The Pontrieux Report

My Formula One season began as usual in the early hours of Friday morning. Like many F1 fanatics I used to turn to Germany to get my fix of comprehensive free to air coverage. With a cheap dish and old analogue Sky box I have not had to rely of ITV’s lamentable output.

The news channel n-tv used to broadcast the practice sessions, with qualifying and race day covered by RTL. RTL’s coverage is very impressive with a comprehensive warm up show that includes the driver’s parade and extensive post race analysis,  showing the responses of all the drivers in the press conference and not just the German driver.

So to the BBC’s red button coverage of the first two practice sessions.
The station’s first practice session broadcast was covered by David Croft and former Super Aguri driver Antony Davidson.

I am sure that Anthony Davidson would rather be in a car than the commentary booth, but his personal loss is to the gain of those wanting to get a sense of what it is like to drive a car and what the team is trying to achieve in the session. His experience enabled him to accurately interpret the track action, almost demonstrating a psychic ability to predict what was likely to unfold later in the session.

A good start which unravelled a bit for the second session which was covered by Maurice Hamilton and Ian “Arthur Mullard” Phillips. When I last wrote about this pair it was about how they spent a lot of time trashing the skill and ability of Felipe Massa. I haven’t seen their brief but it surely can’t be to waffle on about anything that comes to mind? They were so busy responding viewers’ questions it was like listening to Test Match Special when play has been suspended. Someone should have told them that they were broadcasting to a TV audience and not just the 5 or 6 listeners to Radio Five Sports Extra.

“Formula England’s” finest had a novel approach to their golden boy’s lack of form – largely ignore talking about him. It was quite refreshing not to hear breathless references to Lewis Hamilton every few seconds and actually devote some airtime to other drivers.

I am not going to complain – except to remark on the elephant in the room with regards to McLaren’s poor form this season; this is the first season in a few years where we can be reasonably certain that McLaren have not been able to incorporate stolen proprietary information from Ferrari in the design and set up of their cars. Why won’t the British media even contemplate that there may be a link?

My lunchtime nap today coincided with listening to the second practice session of the Bahrain Grand Prix on 5 Live Sports Extra.

Felipe Massa had run over a kerb, which led to a display of ‘Formula England’ at its worst, with much trashing of Felipe’s driving ability, about how undisciplined he is, how he hasn’t a long term career as a Ferrari etc. I can’t envisage them taking a similar approach to talking about an English driver, Anthony Davidson for example.

The bitching about Felipe only came to an end when a car smashed into the tyre barrier. “It’s not Nelson Piquet Junior”. No it wasn’t that foreigner or any other, it was Formula England’s Golden Boy who had made a mess of his car and probably his pants.

As the second practice session came to an end Felipe topped the timesheets for the second time today – without trashing his car.

PS. Note to the Arthur Mullard sound alike who was commenting with Maurice Hamilton. As there were only about 10 of us listening to 5 Live Sports Extra, is doesn’t really matter if you use the term “Pissed off”, but if you want to get a gig on 5 Live proper during the day, you’ll need to watch the mouth.