Back to Main or simply Back
 

Formula One Page

ein F1-Ferrari 17kB noch ein F1-Ferrari wieder 17kB


Update:
Though my interest in Formula One decreased over the last years of RTL transmissions, the year of 2001 was the first year in which I did not regret that I missed races. After about 15 years of a more or less intense passion for motor sports in general and formula one in special, I decided that you can spend your time on better things than on boring commentators, boring races and boring drivers that don't deserve the term "racer". Currently I don't see a car racing series that can draw my attention to it as Formula One did in the late eighties and the early 90ies. Motorbike grand prixs are an option, sometimes. As a resume after all these years, I have to say: I don't regret the time I invested, but it is time to focus on other things, to break the commercialism and give your attention to passionate people that do things out of passion and not only to maximize the profit. Regard this page as closed after these final words. Greetings!!

So let's see what we've got:




  

What do they do???

Well, it's 1997 and I have to rewrite this paragraph: Eurosport could no longer afford to satisfy the financial demands of Mr. Ecclestone and RTL did their best to get rid of a better Formula One coverage alternative. So Ben Edwards is on a different mission: He commentates the American Cart Series (former Indy Car Series). John Watson is, as far as I know, envolved with BBC. Again a big thank you for your great coverage of the Formula One circus within the last years!!

This development leaves us with two German TV stations covering the Formula One: RTL with their trio Jochen Maass, Heiko Wasser and Kai Ebel. Except for Mr. Maass, these "journalists" should better go to the comedian corner of RTL's programme than keeping information on our beloved Formula One from flowing to the fans in front of the monitors. Telling the audience that the Imola race track was named after the brothers "Enzo e Dino Ferrari" is only one of many unpardonable mistakes. The question I ask myself is: Why can RTL on the one hand afford to pay multimillions for the exclusive rights for the pictures, but on the other hand they are not able to find some persons capable of commentating?!?!?! Unforgotten is Willi Knupp who started the misery years ago...

The other TV station covering Formula One is DF1. Mr. Kirch paid another immense amount of money for the rights to transmit and consequently wants this money back: You have to pay 30 Deutsch Marks for his "sports package" per month! During the season, I would go to my financial limits and pay that amount, but as far as I know, you have to sign a 12-month-contract. The next major point is: You need a decrypting appliance. The price for the so-called "dbox" is about 1.000 DM. Well, this leaves us with our three RTL friends...

As Mr. Ecclestone downgraded the Friday action from a qualifying session to a timed session, it is enough for RTL to broadcast the Saturday 1 o'clock session. Of coarse with two commercial intermissions and of coarse these "geben wir kurz zurück nach Köln"s can be as long as they want, as noone can switch over to Eurosport. Same thing with the race except that on Sunday there are of coarse more than two intermissions. Because of these intermissions, RTL has to come up with the highlights of the race afterwards, where you can see what you have missed during these offline times. During the highlights you miss the press conference, which was also a funny thing in the past years especially when Mika Hakkinen or one of the other "men" took part.

I know we live in a capitalist world and every enterprise seeks for maximum profit. They can not care for longtime consequences. I have been watching Formula One races for over a decade now and I would like to watch it for another ten years. But if they go on using Formula One just to find excuses to bomb the viewers with advertisement without any real interests for the sport they are covering, I doubt I will keep up my passion. And I am sure I am not the only one.

Though Formula One is my favourite, I like watching other motorsports like the (German) Touring Car Trophy (nowerdays called ITC)(the times they are a-changing: ITC was killed by Ecclestone as well within one year; 3sat, with partially good commentators could not pay enough for the rights, so they had to drop coverage and so did most of the audience; now we have the SuperTourenWagenCup (STW-Cup), which has to prove its attractivity in 1997), Indy Car Racing (no longer existant as well, but this time it's not Mr. Ecclestone's greed, as far as I know; it's called CART Series), Rally Driving (keep up your good coverage, Ulf von Mahlberg!!) , or the more freak-show-like Tractor Pulling, Monster Trucks, Dragster Racing, Stock Car Racing, Mud Racing, Truck Grand Prixs or the very rare, but impressionable Truck Trial.

NEW !!   The new motorsport-trash that Eurosport offers is the Icelandic Offroad Class with Gísli Gunnar Jónsson and others trying to climb unbelievable steep slopes with their 4x4 buggies... Holy crap! They have a web site at www..est.is/bilak
The best motorsport trash is the Rachau hill climb where crazy Austrians try to climb a mountain on their enduro bike. Of course most of the challengers fall long before the peak and tumble backwards down with their bike. This excellent piece of amateur motorsport is an exclusive event. There is only one date, but it is repeated several times on tv. Watch out for it on your favourite trash tv stations DSF and Eurosport.


  
The active side:

No, not as active as you might think! The action happens at home in front of my comupter monitor. I love playing car racing games like the Microprose Formula One Grand Prix. Starting in 1992, I think I drove more than 10,000 laps on the various tracks. But that was not the first driving game I learned to know (and love): In 1982, it started with Pole Position on an Atari 400, followed by Pit Stop on the C-64 of a fellow, then Testdrive, SuperSprint, Vroom, the upmentionned and still favourite F1GP and the Lotus Challenge Trilogy on my ST and in the last years the F1GP, Indy Car Racing and Nascar Racing on a DOS machine. After a long, long period of waiting, 1996 brought us F1GP Part 2. Sadly, it was the most performance-demanding game at that time and only real freaks tried to run it on a machine like the 486/66er on my DOS-card. This kind of hardware delivers a very, very low framerate at a resolution of 320*200, not much higher than that of F1GP part 1 on the Atari ST, but it has a better sound and some more graphics. Despite the framerate, I enjoyed playing it, but this was one of the rare moments, when I would have been glad to have a PC. Around the same time, Papyrus released IndyCar racing II for the Macintosh and it was said that it needed a PPC @ 90 MHz. Nevertheless, I tried it on my 66 MHz machine, but it was not much fun. The new feature that raised the Mac version above the DOS version is the support for Plain Talk Speech Recognition. It allows to adress orders to the pit crew not only via the keyboard, but also via the microphone. In 1997, another car driving game was released for the Mac: Carmageddon. On a G3 with 3dfx graphics, you can have helluva fun driving over pedestrians or crashing into competitors. April 1999 brought CarmageddonII to the Mac and I could withstand till the end of August. First, I was a little disappointed by the graphics, but the longer I played it, the more I liked the 3D approach for the pedestrians. It is bloody good!

  
Here comes the first link ever included in my website:
The link to the homepage of

the Ferrari Website

Some other links:
(The links, they are a-changin', so please tell me about outdated links)



 
Back to Main or simply Back

© sucks, so no © by Oliver Schubert, but noone would like to copy that anyway . . .
started on 8/26/1995
last modified on 2/10/2002