Every day stolen news! (f1racing.net/)

Member Name: MichaelR

Product:	f1racing.net/
Date:	10/02/01 (52 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: All the news in one place. Excellent photo section. Good functionality.

Disadvantages: Plagiarism. No features - just news.

"Every Day Updated News!" Proclaims the banner at the top of the F1 Racing.net site.

Actually, it's updated more often than every day, but the thing that upsets me a little bit is that some (for some read "most") of their news stories have been directly ripped off of other sites and from newspapers.

It is a good site, but plagiarism is rife over at F1 Racing.net

It does have it's advantages of course, it means that you get all of the news stories in one place, and you're less likely to have to go chasing around 1001 different sites encase you missed anything (I do anyway, and I still find that F1-live has more exclusive news and opinions (see separate opinion)).

So, yes, F1 Racing.net, which I should mention is nothing at all to do with F1 Racing magazine, (The magazine has close ties with itv-f1.com) has all the latest news - just after it has been posted on it's original source or published in a newspaper in the case of those rumour-type stories.

Where F1 Racing.net really excels though is in its photographic department. It is consistently first with the new pictures - and it has a lot of exclusive photos, particularly from team launches and testing sessions. On the downside, most of these are rather small, even when viewed at their full size, but they are high quality and they are exclusive.

The ability to search the back catalogue of images also makes this one of the best sites for F1 pictures.

They also have a good series of polls, on a variety of F1-realted topics. These polls actually have some integrity too, as they have an IP check to prevent people voting over and over and over again. You can still vote more than once if you have a dynamically generated IP address, (I.e. you get a new one every time you connect to the Internet) but it prevents the polls from being fixed in the same way as they are on some other sites, where someone can sit and hit the vote bu
tton 1000 times in one night.

The good thing with F1 Racing.net's polls is that you also get to see the result after the poll has closed - many sites don't report the full results - and they also publish the results of the previous few polls conducted.

F1 Racing.net also has an excellent statistics section during the season, with comprehensive classifications published very quickly after the close of each session and the race itself, and Championship tables updated after every race, with the top part of the table instantly shown upon logging into the site.

The site is very well laid out - it uses one of the best layouts I have seen infact - with the main headline at the top of the page under the banner, with a large picture and a link to the story. In the same frame, each story for the past few days is also listed as a headline, along with the date that the story was posted onto the site.

Perhaps it would be better if a little explanation of the story was also included with the headline - a la F1-live or itv-f1, but this is a minor point.

The right hand frame contains the polls, a small championship table, and currently a box with links to reports, pictures, and info concerning the new 2001 season cars.

The left hand frame offers the language selector and a link to buy tickets to any of the 2001 Grands Prix.

This site is very functional - everything is always accessible all of the time, there's no getting lost in a nightmare of hierarchical sections as is the case with many sites, and there are some great features such as the ability to e-mail an entire article to a friend, and a wide variety of languages to choose from for the news reports.

On the downside, there are no features to speak of on this site. I do like the odd insider feature, technical feature, or amusing piece of humour, but then this is a pure news site - it is designed to report just news, so I can't really compl
ain too much about that point.

Overall, this is an excellent news site, and you probably won't need to visit any other site if all you are interested in is news.

It is just a shame that they don't add their own twist on the news, they just quote what other people have written directly without giving credit to the author, and I don't approve of that.

Summary: