F1-Eve - 'Twas the night before F1
 |
| Locked and loaded & ready for the off! |
After what feels like an off-season that lasted forever, we can finally look forward to FP1 tomorrow and start building the excitement towards lights out on Sunday.
However, as all content from this point forward will be rightfully based on this seasons events, I wanted to take a little time to review what happened here at the Dirty Side over the break.
We were actually a little worried about how to fill the time and create content for each episode given both Brian & I have full time (non-F1) jobs.
One option was to have a break and hang up the microphones for a little while.
The problem is we enjoy this too much so didn't really fancy this as our go-to strategy.
So, we figured we'd find a way to fill the off-season with something.
Little did we know what that something would be!
First things first we filled the end of 2022 with some post-season tidying up.
We had PitLane Paul & Rob Reed on to review the season that had just closed out.
Was great to have Paul on properly after having had him in race review form all year. Having Rob back on was also great as you can never have too many Robs in one place!
Brian then served up a special edition of Sap-Stats to take a look at some of the stats behind the season and debate whether the new regulations had been beneficial to the sport and we also did an end of season awards episode.
We then managed to get ESPN's Nate Saunders back on the show for a second chat.
We were so grateful to have him on again and he's been great to us over the course of our adventure. I was even able to enjoy a cold beer (or two) with him when he was in town as I live pretty close to the ESPN office he visits when in this neck of the US woods.
This got us thinking about raising our guest game!
We tried to build a plan up for the types of folk we could go after and felt it boiled down to those in the F1 content arena.
It was time to be brave and start seeing who else we could get to come on the Dirty Side and more importantly the 100 Seconds of DRS!
In the meantime we launched Season 2 of the Dirty Side and did a quick preview of what lay ahead of us in the 2023 season.
In between the recording and planning of potential episode content in case we landed no guests, we reached out to the host of the Missed Apex podcast (Spanners Ready) TikTok's Antonia Rankin, author Alanis King, F1 Motorsport content creator Vincenzo Landino, the Engine Braking podcast guys (Engine Mode 11 and BrrrakeF1), as well as a few more.
It's fair to say the F1 community is very kind and, while not all of these came to fruition, everyone responded and were genuinely supportive which we found odd given we often feel like we're trying to gatecrash this F1 party and shouldn't really be here.
To be clear, it's not that we felt it was odd that they were supportive! We were more blown away that some said yes straight away and we booked dates whereas others declined but only for now and agreed to revisit the topic in the future.
We didn't really get the raft of either flat out rejections or ghosting that we expected.
We even got a reply from Will Buxton's agent to let us down gently.
Like I said, such a good bunch.
So, we got Spanners & Antonia booked in and were looking forward to our next round of guests.
Then I may have drunk a couple too many beers one night and got all overly brave and reached out to someone on social media that I may not have done without those beers.
Matt Bishop, former Chief Communications Officer of the Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team.
I threw a request out into the ether figuring I'd go for the good old mantra of "nothing ventured, nothing gained".
We were blown away when he not only replied but actually accepted.
Before we knew it we were busy researching Matt as he was now going to be on the show before either Spanners or Antonia.
After reading a few articles and watching some previous interviews we knew the places we wanted to go and also the stories we thought he'd been asked too many times.
Sitting down and talking to Matt was such an enjoyable experience.
The man is a font of F1 knowledge, speaks in a truly enthralling manner leaving you hanging on every word, and to top it all off is an absolute top class gentleman.
We both agreed that we could have sat and listened to him speak for hours and also that he's one of the few people we would happily pay money to listen to more of his tales (don't invoice us Matt!).
There is a reason why that episode is already one of our most listened to episodes and that reason is not Rob or Brian shaped ;-)
The sadness I get from looking back at this is that when we spoke to him it was during his self-enforced Twitter hiatus that he felt he had to take in order to escape the vile hate that was coming his way.
In no way does he deserve this and I'm happy to say that at time of writing his "On this day" tweets are back and he is, for now, back in the Twitterverse.
With the Matt episode in our back pocket we launched into our chat with Spanners.
For us he is the symbol of what can be achieved with a lot of hard work and dedication to your passion. He has taken Missed Apex from nothing to celebrating over two million audio downloads in 2022!
It was great fun going head to head (or is that mic to mic) with Spanners and it was another enjoyable chat in the bag.
We were both in awe of his ability to string multiple rapid-fire sentences together off the top of his head without the multiple "ums" & "errms" that us non-professional presenters are cursed with.
