Have you noticed that when you go back to look up a race in your old racing magazines that the reports these days do not really tell you the whole story? The authors assume (or are told to assume) that you will have watched the race on TV and the so reports tend to consist of disjointed bits and bobs, and sidebars about what happened to one driver or another. You might get some strategic analysis as well, but what is often missing is a proper account of what actually happened. The newspapers give you a potted account majoring on the national hero of the newspaper concerned, but there is never much room for F1 on the sports pages, while the Internet will give you seemingly endless screeds of Tweet-style reporting that was done live. It is far too long, far too speculative and, although they do not mention it, it was created by people who were not at the race track and in many cases never have been. The world has changed and the old style reports just don’t seem to exist any longer.
Well, folks, they do. And they are in electronic form as well. On top of that they are available within four or five hours of the chequered flag – and all of this at a price that seems far too small for the service being offered…
The answer to the question is GrandPrix+, which is written and created in the Media Centres all around the world, by professional F1 reporters who between them have attended something like 1800 Grands Prix, which is not bad considering there are only four of them. It is a 75-90 page publication in PDF format, giving you proper race reports, plus the kind of features that you used to read in racing magazines, including interviews, analysis pieces and even some whacky stories from the history of the sport, even back to the very early days. The catchline of the magazine is “It’s all about the passion” and that is exactly what the magazine is about. It’s opinionated, punchy, funny and features great photography. It is delivered electronically, no matter where you are in the world and it is the only F1 e-magazine created in landscape format – so it looks great on a computer screen, a tablet or an iPad.
The subscription is a measly £29.99 for the entire season and you get 2012 magazines for free, and you can buy archives dating back five years to create a complete F1 archive in your own computer.
WHy not give it a try in 2013? We are quite sure you will not regret it.
And if those of you who do subscribe want to give your opinion to help guide others, please feel free to leave a comment. If you are interested, go to www.grandprixplus.com and find out how to sign up.
And if you want to get an idea of what you get, try going to GP+ 2012 Brazilian Grand Prix
Does this include the full practice and qualify reports as Motoring News used to do several years ago?
Take a look at the sample link but yes
Highly recommended, and don’t forget to get the previous year’s archive bundle, Joe has a different url for access to these?
Answered my own question by looking at the Brazil 2012 edition. Have now purchased the 2013 series. Looking forward to reading you and your team’s insightful comments.
Talking about old magazines, what does your collection consist of Joe?
I don’t have one any longer.
Got to be nosey and ask: did you scan your collection, or all now from memory?
(I guess memory, but I often find I regret not having kept complete sets of now defunct and usually quite obscure magazines, because I so often recall some quote or article or another that better said what I am thinking. Then again, I one in my teens held the absurd theory that if I did not expose myself to literature then I could not be tainted by influence or inadvertent plagiarism of style. I since learned you just forget so much, if you write enough, you develop independently. I’m still fascinated by these questions in the consideration of how learning and thought are built upon culturally, but try to avoid too much headache inducing consternation.)
I no longer had storage space for several tons of old Autosports. The brain and the Internet do 95 percent of the job these days. I had something like 20 years of the mag, but unbound and I’d stopped taking it because being in France it was arriving too late to matter. I do regret getting rid of it all, but I had no choice.
Done. Looking forward to a great season!
I hate it when the writer pretends to know what the driver was thinking at any given moment, F1 racing magazine falls into this wishy washy category.
I just want the facts.
The best magazine was the Official Formula 1 Magazine, extensive and expansive race by race coverage, coupled with detailed technical debriefs of every team at every race, and a lovely business section. It was cheaper than F1 Racing and twice as many pages, but it didn’t appeal to the fan boys.
I think printed mags are seriously on the decline, hence why 2 magazines run puff pieces about a certain TV channel all the time, and they intern place adverts with them.
They’re too slow too, online is the future
Which years was that published, Karen?
2001 – 2004
Thank you, Karen, somehow I missed that one altogether.
