Motorsport on TV.

RasputinLives

No passing through my dirty air please
Contributor
Having got a weekend to myself this weekend I decided to use some of the time to watch various Motorsports series I've managed to record over the weeks and I have to say I'm left extremly confused.

The Renault 3.5 world series is considered to be one of the main feeder series to F1 alongside GP2 and it does produce some good racing but the coverage by Eurosport is a half hour programme which is mainly filled with poor features on the drivers where they talk a few cliches and do some really unfunny skit. The actual racing gets 5 mins of poorly edited screen time. Where GP2 and GP3 are concerned Sky F1 show us every session but we get very little detail on the team and drivers most of the time not even getting podium interviews. Which brings me to ITV4s coverage of the BRDC Formula 4. For those that don't know the Formula 4 is a new series designed for kids just coming out of Karting to get into their first single seaters. The drivers are between 14 and 18 so its a pretty low level competition but fun to watch. So how come the Formula 4 gets an hour long programme with 45 mins dedicated to the racing and qualifying with the other 15 mins give us a few choice items on the specifications of the cars and how the young lads train on their neck muscles and manage theirvGCSEs at e same time. Yes the presenter is their for eye candy with a few choice buttons undone but the overall coverage was pretty good. So why don't the other series get this treatment?

Add to the fact that I couldn't get coverage of the Indy500 or the Indy series without another subscriptions and the covrrage for the upcoming Le Mans 24 hours looks sparse and it makes me very confused as to what goes on with motorsport programmes.

Sky F1 is the biggest confusion to me. Sky don't renew their contract on the Indy series despite the fact it would have been perfect to fill their new channel as its a high class series with british interest and a schedule that doesn't clash with F1. Meanwhile we hear all about this brand new GP3 car but don't get one programme or feature showing us the ins and outs of it but Sky F1 have such a lack of programmes that they are showing the Porsce Supercup.

Anyone else come across strange coverage of things?
 
Motors TV seem to have given up on all mainstream and even most niche championships. Their schedule now seems bizarre to me.

I saw the Brands DTM round on Sky and the action/chat ratio was disappointing, but I think Sky are just receiving a centrally produced highlights package so probably not their fault.
 
Hmm, difficult to say, really. A very interesting film about a fascinating character. The moves he pulled on Scott and Mansilla in the F3 footage were impressive! Hard to feel very sympathetic towards him, because it was totally down to his abrasive personality that he found himself locked out from a top F1 drive...
 
Nasty crash in the F4 at Donnington Park last weekend, resulting in a double leg amputation for one of the drivers.

I thought that even the small cars had to have really strong front end crash structures?
 
I think they do, if you have seen the video footage it was a really, really nasty incident. I'd be surprised if any race car could have withstood the energy in this crash without some sort of serious injury to the driver. I'm sure the powers that be will look very carefully at the impact zones on the cars going forward though.
 
[Jobmode]Yeah, I watched the video, it looked awfully like one of the crashes you'd see in the late 80s where the front of the car just disintegrates. It was a massive hit, but I think it's exactly the kind of hit that they design for in the crash tests. I'll be very interested to know how the chassis failed.[/Jobmode]
 
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