Dirty Side Deckchair

So, what do you do when it's the second long break of the F1 season and there will be no action on track until COTA at the end of October?    Maybe creating a fictional football club (soccer for those Dirty Siders from the US) on EAFC24 on the PS4 where the only players you are allowed to have in your squad must have names linked to Formula 1 isn't the first thing that springs to mind.  However, that's exactly what Rob did. The mission was to create a new team and place them in League Two before embarking on a campaign to reach the Premier League before lights out at COTA. This is the story of the epic journey one man and a football club went on... First things first - I needed a manager, team name, stadium name, and kit designs.  The first name that came to mind was Brackley FC who would play their home games at Silverstone. Then it was on to the design process for the kits.  As this was trying to be a generic F1 themed team I decided to try and incorporate a f...

And that's when the machines became self-aware... ChatGPT is not exactly a new thing but here at the Dirty Side we hadn't really had a play with it. If you are not familiar with the concept then here is a summary of exactly what it is courtesy of ChatGPT itself when we asked it "What is ChatGPT?": "ChatGPT is a conversational language model developed by OpenAI. It is trained on a large dataset of human-generated text, and is able to understand and respond to text input in a manner similar to a human. It can be used to generate human-like responses in a variety of contexts, such as chatbots, language translation, and text summarization." You cannot ask it for opinions as it will state that it is a language model and as such cannot have personal preferences. It comes into it's own when you ask it for more fact driven responses. With that in mind we decided to ask it some F1 based questions.   We decided to ease our way in with a chat regarding the Netflix ...

So we all saw that Max Verstappen secured the 2022 World Drivers Title in Japan last time out. In doing so he wrapped up the title with four races left to spare. But where does that put him on the list of earliest title wins? Well the answer, as with everything in F1, is a little complicated. You have to decide if you want to measure this in terms of absolute number of races left in the season or in relative terms to what percentage of the season had been completed. Why? Well as we covered in an earlier blog about the calendar, things are not the same from season to season in F1.  Not only are there way more races now than back when it all started in 1950 but also the number of points awarded has changed down the years. As the points one it too hard to wrap our heads around let's just take a look at the leaderboards for "Most Races Left" and "Earliest in Season Percentage" terms We'll start off with the one most folk jump to I think, most races left. We all ...

  Just can't bear not winning a WDC Just recently I saw the news that Roger Federer was hanging up his racket as he had to admit old Father Time had finally caught up with him. This was the picture of him with Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Andy Murray. GOAT Farm Between these four they had essentially locked out the men's tennis scene.  Since Federer won his first Grand Slam at Wimbledon in 2003 only 10 titles out of a possible 78 have gone to anyone outside these four.  As a tennis fan I was very lucky to live through this entire era. Many great but not exceptional players found themselves unlucky to be born in such an era of men's tennis and never win the titles that their skill level may have achieved in a different era.  The same is true over on the women's side of the game with the dominance the Williams sisters had. This got me thinking to Formula 1 drivers who never took the World Drivers Championship despite being great drivers.    Could they ha...