In the final “Thursday Thoughts” of the off-season, some fool posed the question:

“Which blog article or articles have you written that you were most pleased with writing and why?”

Oh, hold on, it was me. What was I thinking? That question is a good starting point. It all sprung out of a discussion about the different reasons that people blog. The idea was to take a carthatic look at what you particularly like about blogging and, in the case of The Reluctant Blogger, why you should keep blogging.

By far our most successful ‘article’ came before the blog – the infamous Car Comparison that killed the site as we exceeded our monthly bandwidth in the space of less than a day. It was linked to far and wide – most amusing was the number of hits coming in from Toyota’s F1 headquarters in Germany. How fun it was to think that Glock and Trulli had nothing better to do. It was a very simple idea and while it is some ways pleasing to see it widely imitated during this year’s launch season, I decided to steer well clear of it. Partly because I questioned the accuracy of the whole thing but mostly, and this is no small reason, because I had come to the opinion that wheelbase didn’t make that much of a difference anyway!

It was another example of graphics that also stood out for me (come for the pretty graphs, stay for the discussion!) were the qualifying grid graphs. A simple idea to plot them to illustrate the spacing, it suddenly seemed like an even better idea to actually use the cars rather than dots and so create a virtual grid.

However, I’ve decided that what I really like writing, and what I think I should take the time to write more of, are short, quick reflections on events. Jean Todt, The Horse Whisperer, Rosberg vs Schumacher and Force India are some recent examples. They don’t always get the most comments but I do love writing them much more than everything else.