Browsing articles tagged with " McLaren F1"

Getting people to visit my website

May 3, 2011   //   by Colin Yeung   //   Interesting & Noteworthy, Opinion  //  No Comments

Increase website traffic.

Increase website visitors.

Get more people.

Those 9 (nine) words plus the 6 (six) in the subject line are enough to guarantee this blog will get slammed by visitors in the next few days.

How do I know?

I’ve been experimenting. Alot.

Rewind back 3 years ago when I first started this particular  blog – it was the trendy thing to do here in Melbourne, Australia, because people were  expecting that if you knew what you were talking about in digital, you would put your money where your mouth was and write it up for all to see – and shoot at.

Like most blog writers I follow, I started this particular blog for a couple of reasons: a place to crystallise random thoughts; somewhere to park some business concepts and ideas I had been nurturing and not least of all, to play around with the key words and meta whatsits that live within these pages to see what effect they would have on traffic. Ostensibly this was for the benefit of my clients and to ensure ongoing continuity in my viable employment.

In recent months, I haven’t really touched this platform, because I’ve been busy playing dad to my 1  & 3 year olds, trying my best to be a good husband to my wonderful wife, selling the  family home and starting a new job. Been a bit busy really. However courtesy of my Blackberry, I’ve noticed my hosting traffic going into orbit, due in now small part to the  3 articles on:

  1. The up and coming new McClaren MP412C car http://www.theculturemind.com/2009/07/mclaren-f1-reborn-2/
  2. Cannondale Mountain Bikes http://www.theculturemind.com/2009/04/mountain-bike-cannondale/
  3. Request for Tender (RFT) process. http://www.theculturemind.com/2011/02/the-perils-of-the-rft-rfp-rfq-eoi-pitch-process-for-business/

Now in all seriousness, these articles have absolutely nothing to do with each other aside from being within the same blog location/address. I won’t probably ever be able to afford a new McLaren (costing somewhere north of AUD $500,000), I actually ride Cannondale’s arch nemesis in a Specialized and RFT’s – well they can go blow – I hate them, as they are on the whole a ridiculous waste of time, not withstanding the fact I’m quite good at responding to them.

What twigged the traffic increase exponentially, was the fact I had to login and remove the pictures off the McClaren post, which I wrote 22+ months ago, because the visitor load was pinging my upper bandwidth. I logged in, removed the pictures and republished. The WordPress Platform, which I use to run this site, in its wisdom duly archived off my previous post and I got a brand new URL, which was annotated with a #2.

Curious, I Googled the article and lo and behold it pops up in the search results. Now here it gets interesting. The previous post was annoted “mclaren-f1-reborn” where as the new post was mclaren-f1-reborn-2/ . Within about 3 hours of me publishing the new post, sans pictures and with the #2, I thought, cool, I’ll drop the bandwidth from people finding the post, because its got a new URL. Wrong. My bandwidth trebled. Not pesky spider traffic either, but proper clicking visitors.

Fascinated, I changed the now pictureless post and re-added the original YouTube Video and republished. Further Increased traffic load.

Additional, basic things to add relevance and increase the site load for this post, which will guarantee extra traffic:

  • post tags, correctly referencing search type terms
  • cross links within the post to articles of note and reference articles
  • cross links to external 3rd party websites, again of relevance
  • actually writing an article that has relevance
  • ensuring your URL is human readable and has hyphens/dashes – separating words and not spaces or %20 characters
  • Using a title for the post which is relevant easily digestible

How Interesting.

McLaren F1: Reborn

Jul 6, 2009   //   by Colin Yeung   //   Interesting & Noteworthy, Make me smile  //  3 Comments

Way back in the early 90′s, I was an absolutely huge fan of Formula 1 (zeolot is the more accurate term, but I’ve grown up a bit since then), religiously staying up until the early hours of the morning to watch the entire F1 race season broadcast live from its respective country. The fascination went far beyond a bunch of cars doing laps around a track under the control of a bunch of very highly paid (and skilled) drivers. It extended to the vehicles themselves, the engines, the computational telemetry, the pit crews, the team structure and most of all the psychology behind it all. I loved (and still do) the technology, the fanatical focus on process and relentless drive to develop faster, better, more effective and more efficient ways of being more reliable, more competitive and ultimately more justifiable to the sponsors which shell out tens of millions of dollars in sponsorship money in the expectation of high profile media coverage.