Those were years I took a different tack with work, but I guess it was a contract publication (one done to spec) and if managed from London, a few likely names come to mind, as well as the implosion of all of those names I remember of the time. I consider myself fortunate I’d struck out of that scene. Keep bumping into casualties. One of the key reasons was the boiler room style sales that was thrusted upon the contract magazines world by two then publicly quoted competitors, where one of which I began my career. Nice to have learned what I did, better to have escaped . .
I think that GP+ is Sui Generis, as such a vital voice, but I agree in general, there is a sad deficit of publishing talent. I think my generation didn’t have much chance to apprentice in the mad online rush, and that it got worse with the ease of “publishing” on the internet. (I’m forever grateful to have had the support of a elder generation in my work, from whom I gained my perspectives ad at least a little discipline) I’m very supportive of the good things of the internet: collaboration, the freedom of usually still protective laws as to speech, the spontaneity and above all, if it can be a pleasurable enterprise. however I think one must be one or the other. I managed not to pay much attention when Cone Nast bought a handful of the larger geek websites, but they for me are now neither serious, nor of the vitality they once caputured, and segues into rather “posh tabloids” if such a uglt contradiction can exist. In comparison, hard slog though it can be, sites such as TechDirt retain their verve and compelling direction. But in the end, too many online outlets have to my view stagnated into a op-ed drawl of self similar essays, varied only by modification of the proper nouns and names. It may be that maintaining a lively and worthwhile pure web publication is every bit as hard, I don’t know. Magazines have come and gone with statistically frightening frequency, when that was the only way. Anyhow, I joke that the publishing world only predicted the rout of print when they heard the closing bell. Ironically, in overall money terms, it’s internet ad revenue that remains niche.
GP+ is absolutely brilliant, the ‘sine qua non’ of F1 reporting, and absolutely astonishing value. If you buy a typical motorsport print magazine every week, you’ll probably have spent £29.99 before the first race. ‘Chapeau’ to the Fab Four.
Hi Joe – great idea to make a sample edition of GP+ available – I really enjoy your blog and have always been intrigued to see what the mag. is like.
I have a proposition for you – I would love to subscribe but am currently unemployed and just cannot afford it but I wonder if you would allow me to share a subscription with someone else? £15 is just about doable. I do realise that this is your livelihood but if it is possible would someone who would like to share a sub with me please email me scarylaowai@gmail.com
cheers
I’ve been a U.S. subscriber for three years and Gandprix+ is the leading publication covering GP racing. It honestly comes out 3 to 4 hours following the race! Outstanding photography, often of subjects and at angles one is not expecting. Every individual who follows the F1 circus needs this subscription. Follow Joe’s blog too.
Signed up last week, and so looking forward to my first edition. I just love your style of writing Joe. I have already looked at the reports from last year, superb. Plus the photos are amazing. Such value for the price. Peter
Your starter for 10.
Do you know who is driving on which day at Jerez next week?
Reporting has come a long way from the ’70′s, when I was a teen in Austin. At the time few people knew what F1 was, much less have any coverage in the paper. I had to wait for my Road & Track to be delivered, which carried Rob Walker’s F1 reports – some four months after the race was held.
Now we can get your extremely high quality reports the same day – thanks Joe! Gotta love this interweb thing.
This is my third year subscribing to GrandPrix+ and I recommend it to my friends without hesitation. I read it on Monday’s after the race weekend and it’s always interesting to read about things that were going on that I didn’t see/pick up on while watching on TV. But beyond that I I have to say the features are really impressive, Joe and David has such an in depth knowledge of the history of the sport and it’s colorful history. GP+ is my favorite thing to read on my iPad, the photography is just beautiful on that Retina Display
Looking forward to another fantastic year!
I did just that, Joe. Looking forward to receiving my info via your on-line publication. Cheers. Go Kimi.
From a subscriber of the last three years, it’s a bargain at twice the price
Price in US $?
Sent from my iPhone
Why not either make a proper sentence with something like “please” or go to an any online web converter.
http://www.xe.com is your friend.
