Thread: An Age Question
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Old 13 Apr 2018, 17:22 (Ref:3815243)   #73
Akrapovic
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Originally Posted by Gingers4Justice View Post
I’m 23, joined the forum in 2009 which means...bloody hell, I’ve been on here since I was 14!!!

I’ve been hooked since being taken to Le Mans aged 4. I immediately came back and rinsed my dad’s VHS collection which included taped Murray Walker-commentated Grand Prix from the late 80s and early 90, lots of WSC reviews, BTCC reviews...

My idea of what F1 and motorsport should be is a weird mix. I bizarrely feel like the late ‘80s is ‘my’ era, despite not even being alive at the time. I guess it proves that the 1980s genuinely were awesome, and it’s not rose-tinted spectacles.

It really annoys me when old white men feel like they speak for my generation. They talk like we’re social-media obsessed textaholics who can barely look up from our phones for 10 seconds.

Motorsport is killing itself in a half-hearted attempt to attract these people that I’m not sure really exist.

In the class I teach last year, in year 6 (ages 10-11), I did a Le Mans-themed week in the build up to the race in our morning routine. I was amazed to discover the following Monday that one of the girls who’d been exhibiting some of the most challenging behavior all year had watched 7 hours of coverage over the weekend and could even tell me the winners of LMP2 and GTE-Pro.

This wasn’t some middle-class primary school in Motorsport Valley. I teach in one of the most deprived areas of London in a class that is 95% Muslim and 68% don’t speak English as a first language.

Do you know why she watched so much? It’s because I made it sound exciting. Do you know how crazy it sounds to a kid that they race cars that look like space ships all day and all night without stopping? No mention of selfies or twitter of Snapchat or any of that crap. I told my kids about it, and they watched it.

Sadly, my class is excluded from F1 and most of motorsport. When I was a kid, I could watch F1 and a host of other series on Grandstand on BBC, International Motorsport on ITV, and F3 and GTs on C4 with just the four terrestrial channels.

Most of motorsport is completely out of bounds to anyone who can not afford the most expensive television packages. My generation and below, the ‘millenials’, have one thing in common - we have less disposable income than our parents and less spare time to spend it. It’s a crowded world of entertainment out there, and motorsport will be quickly forgotten if it’s expensive to follow it from your living room.
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