There are many reasons why his content is so polished and professional looking and most of those are based in hard work and dedication. If we ever needed reminding of the difference between hobby project and career this was it. Not in a bad way, you understand. It was great to chat F1 with him but for me when I was researching him, watching his content, and then listening to him in our chat, you could easily see the difference committing to something full time makes.
Again, another top gent who was kind enough to share his time with us.
A couple of weeks later, after a Vale's Tales on Mansell, we had another guest lined up and a very different one for us.
We'll be brutally honest here and say that while we have a Tik-Tok account here at the Dirty Side, we're not sure we're the target demographic for a lot of the content there.
We are also fully aware that we are two middle aged dudes.
So, for us to be talking to Antonia Rankin we were well outside our comfort zone.
All the things we wanted to make sure we didn't do as our view is that any fan of F1 is a valid fan and that anyone can pull up a third stool at our virtual bar. No one has the right to gate keep F1 fandom.
It might sound bizarre but I was actually more nervous thinking about how to approach the conversation with her than with Matt.
Turns out we over thought it and worried about nothing.
She was fantastic and by just being ourselves and getting caught up in F1 chat all worries of gender & age differences just seemed to dissolve.
This brought us to early February and we'd already had quite the opening to 2023.
However, by the time we edited and published the Antonia episode on Feb 5th, we already were sitting on something much much bigger.
We say that with no offence intended to anyone who had come on the show before but when you are sitting on an interview with current F1 driver Valtteri Bottas then it doesn't get much bigger than that!
The call had come through about a week prior that the chat with Valtteri might be on the cards.
Brian and I had learned from the Villeneuve interview that there was no point writing a biography on him and that we should stick to trying to have fun with him whilst also not wasting such an opportunity by only having a laugh with him. We needed some proper topics as well.
So we worked to review a number of past interviews and tried to avoid common subjects that he is probably bored of discussing. We also took guidance from PitLane Paul on this subject who had been the brains behind brokering this whole thing (again, we can never say thanks enough Paul).
With a draft we were happy with we fired it over to Paul and waited. He gave us some pointers of some things to tidy up and then it was all down to Valtteri's schedule.
Would he have time to spare or not?
The wait felt like forever.
We know Villeneuve was a huge guest but somehow this felt magnitudes bigger.
Were we really on the cusp of talking to a current driver who we'd see line up on the grid in a matter of months?
The answer was yes!
The meeting was booked and I had the most surreal invite in my calendar for a call with Valtteri.
Dialed into the Zoom call with Brian & Paul, the seconds felt like hours as we waited for the 4th participant square to open up.
Then it did.
At first just a black square with a line of text in the center that read "Valtteri Bottas" appeared.
My heart rate jumped significantly as we waited for our first mullet sighting.
And then he was there.
An actual real life F1 driver was there and was saying hello to us.
Not to a Sky Sports journalist or paddock press member but to us.
Two guys who decided to start an F1 podcast just over a year ago in a country that in general has no clue what F1 is all about.
The rest as they say is history and can easily be listened to over and over on podcast format or even our YouTube channel.
To say we are grateful to Paul & Valtteri is a ridiculous understatement but I can't think of words that would actually convey the feeling.
It would also be remiss of us to not give a shout out to listener Andy (aboutpluckingtimes) who has been the mastermind behind the various songs we've had on the show. He did the sandwich rant remix and the Pitlane Paul thank you track.
He added to his repertoire with the Valtteri song which was brilliant!
We followed that up with another first for us which was to invite multiple panelists on to the show to preview the upcoming season. They came from our Discord community and it was something we'd been planning for a while. We'd had two guests on before but this time there were six of us plus two who had sent in pre-recorded content.
As this was always a podcast by fans for fans it was so nice to have a show filled with listeners. The total opposite of the Valtteri episode but thoroughly enjoyable and without people listening to us there wouldn't have been a Valtteri or a Jacques episode anyway.
Last week we reviewed Testing and shared a few thoughts on Drive to Survive and F1 Fantasy.
The episode plus downloads to older episodes pushed us over our 10,000 milestone which blows our minds!
That brings us bang up to date as we sit on the eve of the new season.
We really cannot wait to see what it brings in terms of both action on the track, and of course content for the pod.
Thanks to all the Dirty Siders out there.
Let's enjoy the ride together.
Comments
Post a Comment