Right now, £29.99 = $47.25 but presumably you’ll end up being charged a little more than that along the way for the conversion.
let PayPal or your credit card company worry about the conversion. It’s a bargain in any currency
I’ve subscribed for the last 3 years and I’ve signed up for 2013 today, it’s an excellent read, with some great photography, highly recommended. Many thanks for 3 years of great value to Joe, David Tremayne and Peter Nygaard.
Worth every penny!
I’ve been a subscriber for the last two years and it is a superb investment. The archive is well worth checking out also particularly for the historical articles. Anybody who visits Joe’s blog on a regular basis SHOULD have a subscription in all honesty. Proper journalism costs money so enough with the freeloading and support Joe and his colleagues for 2013.
Totally recommend, a lot more than just qualy & race reports. Great photography & articles too…the bizarre tale of Violette Morris springs to mind!
Off the topic a bit. Do you know why is the Mole inactive for such a long time?
Deep cover, surely — a mission so complex and crucial that the very future of British motor-racing could be said to hang in the balance…
He’s busy tunneling all the way to the Mercedes factory at Brackley, getting ready for some fireworks!
GP+. More exiting than the actual race.
To the fence sitters – if you don’t get your wallet out and release a few moths now and then, services like Joe’s will cease to exist. Unlike other media outlets on the web, he’s not asking for a donation, he’s providing a valuable service.
Look forward to reading this year’s magazine(s).
It really is worth double the price, but don’t tell Joe!
In general, I agree with Joe about most things, disagree about a few. In the matter at hand, I disagree with his use of the word “investment”, just as I do whenever someone uses that word to justify consumer purchases.
But that’s picking nits. I completely agree with him that it’s well worth the price… and that comes from somebody who is spending the American peso, er, uh, I mean dollar… it takes more of those…
GP+. Better than a peanut butter and sweet pickle sandwich. Some would say by a wide margin.
GP+. Not better than a peanut butter and strawberry-fig preserves sandwich… but worth it nonetheless
Thanks for sharing GP+ 2012 Brazil. Is that how they are delivered, you view them in a web browser? Is that the same quality as the purchased version? If not, what is the resolution of the full quality product?.
It is delivered in PDF format. I guess that the quality is better.
I’m not sure about what quality measure you’re thinking of, but one thing I find is that I prefer downloading the pdf and using Reader in full screen mode. Better experience than the browser.
And I have no idea how Benny Hill got into the act.
Very likely your web browser has problems rendering the color accurately. Only Opera Next (their ongoing beta) really gets this right. Chrome, I am fairly sure, use their own PDF renderer. I don’t know if it’s patents, or just Chrome team doing just good enough, but Adobe Acrobat itself always does the better job. It may not be scaled properly, for one thing, in the browser.
Adobe Reader seems to be a blight of security loop holes. Adobe long took over Microsoft and the rest for ignoring serious security issues. Acrobat pro is less afflicted (less installed base, less incentive to attack it, I guess) BUT, and this really is worth thinking about: if you use Windows, there is a tremendously powerful security system (listed directly from VMS, which is still considered as one of, if not the most secure systems, a fair deal of things essential to life still run on that) , that literally, if you want you can stop anything talking to anything else.
No place here to go into it (mind, I hardly ever see discussion of the security model even on hard core geek admin sites) but you can imagine it this way: every single component of every single application, every single file, and what they do, under Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista and 7 now 8, can be controlled in a absolutely micro managed way, so that even someone with root or Admin privileges cannot touch them, nor they touch anything else. Think of it as a kind of ad – hoc sand boxing. That said, this is no way a job of a few hours. Understanding system internals, DCOM, and a bit more would be essential. (though there really is a lot of neglected neat stuff under the Windows hood) The real downside is that you will soon find you must keep a logbook, and any update or change is a exercises in rolling back half what you did, re-profiling, and starting over. That said, the theoretical security of Windows is impressive, and I’ve put boxes straight on the internet, publicly, with no firewalls, and played “capture the flag” with some guys so much better than me, and done well enough to be chuffed.
. . .
*Nothing* but nothing beats printing out GP+, though. (I delight in the anticipation ad smell of warm pages being stacked in front of me, but regulars here know I am strange!)
