Despite the help of some of the best brains in Formula 1 it is not going to be possible to produce GP+ tonight as there appears to have been some kind of motherboard failure on the computer on which everything is created. This means that for the first time in years I am going to be able to have dinner on a Sunday night because there is nothing more that I can do. I will finish the magazine and the JSBM newsletter as soon as I can, but tomorrow is going to be spent largely travelling back to Paris. I will then buy a new Mac and catch up. Despite all the problems, we will still be out faster than most other magazine. I do apologise for this…
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joeblogsf1 
Even the best drivers have engine failures now and then!
Bon Appetit!
It’s not as if it happens often….
Just when I missed the race and hoped to read the report tonight too. But yeah, things happen, so good luck getting everything sorted then.
No worries Joe! As they say in the Catalan language “Bé appitit”!!!
GP+ is still the best thing in F1. Good on ya, Joe.
Sorry to hear that Joe it happens. You should still have a well earned break and some dinner though!
Bon appétit Joe! As far as I’m concerned, even if GP+ magazine came out mid week I’d be happy… Brilliant read every time.
My question if I may : why do you subject yourself to the stress of publishing it so soon after the race and forego your comfort, like enjoying a meal and maybe getting more insight after the race?
Have a safe trip home.
Thanks for letting us know Joe, these things happen so enjoy your meal. I look forward to receiving it later this week.
BTW: you got a mention “long serving member of the F1 press core” on Sky when you there was a shot of you talking to Gene Hass during practice 3 on Saturday.
enjoy some food and a bit of chill time – not having sky, I’ve not seen the race yet anyway!
Ah. Do I suspect the the Macbook black screen of death? You have my sympathy. Saw you on the TV on Saturday!
Have a good dinner Joe.
A little unwise of Lewis to criticise the team in the interview by the BBC.
I’m sure most subscribers won’t mind. I always think you place too much emphasis on speed of issue anyway, quality of the content is far more important
Shasta happens. Safe travels and enjoy your new computer when you get it…
No problem, Joe. Enjoy your spare time and I’ll look forward to reading it tomorrow.
Sorry to hear of your computer problems, hopefully it won’t be too expensive to sort out.
Bon Apetit
We can wait for once. We were spoiled all those years. Thank you and good luck and keep up the good work!
No problem, Joe, enjoy your dinner and we will all read GP+ when published!
Still quicker than the McLarens this season.
Enjoy your meal Joe. We can wait!
Mac-Laren mobo? 🙂
Enjoy your dinner Joe. I’ll wait.
Enjoy the meal. An early night for me then. 🙂
Joe, Check carefully as I think there is a particular series of Macs where Apple are replacing the logic cards for free. I have had all the graphics suite on my 2012 Retina Mac Book Pro replaced FOC. Wilson
Not a problem for me Joe, sometimes these things happen.
It’s a plausible story, no question. Yet, … why dost thou doubt, my fretful heart?
Everything is explained in the phrase “help of some of the best brains in F1”. LOL
Joe, I have been sitting here in Nerang, Australia, patiently refreshing the http://www.grandprixplus.com page. Thought I better check your wordpress page. Oh well, time for breakfast. Best of luck….
Take your time and enjoy the break. We can wait!
Hi Joe, thanks for the update, no problem at all. Hope dinner was nice!?
And Apple strikes again… LOL
I hope you enjoyed your dinner!
Hope you had a backup…
Sympathy, Joe. They say there are two kinds of computer users…. those who have had a major hardware failure. And those who are going to. I hope recovery is as painless as possible.
No problem! if I can wait almost five months for Rosberg to prove my point tha,t “if your ahead in a Mercedes you cannot lose”…. nearly 18 seconds! win margin. Then I can wait on my copy of your magazine. Sadly I’m still waiting for Lewis Hamilton to lose, just once, with some semblance of good grace. i fear I’ll be left waiting!.
Just wondering Joe why my comment is still awaiting moderation?
