canadian grand prix

No post on Friday as it was absolutely bonkers at work.

To be honest it's totally bonkers at work today as well.  Today's bonkers-ness has been caused by two people going on holiday at the same time and two more going to a conference.  When you're a tiny company that sort of thing is a nightmare and shouldn't have happened, to be frank.

Canadian Grand Prix this last week and Lewis finally got his first win of the season.  It was a cracking race, which Canada almost invariably is.

This shines another highlight on some of the bizarre selections for races that the BBC shows in full and those they only show highlights for.  They showed the last race, Monaco, in full and while that can be good, usually it's boring (as a race) and that was the case this year.

And they're going to show the next race, Valencia, in full and, to paraphrase Mark Webber, it's about as thrilling as watching people negotiate a Tesco's Car Park.

What makes this last weekend particularly galling is that, despite the clear promise made by the BBC that 5live would continue to air full coverage of the F1 races throughout the year, they didn't.

Now they were scheduled to - it clearly showed coverage for the race itself on 5Live Extra on my PVR, but in the event they aired coverage of the Test Match instead on 5Live Extra and the 5Live had some "build up" programme for the shitball-excuse-me-football.  In order to listen to the race I had to go online (onto the BBC F1 pages, rather than 5Live web pages as the announcer said).

They also didn't air coverage of the qualifying properly - it was bits and piece during another programme and only aired 1 of the practice sessions.

However, what all this perhaps did highlight was one of the reasons the BBC weren't entirely bothered about renewing the full F1 package - the summer there's an embarrassment of riches for sport that the BBC can air without having to pay fees, etc.

In particular there's the Euro 2012 competition and the Olympics which will each saturate the airwaves for a good couple of weeks.  And these generally coincide with F1 race weekends at some point.

I guess from my point of view one of the advantages of all this sport I don't give a toss about is that I will gain lots of free time in the summer.  Especially since the sport I do like is going to get short shrift while these other things are going on.

I have to say that if my job search results in a significant uplift in pay I'm beginning to be very tempted to get Sky.  They fact you get it free with the HD package, which I'd want anyway and so you don't need to get the full sports package is beginning to look like an attractive (expense aside) option.