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As racing seasons worldwide kick into gear it presents a mountain of technical challenges to those running the sites and apps behind the action. It's a challenge tailor-made for a headless sports CMS.
For global motorsports fans, February is the month where all the winter talk falls away to reality. After months of waiting for the flag to fall on a new season of on-track racing, the green lights and chequered flags are now imminent.
Race one of the new Formula One season, at Albert Park in Melbourne, Australia, is just two weeks away on March 16th.
After a winter of “What ifs?”, fans are geared up again for Max Verstappen vs the rest, as Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri at McLaren, Charles Leclerc and new teammate Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari, and George Russell and Kimi Antonelli at Mercedes all start as challengers in a star-studded field attempting to prevent the Dutchman winning his fifth title in a row.
Elsewhere the WEC World Endurance Championship, MotoGP motorcycle championship, and Indy Car seasons all kick off in Qatar, Thailand, and Florida respectively over the weekend of February 28th to March 2nd.
Meanwhile the World Superbike championship is already heading to round two after an action-packed opener in Australia last weekend, and Nascar fans are several races into a lengthy 36-race championship.
To quote the late great Murray Walker, February is GO! GO! GO! for race fans.
It's not all go just for fans: spare a thought for the armies of personnel working on the series’ sites and channels who have been working all winter to review, redraw, rewrite, and reengineer their sites and content for 2025, to accommodate the composable experiences and multichannel publishing expected by fans and commercial partners.
Visits to sites and apps rise rapidly the closer we get to race days, and editorial, PR, and marketing teams will have had to rewrite every team profile, every driver and rider profile, rework countless images and logos, and check and redirect innumerable facts, stats, and URLs to reflect the changes in sponsors and personnel from last year to this.
And that barely covers the sea of preview and news content published across every channel to bring fans up to speed on the season ahead.
It is a huge challenge for content teams and places huge expectations on their sports CMS and publishing CMS to make it happen smoothly, and all hints at just how core to the overall reach of the businesses the official series sites now are.
Far from offloading coverage and content to external sites and media partners covering individual territories, official sites often now take the lead to a global audience. Going fast is big business and the sites reflect it, with an approach to their content and digital properties that is every bit as sophisticated as the most advanced publishing sites.
The one they all look to, on track and online, is Formula 1. Its official Formula1.com site and the sports associated digital footprint are seen as a benchmark in covering a sport and as many things around it as possible.
Let’s have a look at the site, what sort of challenges it hints at, and have a think about how a specialist sports and media CMS like Glide can help. We’ll hear too from Glide CPO Rich Fairbairn on how seemingly small editorial and dev decisions can become major issues in practice.
For clarity, the F1 site is not built on Glide - but it shows perfectly why modern sports sites rival the biggest publishers for the sophistication of their thinking, and at the wide range of challenges sports publishers face.
The previous F1 website and app went through a significant upgrade with a relaunch in 2015, but the real fun began when new owners rolled into town.
Liberty Media’s £3.44bn buyout of the Formula One Group was finalised in January 2017, after which a huge program of product rebranding for the global market was put in motion.
By the time the cars lined up on the grid for 2018’s season opener in Australia, there was a multi-platform campaign in place, spearheaded by a slick promotional video titled Engineered Insanity.
A core element behind the strategy had been to engage with existing F1 fans to gauge their opinion - using user feedback and data to guide their new direction.
Some highlighted an opinion that the sport had become too immersed in engineering at the expense of the drivers and personalities, the human side that fans could better relate to. This enormously helped the content teams to look at the “what?” of the new site’s coverage.
There is no doubt too that the bespoke F1 fonts designed by Marc Rouault for Wieden+Kennedy, and on-brand graphics and artworks incorporated throughout F1’s platforms, give both the web and the app a unique and stylish appeal, echoing branding cues found throughout the sport’s coverage.
Rich says: “The branding of F1 is a masterpiece of connected thinking. If you look at every channel the sport places itself, there is consistency in colour palette, fonts, typography and theme.
“Having tight control of things like typographic assets and icons across multiple channels is vital, and is something at which a headless CMS or one specialised in being a publishing CMS can really excel as each channel can be served from the same central store of assets and content. You want your content teams and channel managers to work in the fewest number of systems and this uniformity of branding is one of the benefits you get from that.”
On desktop the main F1 site homepage is clean and easy to navigate via a top-lying navigation bar with simple to follow labelling.
The sheer variety of navbar links and sections gives insight into the breadth of offerings contained under the banner of the official site, echoing the many business models and revenue streams connected to the business, from typical fan-centric content to merchandise, tickets, travel packages, experiences and much more - even artworks and ex race car parts. Behind every system will be another system or datastore working in real time, a major part of any multi-model site.
Rich says: “The F1 site really shows how modern sports sites and sports and entertainment CMS need to work alongside multiple systems in unison. On the F1 site, alongside the typical content a fan wants is ticketing details and purchasing, merchandise stock and sales, event booking systems, and marketing and paywall platforms. The way Glide is designed to work is to make orchestrating all those other external systems quite straightforward and when you see sites like this you see why it's vital.”
The homepage of Formula1.com gives a hint at the breadth and scale of the site
For app users, the nav bar is at the foot of the screen with a simplified range of options which still give access to all the same content once onboarded.
What is abundantly clear is the sheer variety and quantity of written, video, and audio content freely available, from latest news, interviews and features, live reports, and a wide range of video specials and the F1 Nation podcast.
