run Fantasy Formula 1 this year. Here’s why: 17 years after starting it off in the mid 90s, 2012 saw me trying to juggle sorting out results, a race report, various stats and a captioned image, and place them onto the blog, on twitter, into a Word document and out via email. At the same time as doing that, I was trying to fit in writing a 500 word newspaper column that needed submitting on a Wednesday. Consequently, I was spending Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at the computer, then the rest of the week never quite catching up on everything else I needed to do. The BBC’s decision not to show half the races live also means I get to see coverage from those races later in the day, leaving even less time to get a head start on the results.

Surprisingly, the North West Evening Mail haven’t yet cottoned on to my innate crappiness at writing, and are still allowing me to submit grumpy diatribes to them each week (I’ve written 44 columns now). Trying to fit that around FF1, but wanting to get the results out quickly, meant I was rushing things a bit. Being an annoying pedant, I like to make sure I do things properly, which is why this is alltyped proper and grammatically corrict.

These are good reasons on their own, but the reliability of the modern F1 car means most of them finish every race, with only occasional large moves from their starting position. After tweaking driver prices over the last few years, it still seems to be big budget FF1 teams that win – short of a big upheaval of the rules I’ve been using, I can’t see an easy way of changing this.

Finally, and significantly, FF1 started out as a social thing in the office. On a Monday, I’d show up with the results, and colleagues would spend some time pointing out how incredibly useless my team was, whilst I told them they were only jealous that they hadn’t picked Forti Fords and Ralf Schumacher too. Whilst some of you have kindly emailed or tweeted me to let me know you’re enjoying it, generally it’s been pretty quiet.

I’ve been putting a lot of time in... it feels like I’m not getting a lot back out of it any more. I also spend half of the race jotting things down on a notepad, and trying to find new ways of slagging Maldonad’oh off – and that’s not really the point. So this year, I’m going to just watch F1 and enjoy it. I hope you do too. Maybe I’ll blog on the subject from time to time.

Thanks for taking part, and apologies if you’re disappointed. I’ll have a think about 2014...

Best wishes,

Peter

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making an exhibition of yourself

By
Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...
Post a Comment
Read more

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

By
If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...
Post a Comment
Read more

Suffering from natural obsolescence

By
You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...
Post a Comment
Read more