Today's entry is going to be a relatively short one (cue relief from LCMB's readers ;) )

Before I found out about the F1 blogosphere, or even the F1 fora, I used to use Yahoo! Sport's portal to keep up-to-date with the news. Even afterwards, it was good for brief checks of what the hot topics were before plunging into the detail stuff from sources who were more detailed/closer to the truth/more opinionated [delete/augment as appropriate]. It's been a while since I've done that - Twitter more or less took over the role of telling me what the hot topics were at a given time - but this afternoon I wandered back to Yahoo! Sport for nostalgia's sake.

I was disappointed at what I saw.

The fact that it's a news portal, rather than a direct source of news, meant I was unsurprised with the... ...variable quality of sources used. It was the lack of quality control that truly got to me.

Take this example. The headline indicates it's a rumour, but such efforts to distinguish the type of item are the extent of its strengths. The story is attributed to F1 news site Crash.net in the top-right of the article, Spanish daily sports newspaper Diario AS in the middle of the article and the distinct impression that GMM is involved at some point as a middlesite. The Diario AS article which appears to have started all this is much longer than the versions at Yahoo! and Crash, and the style of abbreviation has all the hallmarks of GMM on it.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the GMM controversy, it is an information-trawling agency that charges money to send metric tonnes of small items of varying levels of veracity, frequently using an online translation service to help make its quota (currently 8-25, but changing every so often). It's the F1 data equivalent of fast food - some like its convenience but many consider the lack of value-added information, rumour quotient, lack of indicated differential between types of item and certain other of its actions unhealthy. Whatever your opinion of GMM, it is proper etiquette for a site to mention a site if used as a middlesite. Proper "breadcrumbing" of information sourcing enables people to find out by what process the information has arrived and what changes may have been made to it along the trail.

Making matters worse is the lack of care in the sentences. This carelessness has been imported from Crash.net, but that is no excuse. Why is "newspaper" abbreviated with an apostrophe when the correct abbreviation doesn't have one? Why have online translator artefacts such as "the Collins" been left? They act merely as symbolic eyesores and serve no useful purpose.

Worse still are such confusing suggestions as "Tonio Liuzzi's management has made contract with Hispania Racing" when the headline itself suggests the two sides are merely in talks. The offending sentence is the very first one in the article. What, exactly, is a reader unaware of the true situation meant to make of this? They might think something's been signed, they might not - but they will think the reportage was rather clueless. Not great for a site that presumably expects people to come back and read more of its articles.

It is a relief to me that the F1 blogosphere and reputable journalists like Joe Saward have taken over as the primary sources of F1 internet information exchange because if they hadn't, computer-using F1 fans would be banging their heads on the wall in frustration every time they logged on.

PS. If I have made any blatent blatant spelling or basic sentence construction mistakes in this entry, feel free to point and laugh at the irony ;) .

Warning! Long entry alert!

I spent quite a lot of the weekend attempting to find out information about Giancarlo Fisichella's latest adventure. Considering that it was an international sportscar race (link in Italian), this proved surprisingly difficult.

The race was the 6 Ore di Vallelunga (link in Italian), an endurance race slightly longer than a typical Le Mans Series race (because there is no maximum distance) for GT2 and lower. GT2 is the level Giancarlo races at in sportscars and the race is an independent one, so initially my reaction to him being on the entry list was excitement. Especially since, at fewer than 80 miles from Fisico's home district, it would definitely be his home race.

Then I spotted a slight problem. Coverage.

Sportscar racing is challenging to follow at the best of times. Pit stop counts that sometimes enter double figures, safety cars that pick up whoever happens to be convenient, high entry counts leading to multiple simultaneous incidents... At least the multiple classes would be a minimal complication this time. Usually Giancarlo races in ACO-sanctioned events these days, where GT2 is the slowest class, but in Vallelunga GT2 is the fastest permitted class. So winning the class would surely require a race win.*

Usually the way round all this confusion is to load up a live timing screen. By necessity more complex than any single-seater enthusiasts use for F1, the versions supplied by LMS, ALMS and the 24H Le Mans official websites all offer reasonable means to follow what's happening (when they load and update correctly). The Vallelunga organisers... ...didn't.