That’s my indulgence, and worth it because I can hand a copy to a friend, or even a stranger (not often drink in a pub, these days, but I’ve been asked what I was reading very frequently) and know Joe et.al. are not at risk of a PDF being copies around the internet when I hand a physical copy. That always brings a warm feeling and smiles all around. (Printing GP+ is about the cost of a pint in London, allow I buy supplies bulk, but longer lasting and more heady as a gift!)
I still think that Joe should look more at releasing archives, as some very successful titles do. I had a big think, and I think the obstacle might be having more head count to capitalise on selling to make returns on freeing up access. I hope Joe one day asks me to look properly at that, because I dream of a print renaissance in general, and very much in F1, and I’d consider that a labour of love, not a business deal. (Not a pitch at all, I have one book for this year, a republication of my father’s epic technical Squash articles for after that, and the rest is having a personal life again. Helping GP+ would be firmly non commercial, almost strictly personal, for me. Simplification in my life is because I have some technical projects to work on, which started as ideas whilst thinking about GP+. Maybe one day . . )
It’s been a really super, but also tumultuous few years since I discovered GP+.
Sine I found it, I reconnected with a great deal of very fond memories and nearly abandoned enthusiasms. Joe was so kind to let me try to recount some of those here in the comments. When I said GP+ is Sui Generis, I also mean by connotation, it’s a personal journey, one you can get stuck into. I am quite certain my love of the sport (and in fact tangentially quite a few enthusiasms which were long diminished in my life) would have faded into distant memory. I found myself savouring the editions for later, rather than reading the moment after the face – in no small way because they do have such a thorough race report, I can think back more clearly – but because it became a adult version of what I’d read by torchlight as a little boy, as excited to be sneaking up late at night, as the adventure book the 8 year old me wanted to loose myself in. The very criticism I might bring, that GP+ is perforce dominated by personalty, is what makes it work, and allows I feel immediacy even if I am reading a week or longer later. Publishing in general, ought to take heed. Little boys do not understand what romance really is, but they sense it, and I find GP+ a escape from dour adulthood, condescension, gripes grudges and forelock tugging to a publisher’s management and corporate self censorship, that when so young screamed at me as falsity, made me even feel isolated because the grown ups did not understand, in their unrelenting pragma, what lit up my existence, and led me to my present day occupation, one which I had decided upon by no later than 11 years of youth. It remains true, that to promote any literary work into a very large audience, takes breakthrough investment.
Somehow, that fact spoils my thinking as to if GP+ will be a mega circulation I have pitched Joe, but it came out garbled because I don’t think in my heart I want GP+ to change, and my own game for its history was a analytical (and very geek and somewhat angry) response to the coldness and lacking of heart in publishing connected to big business, so despite I will always ask if I might be of service, those are not readily connected, even conflicting, approaches. I’m rest by saying, it’s most deserving of your attention, and may be the one magazine title the big boys will never suss out how to produce. Avail yourself of a subscription, if only to experience by counter example, why the magazine industry lost its mark by a country parsec these past 25 years or so.
Oh, yeah, and the Formula 1 bits are really good too!
Having started to read the blog in 2012, I am now a first time subscriber to GP+…can’t wait to start reading
hi joe,,,have u heard about a team called scorpian trying to replace HRT????
No. And it is too late to get an entry for 2013. Anyone with money would be stupid to start their own team at the moment. You can buy them.
I have been a subscriber since Issue # 1 and have re-subscribed again for 2013.
Have all the issues backed up as well.
Probably little need for me to add my compliments to the comments above, but I also heartily recommend GrandPrix+. I devour EVERY word of EVERY issue and enjoy EVERY morsel.
Thanks to Joe, David and your team for continuing to produce quality in this sad age of armchair journalism.
If I subscribe can I print the magazine as well?
Yes, but why?
Because, I still have not completely made the transition over….. to electronic media for reading…..
Last year it worked out to about $2.50 us an issue. History, politics, race travel guide, technical manual and the most in depth coverage of F1 available. The best value in F1 products.
RShack the F1 library I am building, that fits on a thumb drive, seems like a good investment to me. The photography more then pays for the magazine, the journalists are the last of the pure breed.
