A new starting line

I created this site on January 1st 2019. Under the banner of Highway F1 with a crude logo drawn in an open-source image editor, I began with the Toyota Racing Series and expanded into coverage of Australian Formula 4.

A month earlier I had finished as an editor of Honi Soit, the student newspaper of the University of Sydney. I wanted to continue to write and potentially combine that desire with my love of motorsport. It didn't necessarily generate much interest covering these two miniscule series in a world prior to Drive to Survive, but it was a gripping duel between Liam Lawson and Marcus Armstrong that drove me to keep going each week. Both New Zealanders racing at home, Lawson bursting onto the scene after a stint in Formula 4, Armstrong just a few years ahead but all-the-more experienced and preparing for the debut of the FIA Formula 3 series later in the year. They fought hard and traded positions each week in a straight championship fight that pushed other competitors to the periphery.

It brought five years of ups and downs, attending sporadic Formula Ford and Formula 4 events, COVID-19, a handful of grands prix, and the mirage of a job offer, all-the-while beginning as a social media producer at 9News before moving up as an assistant chief of staff. That career began just over a year later, and I tried to balance the two but often burnt out from the latter and compromised the former. The most drastic was last year, attending the first three Formula 1 events of the year before returning to the Bondi Junction stabbings and, just a few days later the Wakeley church stabbing and ensuring riots.

Combine this with the level of upheaval in the Formula 1 world this year, it has been hard to keep up. But I come into 2025 with a new focus and a new model for this site. It's hard to compete with the main news organisations and the newer web-only models that specialise in churning press releases into articles as fast as possible. It gives a quick sugar hit of traffic but is a lot less useful in building an audience and keeping people around. Sugar hits used to drive my site when I struggled to build much else, with all of the revenue and most of the clicks coming from the SEO-focused "F1 live streaming guide" (paying about $30 AUD/month in Google Adsense money) and a "Black Friday F1 deals guide" that lasted for two years before losing its spot at the top of Google search results and fizzling out (this idea actually paid out close to $1000 AUD the first year from affiliate links!). The best was when I was really in the zone, cranking out F1 articles like crazy and watching the traffic spike well beyond my expectations, which happened a few rare times such as in the minutes before the 2023 Australian Grand Prix, for no real reason other than a reward from Google for the sheer volume of drivel I was able to repackage into (dare-I-say) well-written headlines and good SEO (verging on clickbait but holding myself to the invisible standard that "I would never compromise like that").

The pressure I had put on myself to compete was a lot like the hot Sydney summer. I would build momentum and clicks like the gentle warmth of the morning rolls into a blistering day before the stifling heat settles in, and residents beg for the southerly buster, a regular cool change that drops the temperature by more than 15 degrees and often brings intense thunderstorms. Chasing a story gives me that same relief from my frustrations. Sitting in my hotel room in Bahrain I had one of these moments, frozen in place with self-doubt weighing on my ambitious plans to attend the first three grands prix of 2024, when the rumour arose that Red Bull boss Christian Horner could be sidelined from the team after a complaint over misconduct in an alleged personal relationship with an employee. I had an epiphany, rushing my dusty rental car to the airport to be the first to put questions to him. Fifteen minutes later, pulling up to the imposing private jet terminal as the plane touched down, I realised that my exuberance, and the story itself, were not worth a potential international incident, and left with my tail between my legs (and searching for examples of what was acceptable in Bahraini journalism). But it was enough to get my blood pumping and my brain ticking on what else I could do to carve out some stories for myself.

One of my most experienced colleagues at Nine told me something extremely useful in thinking about journalism. The public generally likes our product. Millions still watch television and even more read news online. They do not, however, like how it is made, and they like the individual journalist even less. So perhaps this re-introduction is misguided, especially when I admit my tabloid tendencies.

I may be blinded from my intense level of news consumption, but I slightly disagree. Maybe it is truer of the tabloid news that the public dislikes those who make it, but I do appreciate a good journalist and even more, a good writer. I find it is quite obvious when a dedication to the craft and to informing the reader is what motivates someone and their writing. It may not be very novel to say I appreciate one of the most popular publications in the world, but I very much see the sense in the New Yorker model, serving news digests as entree before the main course of feature writing, limited to just one sitting a week. It is a much saner experience to read David Remnick list Donald Trump's choices for his second presidential cabinet in one paragraph, in your own time, than to be blasted with notifications from the Associated Press, then the New York Times, then the Guardian, then the Sydney Morning Herald, as each announcement is made. Turning the page, I can be captivated by David Sedaris finding the beauty and the irony and the bittersweet in everyday moments that invigorates and reminds me why I love the challenge of trying to put my thoughts into words and those words onto the page. Turning the page again, the next could anything from research to fiction to personal essay, presented with no fear that may run for 5,000 words or be some niche topic or small-town grievance. People will read it, and they obviously do.

People want motorsport news with substance as well! Although barely surviving a print reduction in 2019, Road & Track is still my go-to in airport newsstands (apart from the controversy about this article which I thought was completely fine and definitely bemusing enough to justify). There are handfuls of bespoke (albeit often more motoring focused) magazines that pop up in local bookstores from time-to-time (as well as my favourite, the Firestation Newsagent in Sydney's Kings Cross which seems committed to stocking every print publication available in the English language).

So, in the most long-winded way of clearing out the cobwebs, I am trying to say this. In 2025 I have a new commitment to finding balance in my life and to commit as much as possible to this project to see just where it may lead. I will return to the news of the motorsport world, focusing on open-wheel junior development categories, for free. I am no Remnick, but I might start with the same publishing schedule. I will also be introducing a small fee for a membership tier where I will attempt to bring the colour I believe is sorely lacking from the motorsport world, especially these junior series. And there is hopefully more to come... with some other ambitious projects underway. I have moved to the Ghost hosting platform to make the site less bloated and will do away with ads for the time being. I don't want to serve ads to paying members, so I've hit pause for everyone while I get settled in. There will be merch, there will be videos, there will be more! So please, if you're interested, sign up below, for either tier. You'll hear from me again very soon.

And if this doesn't work... I could always start a "shoppers club" and give away a Suzuki Jimny each week. That seems to get results too.