Wow, that Netflix documentary is reallllly helping grow interest in F1! Enjoyed the long scroll down to see Haas as the winner. I assume the article controls for the physical location of the request (i.e. is Haas fastest because the author is in the US and Haas is the only US-based team and/or hosted site?), but I didn't see it in my perusal.
I loved that documentary. But doggone it, the racing scenes were all quick cuts. I could barely focus on it before it cut to another view.
In the movie "Grand Prix", the greatest shot in it was one continuous shot of a lap in the Monaco race, from the driver's POV. No added music, just the engine sounds. I wish that documentary would add such a scene for each track.
I hated the documentary. It was entertaining I guess, but most things presented were blown way out of proportion for increasing the drama. And the wrong sounds were dubbed in for the cars, and the videos were edited in such a way to suggest things that outright did not happen (ex: The Mclaren mechanics laughing at Grosjean crashing).
This is quite sad, because there was a lot of legitimate on field drama last year, that they could have chosen to show instead. I'd even go so far as to say it was a mockumentary rather than a documentary.
Literally, the only good thing was that it seems to have been entertaining enough for a lot of people, that F1s viewership has increased quite a lot.
The other egregious edit was making it look like Grosjean shoved the cameraman in the pit lane. In reality he was reaching out to stop him from running into something (the cameraman was walking backwards)
That is a particularly good video of Leclerc's lap. I love that the telematics on his steering wheel are visible as well, and you can get a real sense of the speed and the gear changes needed.
Yes, I like that too. The steering wheel displays are easy to see in night races. It's interesting to see what the different teams are doing with their steering wheels:
Just the exchange between Cyril Abiteboul and Christian Horner before the 2018 Belgian GP regarding Ricciardo going to Renault justified watching the whole series. The gist:
CA: so now you need an engine and a driver.
CH: you are spending the money you don’t have for the drivers.
CA: I have a lot of money.
The build up to this was Red Bull announcing they are not going to use Renault engines in 2019 but before they knew they’ll lose the driver to Renault.
your description is severely lacking. what was said is largely irrelevant. the body language was the point. horner as cocksure alpha and abiteboul as weak. the 2 are portrayed that way throughout the series. i especially like the highlight / intimation that the highest priority for renault is the quality of their lunch.
Yep. I'm watching an episode every day and it even made me want to watch a race the past weekend. I kinda miss following it, and I lost touch since 2007-2009.
> Wow, that Netflix documentary is reallllly helping grow interest in F1!
Based on language and phrasing used on the blog, the author is British, and F1 has been a staple on mainstream terrestrial channels for decades, although it has seen a decline as F1 has increasingly became boring and predictable, and almost entirely dictated by team tactics and car reliability.
I watched a lot of F1 in the 80's and 90's. Then stopped for various reasons (around the time that Senna died on the track). But lately have started watching again now that my sons are taking an interest.
I fully appreciate that the heady, noisy, dangerous days of F1 are over, as driver & fan safety, as well as hybrid engines take over the sport. But still, exciting wheel to wheel racing can happen, as evidenced by the race in Bahrain over the weekend.
This year at least, the teams seem on a more even spread, and it is hard to pick a runaway winner for the drivers or constructors championship.
I'm not sure I'd call the last season "amazing". It had some promise at the start, but it was pretty clear before too long that Hamilton was going to run away with it again.
We'll see what this season holds (since at this time last season it still looked like it would be a good fight to the end), but I'm optimistic. If Bottas can retain his form from Australia (I think the wind really threw him off in Bahrain), and if Vettel can get his head on straight, we could see a legit four-way fight for the title.
Even more excited for the midfield battle this year. The rookies (esp Norris) look great, McLaren "can fight", and adding Kimi and Ricciardo to the midfield is sure to shake things up.
> ...and F1 has been a staple on mainstream terrestrial channels for decades, although it has seen a decline as F1 has increasingly became boring and predictable, and almost entirely dictated by team tactics and car reliability.
Also it's now only live on Sky, which requires a minimum ~£30/m subscription; probably doesn't help viewing figures.
I'd love to hear from those of you who do web work for these types of big companies. Do they just not care about performance or are there other issues at play? I've dabbled with some small sites and would get stressed if the page load was more than a couple of seconds. How can these companies with large budgets find it acceptable that page loads can take tens of seconds while jumping content around the page or locking up threads with massive JS?
