F1 News Sites: Which Is Your Favourite?

F1 News Sites: Which Is Your Favourite?

NewspapersWhere do you go for all your Formula One news? Do you visit websites, buy Autosport (or equivalent) each week, or do you not worry about F1 until raceday? For me, I do my catching up mostly online. Using Google Reader, I can keep track of new stories as they get posted side by side with my favourite blogs. There are plenty of F1 News sites out there, so occasionally I end up culling the amount that I follow (particularly if the articles I’m reading are nigh-on identical to others) and also those that don’t update promptly or regularly.

So, which sites do I follow?

Autosport is probably the big one there. And ITV and BBC are rarely checked now. Occasionally Autosport’s Grapevine service will have a juicy bit of gossip on, but in all honesty it isn’t updated nearly as often as I would like. Pitpass is fun to read because the writers are aware of just how ridiculous F1 can be sometimes, and Paddock Talk covers just about everything in bite-sized articles.

What about you? Where do you go for up-to-minute F1 news? And which site is your absolute favourite?

And just in case you are a first time reader of BlogF1 and like the idea of subscribing to my feed for regular updates, here it is.

8 comments

  • Grandprix.com is my main source of news and I am also subscribed to all those you mention. I don’t buy any magazines any more but I do read the non-F1 bits I’m interested in in the newsagent.

  • Being an F1-journalist, find autosport the most useful F1 news source just like you. Also like pitpass, great stories written is good style.

    I also visit gpupdate.net, F1-live.com and grandprix.com frequently, and of course the official team sites too.

    I collect feeds from wherever I can, I’ve got nearly two dozen F1 channels on my startpage – including this blog.

  • It’s Pitpass and F1Fanatic for me – and BlogF1 of course 😉

    I’m also subscribed to BBC and ITV’s feed as well but 99% of the time their headlines are identical.

    Considering they are the broadcaster of the sport, ITV really should do more background work in my opinion and be able to offer a more in-depth service than the BBC for example but it would appear not!

  • Excluding blogs, I mainly rely on Pitpass and GrandPrix.com. GP.com is not quite as polished as many other sites, but it often has interesting angles on stories that aren’t reported elsewhere.

    Pitpass is infuriating if I want to post any of its articles to del.icio.us though, as the article headline isn’t in the title tag, and the site prevents me from even copying it so I have to type it all out by hand. Surely ridiculous from an SEO standpoint as well.

    Anyway, I also keep subscribed to ITV and BBC, although they are not as useful as the others. Formula1.com also at last got RSS feeds at its relaunch a couple of months back, so I’m now subscribed to that.

    As for blogs, my favourites are BlogF1 (naturally), F1Fanatic, Sidepodcast and Forumula1.

  • Autosport is essential reading one and off-line, as are Pitpass and GrandPrix.com. Autosport’s Journal is great. F1 Racing (magazine) is more entertainment value, and the website of the same name is also good. F1.com sometimes has good features, so does F1 Technical. I’ve got a substantial blogroll on my site and I read all of them, usually over my lunch break. Which is what I’m doing now! Very nice to see my site mentioned here by the way thanks guys.

  • OK, this could be a long one…

    Off-line, I have a subscription to F1 Racing, and buy Autosport when I think there’s an interesting story in it (average one issue a month).

    Online is more interesting. My first port of call is the Yahoo! Sports portal – it’s only one click away from my e-mail program, updates quickly and is very concise.

    For the more in-depth news coverage, I use pitpass.com and grandprix.com. pitpass.com is broader and has the best columnists, whilst grandprix.com is better for the financial side of the sport and other detailed stuff.

    I also check three forums – and considering joining a fourth. Of these, sf1o.com could be considered a news resource, as the members post so many Dutch Spyker-related news in varying states of translation that it constitutes my best Spyker resource. homeoff1.com has a couple of interesting nuggets too.

    There are plenty of blogs on the list. BlogF1 (obviously) for the relaxed news, F1 Fanatic for the energised version, Fun F1 for the really silly news, Motorsports Analysis for the super-analyses, F1 Insight for the more regular but somewhat shorter analyses and The Worst Sports Blog ever for American F1 news.

    Oh, and sometimes I check planet-f1.com’s news as well – but only if I am in desperate need of a laugh. I do not use an aggregator for processing any of this.

  • And as for doctorvee’s point about pitpass’ likely SEO rating, if the title tag has a more accurate summary of what’s in the article than the article title, then it’s good for SEO. Otherwise, it’s bad for SEO. From what I was taught in information retrieval class last semester, the search engines don’t currently penalise for discrepancies between article tags and titles, only for discrepancies between titles and content. In fact, they don’t pay article tags much notice at all unless they’re blog search engines – but that’s another story.

    Also, it is possible to copy the full title of a pitpass story, as long as you remember that the length of the link is longer than the address bar. Press CTRL + A when your cursor is in the address bar of the desired article, and then do the copy process into the place where you want the link. Far from ideal for us, but the only SEOs that penalise are the ones that don’t recognise end-of-address parameters (i.e. smaller, older search engines). The likes of Google can handle an end-of-address parameter, as long as there’s only one of them.

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