Because I have been travelling non-stop for two days and trying to sort out a computer mess that you may or may not have read about.
Understood-sorry. i just thought i was having difficulties with logging into the site.
Sorry to hear about the computer issues Joe. Looking forward to the usual top quality result when it’s all sorted.
No worries Joe 2-3 days is still pretty fast for a magazine to come out.
I just hope you had back ups of all the articles and you don’t have to re-write them all.
No worries Joe. Put this one in the category of “S*** Happens”. We still love you. You’re still the best!
Cheers…
Hi Joe,
Sorry to hear about your computer problems.
Nico Hulkenburgs fatest lap, 7th overall. Was set on lap 51, yet he is shown as stopping on lap 50 as he is the slowest that lap and yet the next lap he is second fastest to Massa, standing start and pit lane limiter included. Am I and the stats wrong or is that one of those all time stunning laps, like Alex Zanardi qualifying the years old Lotus Honda 107C 15th for the 94 Italian GP
By my reckoning, Alex Zanardi qualified 13th in a fairly new 109. Johnny Herbert qualified 4th in the same car.
Enjoy the new Mac. Well worth the wait for GP+!
trouble for Mac as well as Mc then joe
The worst!
You should consider working in Dropbox and / or google docs. Then at least if you computer does you haven’t lost everything. My company works in Dropbox primarily with inDesign and Photoshop and it works great. Also makes things easy if you have multiple people working on things.
You need a computer to do that…
Yes and no. You said the computer died and therefore you lost everything. With Dropbox your files are never on a single computer (or device) meaning you can access them from any computer or any smart device
Which is perfect if you have one…
Oddly on a Sunday night all computers in an F1 press room are in use and no one is going to loan you their computer when we all travel on Mondays. And the programmes I use are Apple only… So that halves the possibilities.
Joe doesn’t say he’s lost everything, “just” he can’t get at it. If it IS the motherboard that has let its magic smoke escape then the HDD should be salvageable, albeit with a certain amount of screwdriver-brandishing and swearing; the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia is not famous for allowing mere mortals easy access to the innards of its products. Best to buy a black roll-neck jumper, Joe, as a talisman rather than a fashion statement.
I wish my laptop would stop making that funny noise, though.
You could have a tablet / phablet / smart phone as a back up way (should your mac fubar itself again) of accessing the files on dropbox 🙂
Not enough computing power
fwiw, a wise man once said that unless you’ve your documents in 3 places, you don’t *have* them.
With that in mind (& having been caught out in the past)
1 Hard Drive
2 Time machine, on a 64gb usb drive, permanently plugged into my laptop
3 & working docs saved to Dropbox – which = 3 places, if there’s a wifi connection. [I use Dropbox in preference to Google drive, which can corrupt some Mac document formats]
I trust you enjoyed your dinner Joe
🙂
I had all that but without a working
I had all of that but without a piano you cannot play Chopin, no matter how many sheets of music you have
It’s weird how people forget this basic fact!
It’s like those old messages which used to come up on my PC years back: “Internet connection down – please click online help for assistance…”
Nowadays they just put application help pages online instead. This is sub-optimal when you are in the worst hotel in the whole of New Mexico and the tail end of a Pacific hurricane has rendered the Internet as useful as a couple of empty baked-bean tins and a piece of wet string.
DAMHIKT.
That’s good to see!
Hopefully you were able to enjoy dinner, knowing that there wouldn’t be too much rework.
GP+ will be no less interesting for taking a little longer than usual to cook.
Some good news:
A plug for GP Saboteurs on Road Scholars magazine – http://roadscholars.com/something-old-something-new-may-2015/
No worries Joe, even in these extraordinary days of reliability, nobody is immune from mechanical failure… Looking forward to to issue.
You and the whole great Team are forgiven! (Technical glitches are the masters of even the best drivers – just ask Mclarens best….) And after all, it is always good to have something good in anticipation. Thank you for some fantastic F1 (and motor racing in general) news coverage. Where even the “Gossip” always have a firm degree of truthness…
Joe, I just cleaned my glasses with a tissue and threw it in the bin. Didnt realise but it got sucked into the computer cooling fan duct and the Mac overheated now I cant stop this commennnnnnnt. Phew, close call. Time to retire me thinks.
