Motorsport News: Between the Lines

Producing a newspaper like MN is a wonderfully efficient thing these days. Everything is done on computers. Journalists write their articles on laptops; crisp, clear photographs are taken with digital cameras and then both words and images can be e-mailed from exotic locations such as Malaysia, Catalunya and, er, Sweet Lamb.

In the office, sub-editors trim and polish the stories and come up with headlines, while designers bring everything together on the page. Then the pages are checked and, via computer, sent down to the printers on a Monday night.

Sure, the system doesn't have the romanticism as the old days. Back then sweaty, ink-stained blokes would manually lay out pages on huge boards, their brows furrowed as they used a scalpel to cut stories to fit the spaces on the page as if they were doing a giant jigsaw. Designing a newspaper probably gave those folk an unbeatable sense of achievement...but it was also a huge pain in the arse.

Years ago, rally reports had to be posted down to London on overnight mail trains to get to MN's offices in time for deadline. Now, one click of a button and an e-mail pings through the ether from reporter to editor.

It is almost too easy - and it gets easier all the time. Until last year, MN's pages were designed using a

computer program called QuarkXPress. For years it was the industry standard in the world of desktop publishing. Then a new product, called Adobe InDesign, came along. It did many of the same things as QuarkXPress, but it soon became the program to use and, in the Autumn of 2005, MN switched from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign.

Although the two programs have the same purpose - producing a newspaper - there are differences. For a start, all the buttons that you press to do things in QuarkXPress do different things in Adobe InDesign.

That was a source of much frustration until we got used to the new system, but it didn't take more than a couple of weeks before we had adjusted. After all, it was our job to just get on with it.

For those early weeks it was like driving an unfamiliar car - and that brings me neatly on to Rubens Barrichello (see, there is a motorsport-related point to this). The Brazilian has been rubbish in the first two races of the year and at the Malaysian Grand Prix he admitted he was having problems adjusting his driving style to suit the Honda RA106.

Barrichello spent many years as Michael Schumacher's number two. When he left Ferrari, the Italian team refused to let him test for Honda until his contract ran out on the last day of 2005. So in his defence, he did miss three months of valuable test time.

But the guy is paid a multi-million-pound sum to exploit a Formula One car to its full potential. On the basis that F1 is the pinnacle of the sport, he's one of the best 22 racing drivers in the world (in theory, at least). He's spent the early months of this year pounding around racetracks in last year's BAR test car and this year's new Honda, racking up miles in the car.

Given these facts, surely he should have been up to speed far before the start of the season? After all, it is his job to just get on with it.

If he can't contribute effectively to Honda's championship challenge in the early part of the season, isn't it compromising the whole team? It would be great to see Rubens succeed, but his admission that he's struggling makes it unlikely that we'll be designing any 'Barrichello wins' headlines in the pages of MN anytime soon.