Lots of good ways to describe worthwhile consumer purchases… but “investment” isn’t one of them
Good to keep on the laptop/netbook and read on a long flight, much better than what you get on the in-flight entertainment.
I found the archives particularly interesting.
hi Joe, With interest i looked at the Brazilian GP sample issue,I liked what I saw,but also noticed that apart from one (Ghosh talking to Horner and Marko) the pictures are not captioned.Is this always the case?Particularly in the race pictures i would like that.
In that case you must go somewhere else. The essence of GP+ is speed.
The essence of GP+ is speed.
Seeing it all in my mind’s eye rather than checking back…
The race-weekend photos tend to be atmospheric (perhaps not as atmospheric as they were in the first two seasons, but I am sure there are reasons for that…), and are there to amplify the text rather than to provide forensic evidence. Text saying something like “A Force India and some kerbs” doesn’t really add, does it? On the other hand, a chamber-of-horrors encounter between Ghosn, Horner and Marko is an exception and therefore benefits from a caption.
Illustrations for the features are embedded in the text that refers to them: if you read the words, the content of the photos is clear. Since the guy who wrote the words would presumably like you to read them, I can see why he doesn’t offer a caption.
All makes sense to me.
Just renewed for 2013. I particularly enjoy the historical aspects of the mag as you always manage to find new and previously unknown (at least to me) bits about the early personalities and teams in racing.
Surely the historical articles are written prior to the race weekend, so placing photos captions on these should not slow the pub time?
With or without captions, still looking forward to the new season as described and photographed by people who are actually there!!!
Fair point about captioning the old photos… for the new ones I find it rarely matters… but for the old ones it really does…
Hi RShack, hope all’s well with you!
I learned how had it is to manage archive photo for a family project. Time to time, what happens with commercial archives, is they were done cheaply, or not cheaply but handled by a inadequate scanner operator (operator does no justice to the required skills) and then more than a few archives I’ve wished to use, the negatives degraded or discarded (like so many of the black and white movies wee shot in color, but the color separations thrown out, or fell apart) and had just not enough to work on to maintain consistency in quality, at least not double truck.
The new ones will matter soon enough, though. Digital archive preservation is no joke. Very very hard. Though never as fun as learing about film chemistry.
Before my late BP passed, ca. 2004 I registered a web dot com and a trademark, from which I hoped to build a community dedicated to scanning family archives that from the spectator view, and many man years were invested, small libraries of old photo chemistry books read, contacts and even friends made within the celluloid industry, and I simple ate papers on color theory and the related tech for breakfast. I hope one day to make that happen. But every day that passes, my own generation even is discarding vast materials, of value we don’t know fully. The really hard work I embarked on, though, was finding possible commercial viability. I’ve not seen a comparable model developed yet, so there may be hope. One thing that really worked to my aid was that serious photographers, amateur or professional, who have a clue about film tech, are largely retired, and so I had some wonderful correspondences.
Maybe a dream, but was so early a dream that you could have clicked through to. . .
all best from me,
~ john
sorry my terrible typos, on a unfamiliar keyboard is my excuse, and sticking to it!
Liked the magazine very much. Thanks and thanks for all your input and sharing your view onto the blog and magazine!
I enjoy the mag now more, now that i have a tablet.
OK here we go, why not. $50 a year, that’s $500 over the next ten years.
Would there be a 20% discount for ten years in advance?
No
Erm, inflation, krisb.
Once, news stand magazines did stay fairly constant in cover price. But that was because the adverts were nearly all the revenue, and those moved no according to the news stand circulation. With the only way out of multi generational debts being inflation (at lest that will be a part of the solution I am far from alone in anticipating) deals like that would only disappoint you: there might be no GP+, then.
Just read the sample magazine! Absolutely incredible.
Whilst my background is Broadcasting, I understand how short time is in media 5 hours can sometimes feel like 5 minutes-so I’d like to take my hat off to you and your small team for doing such a great turn around after races.
I will for sure be investing in this, with great pride as a Petrolhead and a keen supporter of things that are different. This- being one! Top work