Safe journey back, look forward to when you are up and running again.
I hope it meant you really enjoyed your Sunday evening for once. I think you’ve earned it!!
None of this would have happened, if you had done your work from home.
Not true. A dead computer is a dead computer and Apple stores are not open on Sunday nights in France
Why use Apple? I would assume using MS would provide more flexibility.
Better interfaces, fewer viruses
Bad luck sir, these things happen… Slightly off-topic, I have recently discovered Motorsport Monday! Big thanks to the team and yourself for putting it together, especially as I really only follow F1 big-time these days due to not really feeling I can justify paying for Autosport anymore, this handy little digest has helped get me back up to speed with a lot of other great action going on. Not read the whole archive yet, but give me a day or two… Please pass on my gratitude to the folks who put it all together, and thanks to you (personally) once again.
Nedder
Motorsport Monday…… yyyyyyeeeeaaahhhhhhhh…
Do you have a 4 laptop limit for the season? Any grid penalties for you at the next race?
Now but I always have budget limits
No I have a budget cap!
Does spending over the budget cap have to be matched by fines paid to the Mrs Joe shoes fund? Or is it just that overspend has to come out of the Mojito Fund?
Just so long as you don’t start threatening to leave F1 for good if Audi don’t supply you with a super new laptop!
Joe,
Is your PC powered by Renault?
That’s the first time since I’ve been taking GP+ that it hasn’t appeared on time, a pretty good record.
Missed it as I didn’t listen to the race on BBC and always enjoy a quiet read through.
166 issues
Sorry to hear your laptop did a Maldonado.
Hope you aren’t of the mind to quit over the heads of this failure/unreliability when you’ve been at the top of the tree and dominating the sport for years cause that could look quite pedantic!!
No, but I might take in an Formula E at some point…
Just don’t buy one of the new MacBooks!
Ok that sounds like you use MacBook Pros for 2000 – 3000 euros. The last one died in Korea in October 2012 I think. So maybe you’re buying premium computing power which would easily be enough to cover the next 5 years, but your machines die after half that time and each time it’s a big hassle.
If you invest in always carrying a spare one, you could go for slower and cheaper versions because you’ll probably use them for a shorter period. Buy mid-range every 1.5 years instead of going for the top model every 3 years, that should bring the additional investment down between 30 to 50 %. Maybe share the extra cost for the backup Mac with a handful of esteemed OS X-using colleagues? There’s always a solution, and those are the things I’d be thinking about now if I was in your position.
How many laptop-deaths within the F1 press pack have you witnessed over the years? Is it like some guy every weekend or is it rather rare?
There are a lot of Macs in the press room. I’d say more than half of them, but I’ve not actually counted. We put the computers through a lot but these days you don’t see too many failures because titanium structures and magnetic power connectors have helped stop broken screens and power socket troubles, which used to be the main reasons for failure. There are also fewer wires these days so fewer accidents when someone hooks a wire. The last dead Mac I had was in Korea three years ago. It was my own fault as coffee went into the back of the machine and fried the screen connectors. I can only recall one motherboard failure maybe three years before that, but I have always got the data back. The other failures I have had were power connection and screen problems. The other day I saw that some of the teams/organisations now use military grade machines. Double the price and pretty heavy but solid. They tend to send stuff in the freight and don’t carry the stuff around with them as we do in the media, so I guess they have fewer breakages…
I sometimes wonder if repeated trips on aeroplanes (cosmic rays) and through security machines leads to an increased incidence of failures, apart from the straightforward wear and tear of travel. The old theory of wrapping them in aluminium or lead foil is about as useful as glueing a shamrock to the back. You would need about a foot of lead to begin to slow down any cosmic ray particle on its way through your microchips.
Wilson