All of these can be read, watched or listened to within the F1 digital architecture so that fan engagement remains strong as users are not constantly being diverted away to third-party audio-visual hosts.
‘Freely available’ is a key factor here too, as it is something that will be especially attractive to users who cannot afford to subscribe to whichever TV channel holds the F1 broadcast rights for their region.
Rich adds: “The F1 site has just about every kind of content on it - written articles, images features, live blogs, lap-by-laps, videos, audio, embeds, social posts, data-driven features, tables and so on - all produced and published at speed.
“For that to happen smoothly means the people behind the site will be looking at and orchestrating a huge number of other content feeds and data sources, some which they can curate and some which will be feeding automated widgets like lap times.
“When the content teams are looking at perhaps dozens of external information platforms, things like timing screens, social platforms, perhaps other CMS, we want those other platforms to integrate into the main sports CMS where it should surface content in the same place the content teams are working. A good example of that is the live reporting section on the site - this is often where site owners are forced to use separate second CMS. That's why we made the Live Reporting CMS a standard feature in Glide CMS - so you can keep using the same image assets, fonts, icons, and so on.”
The F1 site is able to show a wide range of video content, from driver interviews, analytical pieces and highlight clips of every event, from first practice to key incidents from the races. That alone sets them aside from so many of the alternative F1 sites, many of whom cannot get into the clips game for rights or resources reasons.
The more dedicated fan can upgrade to F1 TV for a relatively small fee, leveraging live data and archive and off-track content heavily. It’s a great way to get fans to join up without quite offering them full race coverage - a common conundrum for sports rights owners - and a great use of the things F1 can use with freedom such as timing data.
Rich says: “This is hinting at two major areas of work for the content teams and developers - choosing and collating the right video content, and having a seamless paywall or subs gateway.
“These sorts of things are default demands for media and entertainment publishers now, so at Glide we’ve made sure that integrating with those other systems is trivial and still give power to content teams to manage which content goes where and what is shown to subscribers or non-subscribers.
Although there is a comprehensive live data service available as part of the F1 TV subscription, including in-race track position graphics, there is also a free service provided on both web and app which again runs through all track sessions.
On race day you can tap into a live leaderboard which shows the standing of each driver, how far behind the leader they are, whether they are on hard, medium or soft tyres plus how many pit stops they have made in total.
The F1 site makes great use of live data and timings, but it's not the only one - magazine sites like Autosport also make great use of live data
The leaderboard is switchable to a lap-by-lap blog which includes text, pictures and social media posts.
This is excellent for a free service, but a small personal gripe is that it didn’t show what lap the drivers are on or how recently the timings were updated so depending on your connection it can feel a bit arms-length from the action.
There is a more detailed and also free alternative available on Autosport magazine’s website, which shows both the present lap plus when the timings were last refreshed, so it’s a problem which can be cracked.
In addition, their timing data shows the interval time between each driver, the number of pit stops, and the number of laps since they last pitted. Nice - all the kind of stuff that elevates a superfan’s experience.
Information on the season’s calendar is easy to discover, with both Schedule and Results clearly labelled on the nav bar.
When you open a page for a future race, an impressive in-your-face feature is a display panel showing the dates and times of all sessions from practice, qualifying and sprint through to the main race.
That includes start times switchable between ‘My Time’ for those at home watching on TV, and ‘Track Time’ for fans at the venue.
Over a race weekend, more and more content builds up for each race
Once a race weekend is over this same panel is updated with all the relevant content for each stage of the GP, carrying links to full ‘Results’ with stats, a written ‘Report’, video ‘Highlights’ and the ‘Lap-By-Lap’ blog.
This effectively prolongs the shelf life of the scheduled material and converts it into an archive where nothing is wasted and gains reusability.
A user can basically find anything and everything from each race weekend throughout the season from this one panel for each venue.
Email communications are slick and graphics-rich with a large variety of content, teased with a brief text description and easily accessible from clearly labelled call-to-action buttons.
From the app a user has three options for notifications, Race – together with a warning that it may contain spoilers for session and race results – News and Inside Info, the latter being more for commercial offers and competitions.
There is a Gaming section on desktop (‘Fantasy’ on app) which has links not just to an official Fantasy game, but also licensed partnerships like F1 24 from EA Sports and F1 Manager 24.
Aside from news and reports, the site incudes other fan engagement and off-race content such as a Fantasy F1 game
The crown jewel though is the free-to-play Fantasy 1 game where a user can select a squad of five drivers and two teams to score points throughout the season.
It is a productive and unobtrusive way for F1 to get users to register their details and is a great device for giving fans a reason to jump on to update their squads between races, at a time when you would expect user engagement on site to be lower.
User experience is high end with products that are easy to navigate and slick in operation, which all project the same level of message and branding across multiple channels and platforms. It's a true multichannel publishing operation.
In terms of internationalisation, it has global appeal with five language options available, English, French, German, Dutch and Portuguese, and slick transfer of fans in or out of a gateway and paywall - it's not a blunt tool.
The content is wide and varied with written, audio, video and gaming material all free to access, with a robust paid-for TV service also available, and if you dig into to it the SEO is outstanding.
This is all supported comprehensively by timely and graphics-rich communications, leveraging structured data drawn from integrated platforms and systems.
The products truly come to life over a race weekend, particularly with the detailed data streams that are well presented and make it possible to follow each session as they happen.
Formula 1’s digital products are a well-oiled machine and worthy of the global brand.
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