As some of you may have noticed, despite the 2009 racing season being well under way there hasn’t been any real activity on THE SPEED BLOG for several months now. It’s all the fault of the Starship Enterprise and a bunch of talking vehicles.

At the end of last year I landed a contract to write a book about the forty year history of Star Trek in comic books It turned out to be a much bigger project than we originally thought and gradually used up more and more of my available writing time. As I was working on it other writing opportunities also opened up and my schedule started to look a little crowded, so I tried an altrenative appraoch, like a Twitter account, but that too quickly fell victim to the fact that there are only 24 hours in the day and I also have a day job and a family.

A few weeks ago we finished the Star Trek book and it was packed off to the printers. In the following few days I took a step back and looked at my commitments for the next few months.  I had a lot of them, including a couple more book projects that will run into 2010.

It was with a sense of sadness I came to the realization that it was time to move on from THE SPEED BLOG. I’ve had a fun three years here, and I hope that you have enjoyed the content I’ve provided.

But while I’m leaving THE SPEED BLOG, I’m not entirely leaving the world of motor sports behind. The talking vehicles I mentioned earlier? Well one of the writing commitments is that I am now the regular writer on the Disney*Pixar “The World of CARS” comic book series, published by BOOM! Studios.

Thanks again for reading,  – see you at the track!

Alan J. Porter

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?

Well we’re back after the off-season and gearing up for the start of the 2009 Racing Season.

Here at The Speed Blog we like to try something new each season, and this year will be no exception. The Speed Blog now has a feed on the popular TWITTER micro-bloging service.

 We will be using the Twiiter feed to post short headlines with event results and news items, while continuing to do more in depth articles and driver profiles here on the main site.

The speed and easy update capabilities of Twitter should allow us to cover more series than we have in the past,  plus provide almost daily updates of whats happening around the motor sports world.

If you don’t have a Twitter account, don’t worry, as we will be setting up an automatic feed to repost the Twitter posts (or “tweets” as they are called) here on the main site.

The Speed Blog Twitter feed can be found at http://twitter.com/thespeedblog

It’s been way too long since I managed to post anything here on The Speed Blog, but I have definite plans for this blog during the 2008 season. Instead of trying to keep up and report on teh races (as there are lots of online resources that already do that) we’ll be focusing on the men and women who make this sport so great – The Drivers themselves. Look out for more Driver Profiles and “Racers Past” type articles next year.

I’ll also be continuing to run an overall Drivers Ranking program.

But before we get to the 2008 season, here’s

The Final 2007 Overall Speed Blog Driver Rankings :

160 drivers qualified to be included in the overall listings during 2007, based on a top ten finish in ChampCar (20 drivers), Formula One (22 drivers), IRL (22 drivers), NASCAR (40 drivers), NHRA (26 drivers) or World Rally (30 drivers).

The final Top 10 of 2007 were:

• Jimmie Johnson (NASCAR)
• Jeff Gordon (NASCAR)
• Denny Hamlin (NASCAR)
• Tony Stewart (NASCAR)
• Fernando Alonso (F1)
• Matt Kenseth (NASCAR)
• Lewis Hamilton (F1)
• Sebastian Loeb (WRC)
• Kimi Raikkonen (F1)
• Mikko Hirvonen (WRC)

Welcome to THE SPEED BLOG. The aim of the blog will be to bring you a combination of news, views, commentary, trivia along with a little bit of history from the various worlds of motorsports.

From NASCAR to F1, Champ Car to Indy Car, Drag Racing to Rally I’ll have something to say.

I’ve been a motorsports fan since the mid sixties and a serious racing nut since 1976, when I attended my first car race at Oulton Park in Cheshire, England. (My dad’s company were sponsoring a car at the event). Since then I’ve been fortunate enough to attend all types of racing at all types of circuits across Europe and the USA; from Le Mans to Indianpolis, from Brands Hatch to Thunder Hill.

My first foray onto the web about 10 years ago was a website that went under the highly unoriginal name of Wheel Spin, since then have dabbled a bit in motorsports writing and was lucky enough to be part of the team that worked on F1 and Indycar Champion Nigel Mansell’s “autobiography.”

I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts and views with any fellow gear heads that find their way here.