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FANS’ FORUM

The Fans’ Forum idea came from the interaction that this website enjoys with the fans.

It started out in 2009 with fans asking questions. If I didn’t know the answers, I’d ask someone working inside one of the teams or the governing body. Soon I started forwarding some suggestions from fans to the FIA and the teams. One of those made its way onto the agenda for a FOTA meeting in March 2010.

The next logical step was to give the fans a chance to meet key figures from the sport face to face. We bashed around some ideas and came up with the Fans Forum. Santander UK was looking for a way to connect with fans and when we approached them they said that this was perfect.

On February 24th 2010 we met with FOTA’s general secretary Simone Perillo with the idea to see if we could put fans in the same room as some of their heros from the sport. He was immediately supportive and has always been the idea’s greatest champion within FOTA. The concept was simple; the event would be sponsored so we could put it into a nice venue (courtesy of BAFTA) and the fans could attend for free. As with all these things, we had to put it together in a hurry, but we had no trouble filling the 220 seats in the BAFTA auditorium with avid fans and could easily have filled it 3 times over.

We were incredibly grateful to FOTA for helping us make it happen and they were delighted with the start. Martin Whitmarsh himself attended and played an active role in supporting the event along with Tony Fernandes, Jock Clear, Paul Di Resta and Ferrari’s Luca Colajanni, who has also been very supportive.

Another objective of the event was to create a load of films and audio for fans who weren’t able to attend to enjoy from the comfort of their home (or work!). The videos are below. We didn’t quite pull off the audio, (but we got it right second time in Montreal !) The feedback was fantastic and we were grateful for all of the kind remarks that we were sent after the event. Of course none of this would have been possible without the support and backing of Nav Sidhu and Santander UK – who had the guts to get behind the idea and pay for it! – from the very start.

Fast forward to 2011 and we’ve agreed to do three more events with FOTA in Montreal, UK and Italy.

Thanks to a number of vocal US/Canadian fans, we found ourselves organising the second Fan’s Forum, in Montreal on the Thursday before the Grand Prix. This one we put together with our friends at US travel company Grand Prix Tours. It was attended by 240 fans. Rather than running the Forum as one long session, we decided to break the format down into three sections: The Big Picture, The Racing, The Fan experience and social media. This allowed the questions to be more focussed as fans could target either the technical, political, legal and commercial, according to who was on stage. This worked much better.

Martin Whitmarsh and Eric Boullier spoke in part one, Nico Hulkenberg, Heikki Kovalainen and Mike Gascoyne spoke in part two and the final part featured Williams boss Adam Parr along with McLaren’s John Allert and there was a repeat performance from Colajanni.

The other major difference with the Montreal Fans Forum was the reaction from the sport. I think it made FOTA and the F1 media really take notice and realise what a great fan outreach platform this is. We were overwhelmed by the reaction from both the fans and the sport in Montreal.

All eyes are now on the UK Fans Forum, which will be quite different as it is hosted at the McLaren HQ in Woking, so will have a strong McLaren stamp on it. The event should be the biggest yet – 300 in the audience – and will provide a unique opportunity for fans to not only interact directly with the sport, but also meet some of their racing heros, like Lewis Hamilton and Kamui Kobayashi.

We’re delighted with the progress we’ve made with this concept in such a short amount of time. We’d like to thank Simone and all the guys on our Fans Forum Steering Committee at FOTA, Nav and his team at Sidhu and Simon, Santander, Grand Prix Tours. We are looking forward to hosting the event in Italy in September and are already thinking about 2012.

Most of all though, we’d like to thank the fans for making this happen. Without you there would be no event. Without your support, inspiration and dedication we wouldn’t be able to do events like these. We’ll continue to maintain this page as a record of the Fans’ Forums as they occur. As always we welcome your feedback and comments and suggestions for new events.