There was some news available on the official site, but as far as I could tell (with admittedly limited Italian language skills) there was no live timing. Or broadcasting. Which brought me to the second problem.

To a certain extent, it's possible to follow a sportscar race even without live timing if you have a decent commentary team. Having established there was no official version, my next port of call was Radio Le Mans. Having a commentary team I'd grown to enjoy in the past season (covering four different rulesets and three different continents) explain the complexities of this race (under a fifth ruleset) in my native language would be helpful. Alas, they appear to have gone on a well-deserved off-season break from commentating.

Bereft of alternative ideas, I asked my friends for help.  At the Fisichella Forum suggested half-a-dozen possible sites that could be used. One of them worked, and I looked forward to attempting to understand the race using the likely-sounding Italia-Racing.it (and secretly hoping everyone stopped for ice creams mid-race, since I'd just covered that topic in class!).

On Sunday morning, I duly tuned in... ...and heard "although no-one understood, we-were-holding-back-the-flood..." While I usually like that particular Take That song, I didn't think it was a good sign that I was hearing it 3 minutes before the start. Ah well, maybe it's one of those stations that thinks starting and ending 30 seconds the show either side of the flags is slick and efficient use of time.

The Shakira song that followed made me worried.

The Elvis song that started as the race was due to start made me very worried. "Suspicious Mind(s)", even...

By the end of the next song, I was ready to panic. I'd been checking my social networking services while listening to the radio and seen a photo proving the race had started during the song. It was some Italian pop track, but I was past caring who'd sung it as it was now at least 5 minutes into the race. The way the presenter was talking made it clear I shouldn't expect the station to be covering any racing today. Even if a station called Italia-Racing might be expected to do so.

I'd previously checked through the other 5 links I'd been offered and found that they didn't work or were Internet TV sites requiring registration. Checking against the official site, I noticed something buried deep in the qualifying report (link in Italian) - official broadcast rights were with Sky and they were showing it next week (or possibly the week after - by that stage I couldn't be bothered to get the calender out).

The next hour was spent rambling through every Italian internet radio station I could remember or research in case anyone was unofficially broadcasting the race. Highlights included a lovely club cover of Queen's "You Don't Fool Me". But all the synths in the world weren't going to tell me how Giancarlo was doing in his home race...

After scanning through my social networking, blog and fora contacts (and finding a few photos of practise), I concluded that nobody else I knew had any further information on the race. By this point, I elected to take out my frustration in a game of Worms.

An hour later, logging back in hope more than expectation, I searched on Twitter and found Laura Bonetti tweeting about the race in progress! I knew she was at the track, but I'd assumed that her lack of tweets since the start meant that she was concentrating 100% on what was in front of her. I was pleased to be wrong and even more pleased when I read Giancarlo's car was in the lead. That must have been an exciting couple of hours...

So that, eventually, proved to be my one source of live information - a spectator who was generous enough to spend a little time not looking at the cars in order to post little updates. There's a certain excited tension about following a race via short occasional messages - you start imagining everything that could have happened, refresh, decide nothing's happened, refresh a few minutes later... ...and find that everyone's lined up behind a safety car because of someone else going off.

I probably should have seen an omen in that particular tweet. Just over hour prior to the chequered flag, it started raining. Nearly everyone stayed on slicks. It was on this awkward combination that Giancarlo went off-track. Vallelunga doesn't feature the acres of tarmac run-off that adorn the average Tilke-drome, so it ended Giancarlo's race. The classified position of 7th does not show that he and his team-mates  Perrazzini and Cioci had led the majority of the way without much trouble from opponents.

AF Corse still won the race with a different car (the #10 - they'd sent 4 to the race), followed by the pole-sitting #7 Kessell Racing and the #26 Porsche, which was a GT3.

The race was an interesting and sounded quite exciting, but would have been better with a little more... ...something. A bit like my viewing experience of it, really. Hopefully when the organisers turn this event into a 4-race series the coverage will improve.

* - Just don't tell the LMP1 teams at the LMS at Hungary this year that. The fastest of them was beaten by 5 ostensibly slower LMP2s...