motorsportmania

If you’ve followed the blizzard of tweets you’ll know that I am not a fan of the 2012 onwards F1 TV coverage plans. My #skypaynoway campaign is completely futile I know, but I will not watch the BBC coverage this weekend in protest and may not bother with any of the other 2011 race coverage. I’ve moaned about how boring some of the races have been anyway, and have wandered off or gone to sleep part way through several of them, so what am I really missing?

Well, obviously I’m missing any that turn out to be crackers, but I’ll take that chance. I watch with the sound turned down as I can’t be bothered with the commentary and, as yesterday in qualifying showed, Twitter kept me in touch.

I’m not sure why I’m so cross about it, but I think that it is because of all the twaddle from Bernie and others about how the new package is better. I’ve blogged here about how I will not watch any race from the middle or far East where Bernie has changed the time to make it more Euro market friendly. If he wants to do that to suit me then let’s have all the races start at 1045 as I can watch between getting in from Sainsbury’s and making lunch. That works for me and doesn’t muck up my Sunday.

Our household pays a ludicrous amount of money to the BBC and Sky for the privilege of several hundred channels with not much worth watching on, so there is no chance that I will pay for F1 coverage on the box. As for what the BBC plan for 6pm, regardless of whether it is highlights or the whole race, that is not a convenient time for me to watch. We have our dinner then, and TV gets turned off so that we can have a civilised conversation over our meal. In any case, what is the point when I will know what has happened thanks to various cybermedia?

If the BBC want to cut costs then cut out the wasted hour before qualifying and the race. And why ship herds of people to every race? Why not take the feed and have someone commentate back here from the monitor like good old Murray used to do for some races in the early days of his tenure? Eddie has become an embarrassment and the grid walk went that way long ago, so to have cut it all out would have cut costs.

Goodness knows what Sky have planned for viewers, but I’ve stopped watching my beloved NASCAR on Sky as their fill in bits are so puerile that even turning the sound off has not worked.

Talking of NASCAR, rather than needing all of these extra dollars that Bernie’s new TV deal will bring in, why not have some F1 cost cutting? Like taking a NASCAR approach to pit stops? Only enough pit crew to do one side (or end) at a time, say? Cutting the bodies per crew down to 25% of what we have now would save on wages, logistics and more. It would shake up the pit stop side of things a bit as well if we started to have the cars stationary for 15-17 seconds at a time and would also affect race strategy at many circuits as it could mean that you couldn’t get both cars in on successive laps. The risk and consequence of error would make a difference too.

Anyway, the TV deal is done and will happen and my cost cutting thoughts won’t. I will not watch much F1 on the box and, frankly, doubt that I will miss it too much.

Filed under: F1, NASCAR | Tagged: autoracing, F1, formula one, media, motorsport, NASCAR, racecar |