I grew up in South Africa in the 1980s. Back then, to wait for a new season was to live in an information vacuum. If word of a signing appeared in the ‘Briefly’ section of the newspaper, or the sports news on the radio, you had to be grateful for it. Any testing information, if there was such a thing at all, went straight into newsroom bins.
A week or two before the first race, the local press might cobble together a supplement covering off the calendar plus who would be racing for whom - usually with a few question marks and errors. Autosport magazine would do a proper preview job, of course, but that wasn’t much help because the first race was long gone by the time the ship docked in Cape Town with two-month-old copies.
