FORUMula1.com - F1 Forum

[woody2goody]

Yes I miss Murray, be good to have him back. His mistakes were great!!
(Jens and Ant are good but not a match for Lewis. DC-think pit wall - spin on warm up lap, also think usually loads slower than Webber)

DC and Webber are evenly matched. It's just DC hasn't been able to qualify since they ditched the 60 min format lol.

[phren]

Try New Zealand. All the Euro races are screened "live" at midnight!!!!!!!
Ad breaks that go on forever, with the same ads repeated twice in the same ad break just to get the blood pressure up even more. The timing of the ad breaks seems random, not every 15 mins but sometimes two im the first ten mins and then none for 15. Then 5 in the next half hour. What's happening on the track has no bearing on the ad breaks either. It's like someone sets a random timer on the program and then leaves the office. We also have to put up with Gordon Murray for the pre race build up.

[bud]

Hey phren sounds like NZ is just as bad as Australia. do you have NZ hosts or do you get our coverage?

[phren]

We get Gordan Murray (paint drying, grass growing) then we switch to the UK coverage.
It's a bit strange when you get an ad break and come back to Brundle screaming about someone crashing on the "marbles" or having just made a great overtaking manouver and you missed it cos Farmers have a sale on. We often dont get to see the race incident or the replay as the UK coverage has moved on.

[darwin dali]

Time to emigrate?

[Denthúl]

Yes I miss Murray, be good to have him back. His mistakes were great!!
(Jens and Ant are good but not a match for Lewis. DC-think pit wall - spin on warm up lap, also think usually loads slower than Webber)

I bet that if you put them in equal cars, Jenson would probably perform just as well as Lewis. Anthony Davidson might, too. It's hard to make a comparison when you have never seen Button and Davidson in championship-winning cars and you've never seen Lewis in a pile of crap like the RA107. Personally, I'd love to see all four British drivers in great cars, but the chances of that happening aren't very likely at this rate.

[al4x]

I'm in the UK and seriously guys, ITV-F1 deserves all the criticisms it gets.

Allen is sub-par and annoying, Rider is ill-suited and the pre-race show has been steadily declining since around the time Tony Jardine was poached. Now, Martin, Mark and arguably Ted are all very good, but the overall package leaves a lot to be desired.

Furthermore, they really should rename it Ron Dennis Presents the Lewis Hamilton doing well in a McLaren Show. Anthony Hamilton - a driver's father and manager - got more screen appearances and time than most of the drivers, even some big names like Kovi. I'm not exaggerating either. I counted. Which other drivers' families get this treatment? Umm...None. Jenson's dad appears a couple of times but rarely does a piece to camera. Anthony Hamilton did one at just about every race, usually at least one each in the qualifying and race shows.

I know ITV is just trying to pander to the quasi-patriotic casuals and non-fans to grow their audience numbers, the are a business after all, but that's a gross abuse of their core audience and their monopoly on F1 TV coverage in United Kingdom.

The post-race is also laughable, once I've seen however much of the press conference they show I turn it off. It's invariably now 10 minutes of Lewis Love (Usually including another appearance from Anthony Hamilton) followed by 2 mints on the midfield, 1 minute on the championships and then a 2 minute trailer for a soccer or rugby game.

the coverage of hamilton and his family was excessive! i bet italian tv is really biased to ferrari!

[Martin]

I'm in the UK and seriously guys, ITV-F1 deserves all the criticisms it gets.

Allen is sub-par and annoying, Rider is ill-suited and the pre-race show has been steadily declining since around the time Tony Jardine was poached. Now, Martin, Mark and arguably Ted are all very good, but the overall package leaves a lot to be desired.

Furthermore, they really should rename it Ron Dennis Presents the Lewis Hamilton doing well in a McLaren Show. Anthony Hamilton - a driver's father and manager - got more screen appearances and time than most of the drivers, even some big names like Kovi. I'm not exaggerating either. I counted. Which other drivers' families get this treatment? Umm...None. Jenson's dad appears a couple of times but rarely does a piece to camera. Anthony Hamilton did one at just about every race, usually at least one each in the qualifying and race shows.

I know ITV is just trying to pander to the quasi-patriotic casuals and non-fans to grow their audience numbers, the are a business after all, but that's a gross abuse of their core audience and their monopoly on F1 TV coverage in United Kingdom.

