A round up of the latest Motorsports tweets posted at http://twitter.com/thspeedblog

 February 11th

• [NHRA] Winternationals Pro Stock Cars – Jason Line (6.567s/211.63mph) beats Mike Edwards (6.575s/210.01mph)
• [NHRA] Winternationals Nitro Funny Cars – Ron Capps (4.154s/296.96mph) beats Jim Head (no time)
•  [NHRA] Winternationals Nitro Top Fuel – Doug Kalitta (3.822s/308.57mph) beats Antron Brown (3.847s/307.16mph)

February 12th

• [NASCAR] Jeff Gordon (#24) wins first Gatorade Duel qualifying race for Daytona 500
• [NASCAR] Kyle Busch (#18) wins second Gatorade Duel qualifying race for Daytona 500

February 13th

• [WRC] Sebastian Loeb (Citroen) leads Rally Norway, 2 mins 6 secs ahead of Mikko Hirvonen (Ford), at the end of Day 1.

February 14th

• [WRC] Seabastian Loeb leads Rally Norway by 25s at end of Day Two.

February 15th

• [WRC] Sebastian Loeb (Citroen) wins Rally Norway
• [NASCAR] Tony Stewart wins Nationwide race @ Daytona.
• [NASCAR] Matt Kenseth (#17) declared winner of rain shortened Daytona 500.

A quick roundup of posts from The Speed Blog twitter feed over the past week.

February 1st

[WRC] Sebastian Loeb (Citroen) wins Rally Ireland 1 min 27.9 secs ahead of team mate Dani Sordo. Mikko Hirvonen (Ford) is third.

February 2nd

[IRL] Haymarket Publishing announces that IndyCar magazine is to cease publication “with immediate effect.”

February 4th

[IRL] Robin Miller is reporting that Robert Doornbos will be joining N/H/L alongside Graham Rahal and other new signing … Milka Duno (!!!)

[NASCAR] Jeremy Mayfield forms Mayfield Motorsports and will run #41 Toyota in Sprint Cup.

[F1] An American team in F1? Looks like plans are underway for that to happen in 2010. Project is called USF1 and will be based in NC.

February 6th

[F1] Scuderia Toro Rosso have confirmed that Sebastien Bourdais will return to the team for a second season in 2009.

February 8th

[NASCAR] Kevin Harvick (#29) last lap dash grabs victory at Bud Shootout.

One of the first things I did while setting up the Speed Blog Twitter account was to do a serach of Twitter accounts so I could set up feeds from the various sanctioning bodies that control the series we cover.

I searched for F1, FIA, NASCAR, NHRA, IRL, IndyCar, WRC, ALMS, A1GP and GP2.

And only one series had an official Twitter feed.

Congratulations to the World Rally Championship for being up to date with the latest trends in social media and online communications.

So where are the rest of you?

There are literally millions of users on Twitter and the number is growing exponentially every day. It’s also rapidly becoming one of the  most effective marketing, and messaging channels in this digital age.

Shouldn’t a sport that prides itself as being at the forefront of technology be on the leading edge of communications as well as materials development, aerodynamics et al?

At the half-way point of the season 135 different drivers from Formula One, Indycar, NASCAR, NHRA drag racing, and the World Rally Championship have qualified to be included in The Speed Blog driver rankings.

World Rally driver Mikko Hirvonen maintains the top spot for another month, but the gap to second placed Indycar racer Scott Dixon is closing fast.

Here’s the Top 10 standings at the end of June.

1. Mikko Hirvonen (WRC)
2. Scott Dixon (IRL)
3. Sebastian Loeb (WRC)
4. Helio Castroneves (IRL)
5. Robert Kubica (F1)
6. Fellipe Massa (F1)
7. Dan Wheldon (IRL)
8. Kimi Raikkonen (F1)
9. Tony Schumacher (NHRA)
10. Chris Atkinson (WRC)

Kyle Busch is the top ranked NASCAR driver at #13 on the list.

Once again we’ll be posting our own cross-series drivers rankings as the season progresses. However this year we’ll be making a slight change to the way we calculate the overall ranking, by focusing more on average finishing positions within individual series rather than normalizing across all series.

To qualify a driver must score a Top 10 finish in F1, IndyCar (ChampCar), NASCAR, World Rally, or make it to the final of an NHRA event.

Top 10 Drivers by the end of February 2008 are:

1. Robert Hight (NHRA)
2. Mikko Hirvonen (WRC)
3. Kyle Busch (NASCAR)
4. Gigi Galli (WRC)
5. Petter Solberg (WRC)
6. Tony Stewart (NASCAR)
7. Ryan Newman (NASCAR)
8. Jari-Matti Latvala (WRC)
9. Sebastian Loeb (WRC)
10. Greg Anderson (NHRA)