In my experience with non tech clients, the website is built using Wordpress, hosted by the agency, and presented in a board room. The presenter will connect a newish MacBook into the projector after lots of fuss about the right dongle type and proceed to click around. The decision maker at the company will verify items against their memory and usually things that users do not care about, like they will ask who agreed to have a photo of the red car instead of the blue car because if they recall everyone had agreed to the blue car. Oh it was the red car after all. Really, because the blue car looked better. Oh it was a placeholder image of a different racing team. Oh well in that case it’s fine.
My experience from working at a car company (although not in the F1 area):
This kind of work is typically outsourced, since it's not a core competency for the company. So the company would be contracting some web development agency which builds a homepage and potentially also hosts it. There are contracts and specifications in place around what needs to get built.
In the web development domain I don't think the outsourcing aspect is a big plus or minus on execution ability. There will be some good and some bad agencies around - and an internal team might not really be doing a better job.
Regarding performance: They mostly wouldn't even recognize. The work is presented with some fast connection and device, so it's not visible. And even if it would be, the people responsible for it (or even the leads of those companies or teams) are not that tech savy and will just accept it as the current state of the art.
There will be far bigger discussions around other things than performance. E.g. which images and fonts are to be used, how trademarks and the brand are represented, etc.
Most execs have the assets already cached so they dont realize. And if you tell them to clear their cache and revisit the site they will scoff and tell you to "scurry off with your technical nerdistry!" I don't bother trying to rock the boat anymore. It is never appreciated, only scolded as if you are a pedantic whiner.
That's because you're bad at marketing. Imagine how differently you'd be received if instead of saying "here's how slow it is if I clear my cache" you said "here's what a new visitor who has never been to our site before experiences".
I wish that were the reason. In large companies, the communication channels can be as bad as it is to outside customers. Put your energy into things that reward you back for good faith efforts. Large companies often have power structures entrenched by other factors than efficiency and function.
Code is written by web devs that are more designers than devs with little optimization skills on expensive high end hardware. Work is reviewed by executives on expensive high end hardware. My experience anyway.
That belittles designers -- designers understand what slow means too and can use Google to find a solution.
I used to work at an ad agency several years. We were locked into Wordpress or Drupal with Bootstrap and some base plugins for sliders as well as a ton of stuff for 'SEO' and tracking. The amount of time allotted to deliver the project was actually pretty small. You would get a mild scolding if you even bothered to look at performance. A lot of these things are a part of the theme/plugin out of the box and may not be optimized, but the images and the content was usually uploaded by an intern or whatever and they never bothered with image optimization.
in our case (a major online retailer), some of the problems are coming from the marketing department. we watch the data thoroughly, as we need each year to prepare for black friday, but after that some guy from marketing inserts through tag manager another tracker or any other crappy script that also heavily affects frontend performance.
we actually care about that, but our options are limited. of course, if the performance is heavily affected we can tell them to buzz off, but usually it's not a single tool that generates the problem, but the sum of all of them.
on the other hand, i'm aware that there's some value added by those tools.
I find it interesting that Google tries to stress website performance and even goes to such extremes as creating a new, stripped down HTML spec (AMP) while simultaneously shipping bloat-ware enabling products like Google Tag Manager.
Well, i’m not a web dev, but as a long time fan I may offer some personal opinion on this. First, who visit these sites? Nowadays fans just follow twitter and Instagram for related info, and would-be sponsors have no reason to take a look at sites looking for interest. This is such a small field with huge public info availability no body needs info from web site to relate. The only time I tried to visit team website is to shop some fan stuff. I guess the teams also know this so they can’t care less
Agreed. I am an avid F1 fan, but I don't think I have ever visited a constructors site in all the decades I have been into the sport. At most I will visit the main formula1.com site, mainly to find out race times or to watch highlights of a race I missed (and a site which I hoped the OP would measure alongside the team sites), or else consume information via Youtube, Instagram and other aggregate sites. No interest in just seeing a fancy moving brochure site that doesn't tell me any more than the others I mentioned above.
Well. These are just anecdotal from one job in an agency which also sells websites for some bigger companies... and I hope this stuff is rather not standard... but if I had to guess it's something like:
- bad project management from the client (they often don't care about technical quality or rather can't evaluate it)
- bad project management from the web contractor (they often don't care about technical quality or rather can't evaluate it)
- the web agency has too many projects due and needs to deliver asap
- exhausted & mismanaged dev teams (+ freelancers) which are constantly working on short lived projects, which are a mess because nobody doesn't really care
Also I am amazed over and over again how a lot of managers (or people) will lie straight to your (or the clients) face if they can thereby save their ass.
If you have 100+ developers pushing to a repository, unfortunately many of them don't care about introducing a 100ms regression here and there, and that's how you end up with a slow page.
