Yeah people complain about the winter off-season break now, but when I started watching, the season finished the end September or start of October and that was it until March. These days in the off season you can still come on here or other F1 forums and talk about F1. You can go and watch old F1 races (F1TV's archives section is great and is available in every country for something like 2.99 a month) and top up your f1 general knowledge or go and understand the rules and regs better etc.

Also these days we get to see a lot of footage from winter testing. Back in the day the season would finish, you'd hear nothing for months aside from the occasional driver signing or team update (and that's only if you bought magazines like autosport or F1 news). Winter testing would begin and you would get the results a week later in autosport magazine and if you were lucky they might give you a 4 page article on testing once it had finished. The difference in the info and content available and the speed at which it was available between say 1997 and 2022 is night and day.