So…
It’s been a little over a year since I last updated this blog. Time to bring it out from storage, I guess.
It has been a… weird year. My internship at the Motorsport Network, where I was promoting the Motorsport Fans app, turned into working with the social team and eventually a full time job in social. I cannot express enough just how much I love social media. It’s this ever-changing world and I don’t know how anybody can be bored by it.
Weird analogy but I play Sims. I love building houses. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m stuck in a small box-room in London and I’ll never be able to build my own home. Whatever it is, the best part of building thoses houses is discovering or unlocking new furniture, new possibilities, and new goals. And that’s what social media is for me. New tools to share my love for motorsport, new ways to share it, and new goals to have in mind when I’m sharing.
You never really realise just how much work goes into social media until you do it. It might seem like finding memes and sharing tweets but there is so much more to it than that.
As anyone who has been following motorsport media knows, it wasn’t exactly a simple year at the Network, and we got quite a lot of backlash on social. That’s hard. Especially when you put so much time and effort into creating good content, but that just gets hijacked by animosity for a decision you had no part in making. It’s hard.
But, overall, I think I’ve grown more as a person and learned so much about everything. From planning to filming to editing to research to how to connect the microphone to the receiver in a garage. It was such an enriching experience.
That all came to an end in December. For reasons I won’t go into here, I was made redundant.
Again, it was hard. I grew up playing by the rules. I got good grades, I worked hard outside school, I took on just about every extra curricular activity that didn’t involve exercise I could. I went to a good collage, got good grades – almost causing a meltdown in the process. I went to a good university, that extra curricular picked up again. I studied hard, did all the work outside of class. I got a job I loved and put my all into it, and did pretty well even if I do say so myself.
If this was a video game and, at the end of all that, you were still made redundant, you still “lost”… well, it would be a pretty crap video game, and there would be a few broken controllers. But that’s just how life is I suppose.
I don’t blame anyone, and still love the Network and what it stands for. But it’s been tough.
Of course, through all this, my love for journalism has never gone away. You don’t spend countless hours at soggy race tracks if you don’t love it.
Over the past year, my focus has been on the junior series. Because they’re great. I was the series correspondent for British Formula 4 at Formula Scout, attending all but one race. A few years ago, I could never have imagined being in the paddock just that much. Some might talk down F4. After all 80% of TOCA paddocks are open (100% for F4). Being in them is something every BTCC fan who’s ever attended a race has had the opportunity to do. But being there, with my shiny badge and my access to the crowded media centre, it was something special. And to get to follow these F4 drivers, watch as they grow into professional young racing drivers.
It’s been the same feeling in the Ginetta Junior championship, where I’ve been covering events for my own website: Ginetta Junior Update. GJnrUpdate was my anchor last season. It was a hard year, and the thought that I just had to get through it so I could have one year’s coverage on the site made me keep going through all that.
Racing is important. We’re seeing now, with most of Europe in lockdown, that it’s more to some people than a day out. For me, it’s my livelihood. After leaving the Network, I’ve been surviving doing some freelance work which has all but dried up with nothing happening. And it’s what gets me out of bed so often.
So, once again, it’s a hard time. It will continue to be hard. But we’ll get through this, and I can’t wait to find out what my next adventure will be.
Ginetta image courtesy of Caroline Rhea (yes, the same one that liked my Facebook status)
Diary of a Motorsport Journalist 