The performance of a website very often depends on how important the site is to their sales. For many companies who aren't selling direct to consumers, a fast website isn't their biggest priority.
One thing that wouldn't surprise me would be to see that the websites for some of the companies mentioned in the article are running on SharePoint. --If tuned properly, it can be quite fast, but like other solutions, it can also feel bloated and slow if it's not prioritized.
Well... Ferrari inlined a 1.7MB BASE64 encoded image of their prancing horse logo, only to render it at less than 1/10th of its size.
That shows it's not always the massive JS libs that are the problem. It's also a lack of knowledge and interest from those who build and maintain the site.
That sounds less like a lack of knowledge and interest, and more like a lack of time and care. When your boss is yelling at you to upgrade the Ferrari logo because you need to get to work on Dave's Dogfood, and you've got two hours to do it plus nobody remembers the AWS credentials for the account with permission to upload images to S3, you're going to hack some shit together and deploy it then sneak out for a coffee. Your personal levels of interest and knowledge don't come into play when faced with cost-cutting and ignorance at the purse-string level.
Yup, chuck that responsibility over the wall. Not.
True, the QAs job is to test it delivers as requested, UX if it is usable by the end user, ops that is is not heavy on resources etc. But it is a joint responsibility between all and especially the developer and designer that they deliver quality and not cut corners.
If there is an ultimate responsible it would perhaps be the project/product owner who would decide what is important and how much time and effort they should spend on which parts. But still it is not just pass-the-buck, they are all responsible.
The programmer's job is to come up with the best solution in the minimum amount of time. That's an ill-posed/unsolvable problem. Hence they will sometimes come up with a solution that's not perfect, and they will leave it to QA (or the product designer) to see if the solution is acceptable.
It reminds me of my previous company, also a car company. During the Dakar Rally they had an 8MB jpeg as the header of their sale website.
It took one week and a message sent through a "Contact us" page (public) to get them to reduce it to 700 KB. I suppose it happens because the web devs never tested the website with a realistic internet connection. Everything loads fast when the server room is less than a km away with gigabit bandwidth.
It's either bad project management if they forgot to test correctly/change placeholders or as you said lack of knowledge.
It definitely doesn't matter with Ferrari because I doubt people buy cars directly through their site, but I've gotten into spats with art/fashion people who make terrible web stores that shit the bed the moment you're on a spotty connection. Their justification is unironically "we don't make products for poor people, so who cares what our site looks like on a bad signal," which I find really odd—do people with means never travel or something?
There are a fairly significant number of users without LTE. Bear in mind too that some of the names at the bottom of the list, like Brazil, are countries hosting a Grand Prix this year.
It makes me kinda sad how the article talks about a five second loading time as something that's "relatively good". I guess between cheaply made, slow sites and huge sites like reddit not giving two fucks about performance the goalposts have shifted dramatically toward the bad.
Personally for simple content-based sites I find anything above ~half a second is already quite bad, assuming a reasonable underlying connection to the server (ping < 30 ms).
As a long time F1 fan, I love the premise of this article. Perhaps we should also investigate the correlation between team marketing budgets vs web site speed, as that seems to be a major talking point about their R&D budgets vs track speed these days...
When I started out I used to contact companies and try to sell them a site upgrade, generally focusing on something that was better looking. I wonder if now the better opportunity is to demonstrate how much more efficiently you can code their site to increase performance. Reinforcing that with data on how this affects sales and surely you could snatch quite a few contracts.
Testing F1 race team websites for speed is a neat idea.
I'm a cofounder of PacketStream.io
We'd love to see you re-run these tests from our network of global residential proxies to see results from different locations around the globe. Our product lets you select a geolocation to exit from as part of the request.
If you're interested in free credits to run some more speed tests send me an email: ronald at packetstream io
These kind of websites are just a brand box-ticking exercise. They're farmed off to a low-bidding contractor or agency who have no incentive to care about performance. So long as the site runs fast on the client's iMacs using office wifi that's good enough.
I think your comment is a lot more insightful than it might appear on the surface.
Companies do a ton of market research, if there were some edge to optimizing your company’s site, I suspect there would have been 10 books on the subject by now.
Truth is they don’t do it because they don’t need it. Plain and simple. What exactly would they get other than HNs approval?
Your comment struck a cord with me because it’s a conversation I have had in IT millions of times.
The real wisdom in any type of endeavor is knowing when it’s ok to cut a corner and when there is absolutely no room for compromise.
Mercedes got 500 folks employed just to make the F1 engine[1], I'm sure they can afford to hire someone to get a couple of websites made.
That it's not better is probably because, does it need to be?
