You may have noticed a stream of blog posts live-blogging the F1 FOTA Fan Forum last Thursday. This was the first event of its kind for the sport, coming out of blog comments on James Allen’s website. It was first come, first served for places and 150 of them were taken up within 24 hours. I saw a lot of tweets about people travelling from UK and further to attend, but for me, it was just an 10 minute tube ride (and an understanding boss to grab an extra long lunch). Santander, the sponsors, has obviously put a lot of effort into the day, with a good lunch, I assume covering the venue and the recording and then a couple of freebies for all attending.
The day was tweeted out by many of the teams and recorded for later release on YouTube, so all available for those who could not attend. There were plenty of press there as well and it was fun watching statements made as answers to questions being turned into news articles across sports sites. I even got nabbed by the BBC to do a quick sentence into a mike (not sure what for) as did others, with a write up on Andrew Benson’s blog.
There’s been a lot of response to this through blogs and comments; given my line of work, I was probably most interested in the responses about increasing fan access through social media and the web, increasing data and behind the scenes information. That’s definitely been an influence in my liking for the sport, as it makes it far easier to understand what it going on. It’s good to see the teams will continue on this path and there is pressure to increase what is being released.
The afternoon was a bit like a typical tech event I attend, mainly male with a handful of females and had the same sort of vibe, with lots of waiting to talk to the speakers and associated F1 team members. Although I’ve never seen autographs been signed at tech events š Overall, it was an enjoyable event, one I’d like to see repeated although maybe at a slightly more job friendly time – the speakers apparently hung around after to chat, by which time I was back off to work.