Dirty Side Deckchair

Locked and loaded & ready for the off! As I sit here writing this blog it is Thursday 2nd March 2023 or F1-Eve as I will now call it. 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...

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 ...

Marathon or Sprint? It was announced this week that F1 will be featuring six (yes that's six) sprint races in the 2023 schedule.  Next season we will see the format rearing it's head at Azerbaijan, Austria, Belgium, Qatar, the USA and Brazil.   This format seems to split the fan base and does so in a couple of ways. These are basically the divide between those for and against the format all together and then those that kinda like it but feel it only works at certain tracks. In fact the list announced already raises some concern as while Brazil was a good example of a sprint race, we're not so sure how well one will fare in Baku. For anyone new to the party, the sprint format was introduced last year as a way to inject some action into each of the three days of a race weekend. In a sprint-less weekend, the Friday sessions are for the die-hard fans as they just consist of free practice where the teams & drivers will be dialing in the settings needed for the rest of...

Max's secret identity revealed Anyone who watched the Brazil GP last weekend, and maybe some that didn't, will have seen two main stories taking up the column inches.  First up was the superb showing for Mercedes and specifically George Russell as he secured his first victory in Formula 1. Secondly was the murkier side of F1 as we heard Max refuse to follow team orders and give up his place for Checo. For those not familiar with the history of team orders, and maybe for those who want a stroll down memory lane, we have compiled a quick overview of team orders in F1 and also picked out some memorable ones. So, what are team orders? We need to remember that while each driver is trying to win for themselves, they are part of a team and the team wants to maximize it's points total for the constructors championship.   In addition, there are also times when the team might be trying to ensure maximum points for one of the drivers, especially if only one of them is in contention ...