Of endless fascination to me is the pursuit of technical solutions to mundane, every day problems.

Some Examples:

  1. Need to change tires faster. Reduce wheel nuts from 5, to 4, to 1, development of cross locking splines, keyed to the air gun. The result? Pit changes that went from 3 to 4 minutes down to under 5 seconds for 4 tyres. This was so fast, that new rules were introduced to force cars to refuel at the same time, increasing pit stop time to 30 seconds.
  2. Tyre technology: compounds, wet weather patterns and tyre wall structures evolved and refined itself, again and again, so much so that they introduced regulations to narrow the tyre width and introduced grooves to slow the cars down. The silica compound technology and asymmetric tread pattern variants became production vehicle tyre standards and are now benchmarks for performance.
  3. Turbos introduced forced induction, increasing power at astonishing rates. The rules around engine sizes were changed to reduce their capacity with the result that at their pinnacle, 1.5 litre engines were generating in excess of 1400BHP. This technology pioneered by BMW, Honda & Porsche has influenced production cars today with the introduction of variable timing (think: BMW Vanos, Honda VTEC, Porsche Variocam). They were subsequently banned: too much power.

The list of the innovations in technology flowing on to production cars is endless: ABS brakes. Safety Crash Cells. Pre-fabricated crumple zones to aid in crash deceleration forces. The modern lap/sash harness. Non-submarining seats. The list is endless.

So, it was with a certain amount of awe and reverence I met the news in 1992 – my first year in Uni and incidentally the year I got my drivers license – that the McLaren F1 team had formed a road going division under the guidance of Gordon Murray and were releasing a fully fledged member of the supercar aristocracy in a street legal road car – the  McLaren F1. Every superlative that can be applied to supercars is valid here, where even 17+ years on, it is still the fastest naturally aspirated production engine vehicle in the world and is only eclipsed outright by the Koenigsegg CCR, the Bugatti Veyron and the SSC Ultimate Aero TT. Putting into perspective just how uncompromising a technological tour de force the F1 was – and still is – Top Gear UK last week pitted both the Bugatti Veyron and the McLaren F1 in a standing mile race. Whilst the Veyron won (it does have 1000 bhp), the F1′s acquitted itself in a fashion which is a fitting tribute to Gordan Murray’s unrelenting design and engineering focus.

100 McLaren F1′s were made in total Road Cars: 64 F1, 5 F1 LM, 3 F1 GT and Race Cars 9 GTR 95, 9 GTR 96 & 10 GTR 97′s. As stated on the official McLaren website:

Production of the McLaren F1 drew to a close in May 1998, with a total of 100 cars built, sold and delivered to customers. Of the 100 cars 64 were F1 road cars, five were F1 LM versions built to commemorate victory at Le Mans in 1995 and three were F1 GT road going versions of the long tail 1997 F1 GTR race car. The remaining 28 were F1 GTR race cars built for private customers competing in the FIA GT series and the 24 Heures du Mans.

Much myth and conjecture abounds about McLaren’s and the various figures and feats which are reported. What cannot be denied is that even now, there are very few car marques, let alone single vehicles of any description, which have so universally and comprehensively been branded as superlative by every noted automotive commentator and publication globally.

So, you can imagine my utter delight when I heard that McLaren are building a new range of sports cars from 2011. Ron Dennis, the former commander-in-chief of the McLaren F1 Team is taking the helm of the new business, with the splitting of McLaren’s production and racing divisions into an independent company – McLaren Automotive – severing ties with the SLR badged Mercedes-Benz vehicles at the end of 2009.

The first vehicle off the rank has ostensibly been coded the P11, and is aimed at the likes of the Ferrari F430 / F430 Scuderia, Lamborghini Gallardo/ Gallardo Superleggera, Audi R8 and Porsche GT2/GT3/Turbo.

I cannot wait.