The post-race is also laughable, once I've seen however much of the press conference they show I turn it off. It's invariably now 10 minutes of Lewis Love (Usually including another appearance from Anthony Hamilton) followed by 2 mints on the midfield, 1 minute on the championships and then a 2 minute trailer for a soccer or rugby game.

the coverage of hamilton and his family was excessive! i bet italian tv is really biased to ferrari!

I agree that the Hamilton family did get too much coverage,(I see F1 as very much a team sport, and any individual, however good, is only as good as the rest of the team will allow). but it was good copy for the ratings, and remember that the newspapers probably made even more of it.
And yes, I expect that Ferrari gets excessive coverage in Italy and Alonso in Spain etc, that is why I proposed that each TV company should have access to all of the camera's all of the time with their own director selecting the screens to be used.
There seems to be a common criticism here that there is too much attention to the leaders and not enough coverage of the mid field and other battles, again, a local director can more easily select the camera shots that suit his audience rather than a single director deciding for the whole world.

[Jensonb]

I should point out, I'd grown tired of ITV's coverage even before it became the Lewis Hamilton show. Mainly due to Allen and the irrelevance of most of the parts of the coverage not involving Martin Brundle.

[al4x]

i think itd be worse without local directors, then every race wed get hamilton in the uk etc

[McLaren Fan]

I should point out, I'd grown tired of ITV's coverage even before it became the Lewis Hamilton show. Mainly due to Allen and the irrelevance of most of the parts of the coverage not involving Martin Brundle.

I agree with the comments about Hamilton, and before him Button and Coulthard. It's so cringe worthy. That time Rider was interviewing Hamilton, you could see in his eyes he was star-gazed at speaking to Britain's new blue-eyed boy. He didn't get that excited when he was speaking to Senna for God's sake, only the most charismatic and greatest Formula One driver ever! The amount of times you see Hamilton's father on the television is also annoying. Nobody cares. He knows nothing about the sport. We want drivers, engineers, decent pundits, even the fans' views. Blundell does alright, despite his "blundellisms" and, like Brundle, has a passion for good, old-fashioned racing. The only thing is the levels of pre-qualifying and pre-race discussion are pathetic and the post-qualifying and post-race discussion is even more inept. I agree with Jensonb: ITV's coverage has sucked for years. Lose the bias, get a proper studio, give us the post-qualifying and post-race press conferences, give us some proper Grand Prix build-ups and reaction. In fact, just give Formula One to the BBC. They could do no worse and we'd have no highly annoying breaks!

[7UpJordan]

Anybody remember Argentina 1998 where most of the race was taken up by watching Esteban Tuero running around last?

[Denthúl]

Anybody remember Argentina 1998 where most of the race was taken up by watching Esteban Tuero running around last?

I just watched that the other day! I'm all for showing the rest of the field behind the front-runners (especially in circumstances like that, where they were quite far ahead) but to show the guy out on his own, going nowhere, all the time is silly. Fortunately, as I watch through those old races, there's a decent level of coverage on the battles for third to eigth place, mainly involving some awesome racing from Fisichella, Wurz, Irvine, Frentzen and, on occasion, Villeneuve. Britain is the next race up, hopefully that will be good to watch.

I do agree that we saw too much of Anthony Hamilton last season. I'm a person very interested in the mechanics of Formula 1, relating to the cars and their parts, the way they're set up etc. and so I'd like it if Brundle's Gridwalk was a bit longer and featured more engineers speaking. I also think someone should replace James Allen. He was fine when he was reporting things from the pits during the race, because he was good at that and it gave a good insight into what happened when cars mysteriously retired from the race. He and Louise Goodman did a good job of that. It would be great if Murray Walker was still a commentator. Or at least have them put another ex-F1 driver alongside Brundle. That way there's less sillyness from Allen.

[McLaren Fan]

It would be great if Murray Walker was still a commentator. Or at least have them put another ex-F1 driver alongside Brundle. That way there's less sillyness from Allen.

Murray Walker would be fine to have as a commentator now. His mistakes would not really affect how you watch the programme too much. In the old days, in my view anyway, you needed a commentator who could give you information accurately and in detail because there was nothing like the captions etc. that we've enjoyed over the last lot of years. That's one reason why I like Brundle and, to be fair, he did well with Walker. He was the colour commentator, if you like, and Brundle gave good analysis to counter it.

[stonemonkey]

I don't like James Allen commentating, maybe have brundle and a different 'guest' commentator each race. I vote for Jack Dee doing 1 race. OK maybe not but someone else other than James Allen please.